Week 2- Big Brother, Disney World, and RFID

I returned from a 5-day "vacation" to Disney World yesterday. I add the quotation marks to "vacation" because if you go to a park a day, you realize 1) You don't walk enough on a regular basis for that many hours at a time and 2) Your shoes are not comfortable enough. Disney really has embraced more technology since the last time I was there. You can call the hotel front desk at 10:30 at night and the cast member (not employee, but cast member) can find the current wait time for major rides and attractions at any of the parks.
The Disney buses are also rigged with GPS, and the recorded voices in the bus, along with the electronic signs announcing the destination on the outside, both change automatically when the buses pass certain key points along the routes. Additionally, so many of the vendors are now using wireless point-of-sale stations (cash registers) so that they are not inhibited by wires. Kinda scary, potentially, for would-be hackers. I'm sure Disney has an insane amount of security for such things, but they don't exactly advertise that in the open.
This reminds me of an article in Sunday's Tallahassee Democrat newspaper (I couldn't find it on their website, so linked the same article through Yahoo). It tells of privacy fears in using RFID chips. For those too lazy to check the Wikipedia article linked, RFID is radio frequency identification. The idea is these ID chips send out a weak signal with the chip's information, so that devices nearby can read the information. Some buildings have security doors that sense the cards information and open automatically when the person with the proper security clearance card walks in, but the doors won't open if you don't have the right card. The article focuses on using the RFID cards for Homeland Security and passport information. The problem, says the article, is that other people using relatively simple technology can actually read the weak signals the RFID cards transmit.
Both the Disney and RFID cards are further examples of how small the world is getting. Twitter and Facebook statuses are voluntary ways people inform everyone of what their doing and when they're doing it, while some of the Disney technology and the RFID chips are ways you can be monitored unknowingly. You also may have heard how some GPS-like devices can be installed in cars, so that not only is your location known (not a big deal, really), but the devices can also track your speed, and how fast and hard you accelerate and brake. Interesting information if you're the parent of a teenage driver, but many drivers wouldn't like it if this information was easily available to their insurance companies.
Granted, all these technology is certainly created to help you in some way. I am by no means an opponent for these technologies, but merely pointing out a few things that have come across my plate in the recent past.