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Michelin to Include RFID Transmitter in Every Tire
An anonymous reader writes "According to the RFID Journal, Michelin (the tire manufacturer) has announced that it is planning on embedding RFID transmitters into every tire. The article states that 'the microchip stores the tire's unique ID, which can be associated with the vehicle identification number.' Let the privacy invasion begin!" If they're going to embed electronics in tires, I wish they'd start with tiny pressure gauges. (See also this story from a few days ago about the coming surge in RFID tags.)
If they can put those things in tires, they can
put them in condoms, too.
"Sir, I just don't understand how you could have recieved puncture damage in the exact same spot on all 4 tires."
or,
"Why does the rubber on this tire appear melted?"
Brings new meaning to the phrase burning rubber....
"You now have a lot more riding on your tires, so don't do anything stupid 'cause we're watchin' your ass, bitch."
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
They'll make you put an identification tag on your bumper
The tire makers are just trying to comply with the law! The TREAD (Transportation, Recall, Enhancement, Accountability and Documentation) Act requires tire makers to track all of their tires in case they need to recall them. Blame Congress, not the tire makers.
Oh, and to respond to the editors comment about how they should make tired that track tire pressure instead, they already do! (Is it okay for me to tell the editor to RTFA?
One of the first products I can see coming out of this event is little EMP generators that allow you to detect, then blow the living daylight out of the RF circuitry in these things. Remember... any good transmitter is a good receiver, too... find the resonant frequency of this receiver, and you can pump enough energy into it to melt the traces.
Instant privacy.
The best use I could think of for this would be for those drive-through beer and liquor stores. Every time a car drove through, you could record the ids' of its tires. Then, if the customer bought cigarettes, you could store the tire ids in a database of cigarette buyers. You could sell this database to health insurance companies for a fortune so they could bust people who made fraudulent claims about being a nonsmoker on their health insurance and deny them benefits.
Man, this is a terriffic idea.
If you car is "suddenly" equipt with five (don't forget the spare) transmitters that each broadcast a unique serial number in response to a promiscuously broadcasted request, well, that is "bad" from a privacy standpoint.
Now associate those numbers with your VIN (Vehicle Identification Number) which uniquely identifies your car.
Your VIN is already connected to things like your name, address, insurance carrier and so on.
So now you are driving down a street and any number of automated systems can know it is you (well, your car at least). So you have essentially been tagged like a spring buck.
Worse, but more interesting, a well equipt "ring" of duck-and-squat or similar con artists can now "interview" your car to see if you've got good rip-off potential.
Authorities can target and track you. Who needs racial profiling? The cop is asleep in his car when an alarm goes off to tell him someone meeting his favorite criteria is driving by. How about "that car is owned by a white person" listing getting your black roomate killed for borrowing your car?
Far worse than that, the piece in question is easily accessable.
If systems (toll booths etc?) start using this data for any purpose then I could "swap out" one of your tires and drive around "as you", possibly for days. When was the last time you *really* looked at your passenger side rear wheel? How about your spare?
In even legitimate cases ("Sure Clem, you can borrow my snow tires for the weekend...") of transfer you could become identity-entangled with who knows what...
Being made "trackable" is always a rights issue.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Yeah but people just can't secretly scan your VIN every time you go through a tollbooth, stop at a traffic light (You KNOW that those wires in the road don't really make the light green), or drive through McDonalds.
You are definitely right, it's absolutely absurd that they're doing this. Next thing we're going to be given an identification number that we have to prominently display on our car that is linked to our VIN that _anybody_ can see and find out information about us!
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
I used to work for a software firm, who were based in a large building and with multiple tennants. To control access to our part of the building we were issued with contactless swipe cards. Which are a sort of crude, low power RFID system.
We thought they were purely for access control, but we were in for a surprise. The management had fitted special sensors at the toilet and cafe doors as well as at the drinks machines and smoking rooms. We had no idea management had done this, we just though new heating control thermometers were being fitted.
Once our bi-monthly productivity appraisals came round we were presented with a detailed breakdown of our movement round the building. I was asked why I made 12 visits to the coffee machine in one day (all drinks were free) and why I once spent more than 10 minutes in the toilet,
What management had done was turn the securty cards in to tracking devices. Basically if we went within 4 feet of these sensors, it was logged. We had always assumed that the cards had to be within 2 inches of a sensor to be recognised, not so aparently. This whole setup was implemented to try and achieve productivity gains, in fact it did the opposite. A lot of people spent more and more time on the toilet for some reason and other people developed a habit of forgetting their cards and having to get security to release the doors remotely.
The moral of the story is what started as a innocent security system, turned in to a tracking system which caused people serious stress. I know my employers are allowed to know what I do on their time, but having to justify my toilet habits is my idea of how such technology as RFID systems can be misused. Incidentally, the system was switched off after the unions got on the case.
A few points about RFID.
RFID is parasitically powered from the interrogating device. Powering it from a long way away on a moving target seems hard.
Also, you'd need to be able to distinguish from multiple transmissions on the same frequency to recover the serial number. A very high gain antenna (parabolic dish) still has a beamwidth of >= 2 degrees. Being able to power the RFID devices from more than 10 feet away, and also receive the return signal, without giving everyone cataracts from the microwave exposure seems like a hard problem.
Most RFID systems are not truely RF based, but are magnetically/inductively coupled at a relatively low frequency. These are not going to have any kind of range at all, and a high gain "antenna" (directional electromagnet) would be huge.
Finally, vehicles move. Even a speedy RFID tag that transmits at 12kbps takes 1/46th of a second to send a typical 256 bit message (serial number + checksum + overhead). It takes 5-6 times this in practice to power the tag, interrogate it, and receive a response, in which time the car has moved >10ft at 60MPH. So even if you could have an ultra-high-gain antenna, it'd have to be significantly steerable, too.
I'm not very worried. Compared to a license plate/VIN this is nothing.