And now, some researchers at Intel are using RFID to track people.
For many, a population of tagged and tracked citizens is the stuff that kept Orwell up all night, but the research here has noble intentions.
The system is dubbed Technology for Long Term Care (TLC), and aims to help you keep an eye on your elderly parents without the need to visit them every day.
One way of doing this is to see what the parent does around their home throughout the day, by tracking which household objects they use.
In a mock-up apartment, each object is fitted with a cheap RFID. "Mum" or "Dad" wear a special wrist strap which can detect which tags it is closest to.


"The state of the art right now is that you go to your mom's place and spend as much time as you need to figure out what's going on," says Intel researcher Matthai Philipose.
"If you spend an hour or two a week you've still got under 5% knowledge of what's going on.
"So an 85% accurate system like this still gives a huge improvement over the state of the art."
But he also says installing a webcam could intrude on the person's privacy and there is also the question of what to with the huge amounts of data the camera produces.
"If you want to know that something's happening in Mom's house using the camera, you have to sit there watching the video all the time," Mr Philipose adds.
"We've been pursuing what we call witness snippets. The sensor system in this case guesses that your Mom's taking her medication, but because you want to be really sure about that, it takes out just the three or four seconds of Mom taking her medication and shows just that part to you."

Tracking concerns
It has been argued that every successful deployment of RFID takes us closer to a world where tracking is the norm. But, is it possible to maintain our privacy in such a future?
In the Paul Allen Computer Labs at the University of Washington, steps are being taken to keep our personal information private.
Wearing an RFIDbadge, a man walks the four floors near his office and every few metres he passes one of the specially installed RFID sensors.
Each time a sensor pings his badge, the event shows up on the map, and his location is recorded.