Results: RFID and Identity Management in everyday life - ITAS

uilding. The system then provides a table of all active RFID tags left in the building, presumably of
employees in hazard. At their first drill with the new system, Van der Kooij came out last,
disappointed, holding four tags with no employees attached. In case of a real fire, this may have
caused a fireman to risk his life, searching through the smoke for injured workers, only to find a tag
left on the desk.
Third, time registration. The database registers the time of entry and exit of all employees. The net
time spent in the office is presented in a time registration sheet to the employee, who then justifies
hours spent on projects. This system may appear like a punch card system but it actually isn’t. The
simple reason for this is that less than 25% of staff perform their work only in the office. The rest of
them are continuously on the move for their clients. Also some people live quite distant from the
office and are allowed to add some travel time to their working time. The time being registered by the
system is therefore merely a helping tool for the employees to fill in their time sheets themselves. One
of our respondents for example, Jan Vet, just came back from a customer in Luxembourg and had to
add 14 hours to the sheet. It would otherwise say Jan hadn’t been at work at all these days. Also, some
flaws occur, especially on checking out of the office. Then the system registers the employee entered,
but never left the building, leading employees to maintain all kinds of paper based registries to correct
the system. Although employees apparently have a degree of freedom in managing their identity of
being at work, they are being tracked in and out of the office which may give a sense of being checked
when they fill in their time sheets.
During the implementation of the system, the Workers Council got involved as they received
questions from staff members. These questions mainly revolved around what would happen with the
information registered by the system. For example: “where is the information stored”, “who has access
to it”, “how long are the data retained” or “is it connected to our desktop phones”? A small number of
people argued that the system was a “Big Brother tactic”, scanning all their movements through the
building. It turned out one specific sales representative triggered these concerns. He was found to have
major difficulties with time registration, which is in fact an issue in its own and not linked to the RFID
system. Nevertheless, this demonstrates people are likely to use the Big Brother story in relation to
RFID. In response Jan Vet and his colleagues checked the implementation with a number of legal
advisers and used a checklist of the Dutch Data Protection Authority. Reading this checklist, one can
clearly recognise the checklist is derived from the OECD Privacy Guidelines (see introduction).
Jan Vet, member of the Workers Council, stated: “I consider myself to be a quite anarchistic person,
but if you describe this system as Big Brother, I think that is a gross statement. You are being followed
through your GSM and while you surf the internet. RFID is not much worse than that.” Moreover, the
system is not used beyond its purpose, for example to evaluate personnel productivity based on their
movements or whereabouts. One thing he does worry about is what governments will do now RFID is
implemented on such a large scale. “Governments should be liable for not misusing these systems.
Their hunt for so-called terrorists should not evolve into permanent scrutiny, which I think is
disproportional compared to, say, casualties of car crashes.”
Now the system is fully operational and accepted, the Working Council even turned it into their
advantage: they use the time registration to prove they are overburdened with work. Like any telecom
business, Alcatel cut down on personnel during the recent telecom crash. Now business is improving,
the workload is increasing while few new staff are hired. Overwork was claimed to be incidental, but,
with the time registration in hand, the Working Council demonstrated is was structural, for some, even
beyond the boundaries set by labour laws.
All in all, implementing an active RFID system in order to track personnel may appear quite invasive
at first hand, while in practice it has proved to be not so extraordinaire at all. Aside from some
practical matters, the system was accepted by the staff quite easily. Jan Vet stated one of the reasons
may be that, as they work for large telecoms, they are use to high-tech, high-security environments.
Although the system could be used to evaluate the functioning of staff members on the basis of their
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