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Gillette Buys Half a Billion RFID Tags
prostoalex writes "Gillette announced its intent to purchase 500,000,000 RFID tags from startup Alien Technology. The company expects to introduce RFID tags into its pallets and cases, according to the article. Alien Technology was the first company to introduce an RFID tag with price lower than 10 cents, even though some people claimed it could not be done."
You put your loot in the cart. You walk up to the scanner. You swipe your credit card. You leave. No cashier to deal with. No lines. No need to even remove the items from the cart.
Great geek value, no question about that! Then, when you get to your car, you get to put all your stuff in the trunk, and don't have to worry about those meddling plastic bags. And when that soccer mom cuts you off in the Expedition and you have to take evasive manuvers, you get the really fun part when you get home! Collecting all your stuff from wherever it was!
Once nice thing about the system as it stands right now is that it's tuned for a major convenience, bagging, at the time of payment. No payment, no bags. This, I believe, will have an impact on the non-geek-value customer. Even the most convenient package to carry, the two liter bottle, is difficult to carry more than three at a time for 100 yards (any apartment people want to say how far it is up 3 flights of stairs?). Now my local store is only offering coke bottles in 3 liter -- heavier and bigger than my wifes hands can wrap around. (Also, incidentally, more expensive per liter than 2 liter if you do the math.)
Bags make groceries go 'round. That's why the store throws them in for free, and usually tries to put someone there who can supply the service of stuffing them. In the RFID method, I suppose, you could be handed a wad of bags as you walk in and just stuff as you go, but that involves planning and rework -- if you pick up bread or eggs first, now you have to shuffle to get those to end up on top.
You need to get a bit more cynical, Mr. Pony. Ever actually *deployed* a security system?
:-)
Broken policies create noncompliance. Only two ways to define a broken policy -- a) the trusted refuse to participate, or b) the untrusted don't need to. You have to understand, it's not the job of your authorized users to spend all their time dealing with your security system. Since that's not their job, don't be surprised if they're not particularly willing to go along with arbitrary rules.
All security creates a cost for the legitimate user; the goal is to keep the cost heavily asymmetrical. In other words, those you trust are hurt a little, whereas those you distrust are utterly wiped out. A locked door still requires the legitimate user to wait while he pulls out a key, after all. Lock or not, that guy should be able to walk on in.
Turns out the best way to get people to use a security system is to install a new door -- some new functionality they've never seen -- but, oh yeah, it has this security limitation, but look! New door! New functionality!
I enjoyed your comment about security having reasons you don't grasp -- you don't seem to grasp how quantifiable noncompliance really is with various degrees of onerousness. Don't believe the hype
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Its more invasive than that. I work in a grocery wharehouse. There are electronic tags to monitor temperature, vibration and shock, humidity, air quality, time of travel, GPS, and all sorts of violations of privacy. What does this mean to you as a consumer? Your food is guaranteed to be fresh and not subject to conditions that would make it unsafe.
These sensors are everywhere. They help improve failures in distribution that costs shippers and consumers alike money.
Just be afraid when a bill is passed to push that national ID card as an injectable tag behind your neck. That's when you will find FAQ's on the internet how to build tin foil hats.
This technology is probably inevitable though. As technology improves, more and more people can have their jobs replaced by computers. I know somebody is going to reply by saying "but it just shifts the jobs to somewhere else, e.g. the people who create these tags and create and maintain the software". Sure, to a degree, but if you follow the trends to their logical conclusion, you get to a point where millions of low-paying jobs are getting lost and being replaced by maybe a couple thousand higher paying jobs. At some point, something will have to give
Social progress (measured as GDP increase, or something like that) has largely been driven by technological innovations. RFID, if (or when) deployed large-scale, will decrease the workforce needed in retail and distribution. Of course, as you say, all those same people will not get jobs developing RFID hardware & software. If that were the case, there would be no point in RFID, since there would be no net efficiency gain! What will happen is that workforce will be freed to do new tasks, which noone has come up with yet. Look at things from a longer time scale, and to think of the economy has a whole rather than just the retail part.
As an example, say about 200 years ago a significant fraction of the population (about 80%) were directly involved in agriculture (i.e. they were farmers). Today, thanks to technological innovations farming productivity has increased about 100-fold, and as a consequence a quite small part of the population are farmers (4-5% in western europe and presumably smaller in the USA as farms are bigger there). This has allowed a lot of people to do other things than plowing the ground. We don't have a ~70% unemployment rate (i.e. 80%-5%-overhead of producing and developing farming machinery), as your line of reasoning suggests.
The same goes for RFID tags (or say, the introduction of automation, robots and such, in industry). So yes, in the short term and on a personal level, it might be unpleasant. I.e. aunt Tilly working as a cashier gets the boot and as she has little education she has a hard time getting a new job. But for society as a whole on a slightly longer timescale, the efficiency improvement made possible by RFID will be beneficial.