Slashdot Mirror
NYT on RFID Tags
indros13 writes "The NY Times is running a story on the radio tagging of merchandise. Companies like Gillette want to make sure their razors are in stock and stores like Wal-Mart want to make sure you can find your paisley panties, size 10. But what happens to privacy when everything you buy can be tracked from store floor to door?"
My cross dressing days are over! Everybody will know I'm wearing paisley panties!
fp
I think that it'd be cool if my Hello Kitty stuffed animal could identify things via RFID...
Basketball: Hello Kitty!
Kitty: Hello Basketball!
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
These retailers are more than welcome to track anything and everything until I've paid for it because until that point, it belongs to them.
So, does this mean that the (in)famous walmart $300 PC now sells with built in 802.11???
I tried quicken thing a couple times but its never quite made it for me. Maybe this way I could better budget my measly earnings as I could track even the smallest purchase - and someelse is summarizing it for me.
Nothing happens to your privacy when tracked from floor to door, as long as it ends there.
I dont know where you guys shop, but the 17 year old moron or the "hire the handicapped" person at the checkout at stuff-mart looks at every single thing I buy.
You have _no_ right to "privacy" if you are patronizing someones store. Deal with it.
(This isnt meant to be a flame.. it is meant to point out that they track everything you buy anyway, and almost guaranteed, if you use credit or debit cards, there is a file SOMEWHERE that lists everything you bought, if you dont, like me, get that list on your statement every month.)
Now.. if the RFID tags follow you home.. thats another issue. But the show I saw on it. (Tech Tv? Might have been?) Did not seem to think that was possible.. they are a direct scan sort of thing, rather than a "scan from black helicopter" sort of thing.
Maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
how did slashdot know what size you wear?
You don't have an RFID tag, and they're item-type specific anyway, not item-specific (ie, they might say you're carrying a pink size-16 thong, but not which thong and they don't know who you are)
There are things in this world to be legitimately paranoid about, but this isn't one of them.
Move along.
Wait till they start radio-tagging the tinfoil hats. Then you won't know what the hell to do, will ya?
So they find out that the person who buys size ten also the personal massager. But they already knew that cause it on your receipt
MG
Randomly distributing Karma whenever possible.
1) Select razor. ..
2) Checkout.
3)
4) Profit!
There's no privacy to lose, it's all their stuff until you get past the register with it.
You guys have got the paranoia setting just a little bit too high these days..
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
But what happens to privacy when everything you buy can be tracked from store floor to door?
Ummm, they'll know when people are stealing their merchandise?? I'm not sure what you were going for with that one, but you really need to loosen up that tin foil hat.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
RadioShack makes a small profit selling a wand to disable such devices, until a court order forces them to stop. Fortunatly, for businesses, RadioShack insists on always taking down personal information when you buy things, so the police easily acquire a complete list of criminals and arrest the lot of them.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
...is to reduce their loss to shop-lifters.
The marketing issues involved they can track via their sales registers, they have no need for radio tracking to gain this stuff. Why do you think they ask for your zip code or phone number at many shops when you are at checkout, and why grocery stores have those little "savings" cards...
"Just Smile and Nod." --Huck
...Faraday shopping bag?
How in the world can that be true? Sometimes I go into a Gap store just to use the bathroom. Other times I walk through it just to get to the other side of the mall. What if I'm with a group of friends, and only one of us makes a purchase? What about my poor boyfriends of yesteryear who were just there to hold my bags ;-)?
1%? I don't believe it. Just like 100% of voters voted for Saddam.
--sex
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
Checkpoint is the leader in the industry. They have been at this the longest and have developed a very system for handling all the backend as well.
... not so much for loss prevention, but for availability and auditing of book inventory.
Many of their early success stories have been libraries. Having been a customer of a library that uses this it's very cool
Why the privacy worries?
It's not like everything hasn't got a bar-code on it already!
Look at the good points... You can walk into a shop, pick whatever you want up, walk out without having to go to a checkout!
Your card gets automatically charged & you save time.
this is a big deal...
The tags are removed at time of purchase. They can already 'track' your purchases at checkout. So what if they can track that there's a can of RAID in my cart at 100 feet... I'm buying it anyway -- if I pay with a card, it's trackable. If I pay with cash, less so.
I'd be concerned if these "tracking devices" were still active after I got home and opened up my box of cheese dip and crackers and the "black helicopters (tm)" were overhead.
Tracking is a good thing. We won't see the prices drop immediately because retailers never lower prices, even if their costs drop. It should hold prices at their current levels for a much longer period than usual, as shoplifting losses decrease to offset inflation.
Another good use will be for searches for stolen merchandise. Non intrusive searches will be possible instead of strip searches. In addition, police will be able to search homes without a warrant by scanning them. This shouldn't scare anyone, since only activated RFID tags would respond, so you don't need to fear that they will find other things. That's even better than a standard search with warrant!
Let's see . . .
Pay cash is the first countermeasure.
Second, get the merchandise into a metal lined container, like maybe the trunk of your car?
Third, move the shielded items a far distance from where they were last "tracked", like your home (just a suggestion).
Fourth, remove the tags (this step can be moved higher in the list). Enhanse this step by dropping them in trash containers of your enemies/tormentors.
Yes, all of this is worthless if you are convinced that the, easily removed, mylar strips in your US money is tagged too.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
...put rf tags on your money so you can see where it goes after you buy something?
I assume these tags are removed when you purchase the item and leave the store so how is this any differnet from when you check out? I assume most of use are not yet such fanatics that you only use cash for purchases right? Because you do realize that if you use credit or debit its not at all hard for a merchant to log your purchases and equate them with your name. I doubt most of them do but still. Why does it matter if they know you're carring it around the store when they are gonna find out you have it at the register anyway? Unless you don't plan to visit the register and mother tought you stealing was wrong right?
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
But what happens to privacy when everything you buy can be tracked from store floor to door?
If you're really worried about them tracking your RF tags, try mailling them to Siberia or something. If they really are watching you, that ought to get their attention.
*bzzt* rf-control to watcher-one. he is currently travelling on a fed-ex jet to moscow with his latest consignment of razor blades. over" *bzzt*
*bzzt* "roger rf-control. will continue tracking and advise, over" *bzzt*
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
There actually could be some benefits to this. With this type of technology you could find many upsides such as:
The possiblities are endless! Embrace the benifits of new technology, it's all for your own good.
Ok, I'm done - sarcasm off. I still think the office thing would be fun though.
Are you bovilexic? Moo!
RFID tags are the least of my worries. At least that tracking stops at the store's door. The range on an RFID tag is pretty limited. The important thing is how you paid for the purchase...
I recently got a letter from my credit card company, which broke down by percentage, etc, what I bought and what it was for. Travel, entertainment, food, pr0n, etc. I find that truly terrifying.
If you're paranoid and want to leave the grid, pay cash for everything.
First, would this make theft pretty much impossible? If there's a chance that products a & b can be tracked even while in the store, it would look pretty obvious if they don't wind up at a check-out counter or tied to anyone's check, credit, or cash payment. I suppose that's a good side to that.
On a worse thought though, there have already been stories about making a massive "Total Information Awareness" database to monitor everyone and everyone's interaction with everyone else, what they do, what they buy, and so on, and with recent events from eBay showing that when it comes down to making money and looking patriotic, what will it take for *my* shopping habbits to be turned over to some government megaubercomputer somewhere so they can run a program and determine if the number of cases of Pepsi I buy every couple of weeks, and clothing every couple times a year, puts me in one of those "suspicious" categories or not.
I don't believe I should be investigated or tracked if I haven't done anything wrong.
SecondPageMedia - Wha
A Radio Chip in Every Consumer Product
By CLAUDIA H. DEUTSCH and BARNABY J. FEDER
Here's a tip to thieves: If you are bent on stealing packages of Gillette Mach3 razor blades, go someplace other than Tesco's Newmarket Road store in Cambridge, England. There, a "smart shelf" continuously queries tiny radio chips embedded in the packages it holds, and senses the silence when one is removed. The system may soon be programmed to alert security when several are taken at once, Greg Sage, a Tesco spokesman, said.
And, yes, Procter & Gamble will notice if a case of Pantene shampoo does not make it to the Wal-mart Supercenter in Broken Arrow, Okla. Its truck is equipped to monitor signals continuously from chips hidden in each case. If any case stops sending its "Hi, I'm still here" signal, a monitor in the "smart truck" will record exactly when and where.
Such technology, known as radio-frequency identification -- the same techniques that enable an electronic sensor to record data from an E-ZPass tag or an office door to open for people with chip-equipped cards in their pockets -- could one day stymie pilferers. But it is also capable of doing much more for commerce. Beyond Gillette and Procter & Gamble, companies as diverse as International Paper and Canon USA are teaming up with retailers and customers to apply R.F.I.D., as it is known, to tracking products from the time they leave an assembly line to the time they leave the store.
The companies are tagging clothes, drugs, auto parts, copy machines and even mail with chips laden with information about content, origin and destination. They are also equipping shelves, doors and walls with sensors that can record that data when the products are near. "We want to track all of our merchandise, and that includes items that people are unlikely to steal," William C. Wertz, a spokesman for Wal-Mart Stores, said.
Chip manufacturers are busily spreading that gospel. "That need to have the right product on the right shelf in the right store at the right time -- ultimately, that's what will drive our business," said Karsten Ottenberg, a senior vice president at Philips Semiconductor, the leading maker of radio frequency chips and a unit of Royal Philips Electronics.
Early tests are encouraging. For three months in 2001, Gap tested radio frequency tags on denim clothes at a store in Atlanta. Sales jumped because the tags prevented the store from running out of popular items, and the tags made it quicker to find any items in stock.
Typically, 15 percent of shoppers leave clothing stores without getting what they want; during the test, fewer than 1 percent of Gap shoppers left empty-handed.
Radio frequency identification still has too many kinks, however, to be an immediate panacea for retailers. Cordless phones, two-way radios, local wireless networks and other communications devices that are widely deployed in factories, warehouses and stores can interfere with the signals. And, although radio tag readers can, under ideal conditions, identify well over 100 tagged items every second from quite a distance, radio waves have a hard time penetrating metals and liquids -- something that Procter & Gamble is addressing with the Pantene test.
And costs are still prohibitive. The electronic tags cost at least 30 cents apiece; most experts think anything above 5 cents is too expensive to be widely used for individual packaged goods. Prices would have to fall to less than a penny for virtually everything in stores to be tagged. Sensors, which can be either hand-held or built into walls, can cost $1,000 each.
But costs are coming down fast. Alien Technology, for one, says that it can now sell radio frequency identification tags profitably at 5 cents each for orders of a billion tags or more. Just last month, Gillette said it would buy up to 500 million tags over the next few years from Alien.
But Alien's manufacturing capacity is currently just a small fraction of what it would need to fill orders over a billion quickly. And experts warn that while the silicon chips continue to shrink in size and fall in price, making the attached antennas small enough and cheap enough is much harder.
Moreover, most retailers say they are reluctant to invest in the technology until product tags are universally readable, as bar codes are today. That means that every retailer, manufacturer and carrier must agree to standards, and use tags and sensors that speak the same language.
"It's one thing to say something is a great technology, but quite another to say that you're ready to scrap existing systems to accommodate it," said Daniel Butler, vice president for retail operations at the National Retail Federation, a trade association based in Washington.
Consumer privacy is also an issue. It would be easy to combine credit card data with information from the retail chips to know who bought what, and when -- and, conceivably, track the product even after it left the store.
I don't think the average consumer understands the threat to personal privacy that these kinds of technologies can present," said Alan N. Sutin, a partner specializing in information technology at the law firm of Greenberg Traurig.
William H. Steele, a consumer products analyst with Bank of America, doubts companies will "succumb to the temptation to keep tracking products in the consumers' hands," but he, too, stops short of calling the issue specious. "There should be a certain level of skepticism on the part of the U.S. consumer," he said.
Still, companies are increasingly viewing the identification technology as a potential savior. In 1999, Gillette, Procter & Gamble and the Uniform Code Council, which administers bar code standardization, founded the Auto-ID Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to be a standards and research clearinghouse. The center has satellite labs at Cambridge University in England, and in Japan and Australia.
The technological limitations of bar codes makes the growing interest in R.F.I.D. easy to understand. Kevin Ashton, a P.& G. executive who directs the Auto-ID Center, estimates that on average 10 percent of stores are out of items the managers think are in stock -- and as many as 40 percent do not realize they are out of a color or size.
The monetary impact of losing track of goods is huge. According to a survey by the University of Florida, shrinkage -- the common retailing term for goods that disappear either through theft, misplacement, fraud or just bad record keeping -- cost retailers a record $31.3 billion last year. Only a third was a result of shoplifting. Nearly half was employee theft, about 5 percent was vendor theft and 15 percent was paperwork errors.
Suppliers have as much at stake as retailers. Colin Peacock, the leader of a Gillette task force to study shelf availability, said that 73 percent of customers left a store if Mach3 blades were out of stock; 27 percent bought a competitor's blades. He said Mach3 sales had gone up 288 percent at the Cambridge Tesco store that had the smart shelf.
Stores often resort to putting frequently pilfered items behind glass or behind counters. That means customers must wait for a clerk to get the products. The practice drives away impatient shoppers and all but eliminates impulse buys.
Mr. Peacock suspects that sales are halved when products are hidden away. "The impact of such defensive merchandising can be worse than the problems it solves," he said.
Once it is perfected, radio frequency technology may solve not just those problems, but some that are unrelated to stocking issues. Because the tags, unlike bar codes, are programmable chips, a store like Wal-Mart that frequently changes prices can attach the price to the item and know exactly what a consumer paid if the item is returned -- even if the customer lost the receipt.
And then there are product recalls to consider. Radio frequency technology could pinpoint a tainted batch, and -- if customers paid with credit cards or used store discount cards -- identify customers who purchased such items.
"It would be wonderful to be able to spot just those items that came from a plant that has a flaw, or those perishable items that took too long to arrive and thus might spoil sooner," Mr. Wertz of Wal-Mart said.
Canon USA wants to deploy radio frequency identification to track machines at locations that use dozens of printers and copiers. "It would help us schedule preventive maintenance, and alert us to get equipment back when the lease expires," said James J. Gordon Jr., Canon's vice president for logistics.
Even the United States Postal Service has gotten into the act. Last month, it promoted Charles E. Bravo, until then its chief technology officer, to the new job of senior vice president for intelligent mail and address quality, and charged him with studying tracking technologies.
"We'd love to be able to tell a company that a customer's check is truly in the mail, or that its direct mail flier was just delivered to a customer's door," Mr. Bravo said.
And imagine if the company can also be sure that the item the flier is advertising will be available.
"Increasing productivity, lowering inventories, decreasing theft, all are important," said Paul J. Rieger, Procter & Gamble's associate director of supply chain innovation. "But ending out-of-stock situations, that is still our biggest goal."
What happens to privacy when everything you buy can be tracked from inside the store to the door?
You left the privacy of your own home to go to their store. They could just install 100 cameras on the ceiling and hire a staff of thousands to watch everyone's every move. Or they can RFID things. One of those options would make a gallon of milk cost $10, the other leaves the cost at $3. Neither are especially infringing upon anyone's privacy.
MORTAR COMBAT!
A Radio Chip in Every Consumer Product
If you're walking around the store with RFID tagged merchandise... it doesn't matter. Nothing tags that RFID to you in particular. However - as is mentioned - once you pay, they could tag the RFID to your customer card, the name on your credit card/debit card, whatever. But really, the could do the same with barcodes, etc.
Otherwise, you could wear a similar frequency device near the tags to stymie them...
Cordless phones, two-way radios, local wireless networks and other communications devices...can interfere with the signals...waves have a hard time penetrating metals and liquids
In the end though, paying cash is probably your best bet at not being ID'ed... until the hidden RFID in your boxers tells them who you are, that is.
But what happens to privacy when everything you buy can be tracked from store floor to door?
Your demographics become a powerful asset.
Certain companies, then, may become very, very wealthy.
Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I take my purchases to a clerk who rings them up, and to whom I give payment.
- someone spreading gossip than I am some pencil-pusher in a cubicle 1000 miles away.
The store already knows what I've bought. Big deal.
These sound like a much more effective shoplifting deterrent than the current tags that can be defeated with a tinfoil-lined purse (or fanny sack as geeks call them).
It would be nice to see a system of these tags taking the current 'self check-out' aisles even further: the products in the cart announce themselves to a kiosk which automatically tallies up the bill. For practical purposes, that's much more anonymous than the cashier.
I'm more worried about the cashier-whos-a-friend-of-a-cousin-of-a-dentist-of
Anyways, more fluff.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
"the same techniques that enable an electronic sensor to record data from an E-ZPass tag or an office door to open for people with chip-equipped cards in their pockets"
I know many who have EZ-Pass (mine was ordered and never came) and it has so many false positives for non-payment it's insane. Along with your fine you get a nice little picture in the mail of your car going through the toll even though they have that car in their EZ-Pass database!
My apartment building uses the electronic key lock with a motion sensor on the inside. I'd say it's broken about 5% of the time, which is a lot if that's where you are every day.
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
For any cool experiments? Is the transmitter range long enough to track my pet to within lets say 400 feet? Could they be hacked into some sort of packet network backbone or radio station?
I'm going to brush paranoia aside for now because I wonder what sort of cool things I can do with these little wonders. Millions upon millions of them all availiable whenever I purchase a product.
Could I read these RDIF tags myself? Could I drive past my neighbors and find out what brand lubricant they use by scanning their trashcans? Oh what fun! I can see it now, you heard it from me first, "War RDIF anarchy dildo driving!" As soon as these things are introduced, I'm going to drive around the bay area every garbage night and scan for people who have empty anarchy dildo packages in their trash, and mark it with some chalk (And on a map I will post on the net)
Man, this takes shaming peoples insecurities to a whole new level.
Winona Ryder goes to prison.
I also reply below your current threshold.
Probably about as much happens when your shopping cart contents are itemized at the cash register.
Come on. I mean, come on. This is getting stupid. "Oh, no, my rights are being violated, because the store is TRACKING THEIR OWN MERCHANDISE until such time as I actually pay it. Oh, woe is me. Woe woe woe."
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Link
Until the moment you buy it the things in a store belong to them. Period. They can do anything they want with it, including tracking.
This is no different than putting a tracking device in your laptop or in your car. Or having a "Lost phone" beeper in your cordless.
As a store owner though I certainly wouldn't want a supplier being able to track my inventory without my permission, or perhaps even knowing about it. It isn't any of *their* business, per se. I can see where the large chains would find this useful though.
But in MY store, I put the tags on, if I bloody well feel like it.
As a customer the tags had better come off as soon as I buy the merchandise. From that moment on it's mine, not theirs. Note that that would be *before* I get to the exit.
KFG
These things are great. Can I put them on my packages so I don't have to pay for delivery confirmation?
This is stupid.
Its not like Wal-Mart doesn't have security cameras every 10 feet that zoom in on you, the contents of your cart, what you are carrying, etc.
Also, its not like Wal-Mart doesn't keep records of everything you buy and when you bought them, which can be linked up to the timestamps on aforementioned security cameras.
Trust me, RFID tags on merchandise isn't going to harm your privacy in a store one tiny bit.
The
Unless you are stealing from the store, the clerk and the cash register know everything you buy anyway.
If it ends up having *any* impact on privacy, it would be too *improve* privacy. No matter what, the cash register system has the *potential* to track your purchases that you pay for. Currently, when you buy stuff, every individual item must be handled by the cashier to be scanned, so the cashier is intimately familiar with your purchase. If used properly, this thing could scan an entire cart without digging through every item. Items you want to hide can be hidden. They still are paid for, but the cashier only sees the total sum, not each purchase. Combine this with anonymous currency (only paper money right now) and individuals are in no way associated with their purchases, neither by humans nor by computer.
Afraid of those items being tracked after leaving the store? Rip out those tags when you are out of there.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Sure, they can and perhaps, should track any and everything in their store. The problem is that RFIDs are not deactivated. They continue to work forever. Or, at least until the washer has worn out your panties.
The fact that they continue to work for a very long time and the fact that they are, or can be, completely unique means that a store can identify YOU by your panties. National chains such as Walmart could track YOU and your panties all across the country. Suddenly they don't sound very nice, do they.
Now, let's take the paranoia to a slightly higher level. Let's suppose that stores share their RFID and customer databases with trustworthy groups like, NSA CIA, FBI, SpamKing marketing. Suddenly You and your panties are trackable in every store you go to, or security checkpoint you pass through or toll booth you drive through. Now you can't go anywhere without the beadie little eye of some agency watching you at all times.
Did you ever get the feeling that you were being watched?
As you exit the store just put your goods into a box that sends a very large EM pulse through the goods. That will effectively burn out the little critters...one would think.
Right?
+2 cents contributed.
NOT WORK FRIENDLY>> DONT GO TO LINK>>>
there.. I said it, are you happy?
I wonder if these would even work in an electronics retailer - say like Best Buy. You've got a wall of TV's, cell phones, radio, etc all over the store. Unless you had a large number of distributed receivers, how would you counteract the interference.
Nearly all store shelving is metal. In particular, Wal-Marts have those big 8 foot high shelves in certain sections of the store. Grocery stores are completely filled with metal shelving and refrigeration units.
or http://tinyurl.com/6ffr>
I prefer a void in conversation to a vacuous one.
You scan all the items yourself and you can even pay by cash if you want, the machine has a bill acceptor. The checkout stands even have the sensormatic deal, so you can cancel an items tendancy to set off the "I'm Stealing" beep at the door.
Here's a pic of one, with an article I havent read
with a small RF transmitter that transmits all the item IDs. The alarm would go off in the store. and they'd think everything in the whole store had just been stolen. FUN FUN FUN!
What's next, wanting to vote without having to register?
Scan the RFIDs of trash to see which consumers of which brands are more likely to litter.
Such is the infinite Grace of Popeye.
For a home device that shoots just enough microwaves
into commonly bought consumer good to fry the RFID
tag.
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
Given the previous article talking about RFID tags in tires (which is much more insidious to me than having an RFID tag in the packaging of the underwear I buy), it brings up a question.
Given how low-power these things are, and that they seem to be standardizing on the way they transmit, is there a way to create RFID countermeasures?
The best would be a passive device like the RFID tags that can be powered by the same mechanism as the RFID tags themselves, since that would mean it would always activate when you were in range. However, I would assume an active countermeasure could be powered for a very long time from a small battery.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
Ok, ok, I don't get it.
I fail to see why Gilette wanting to track their razors, is taking away my rights.
Or do the tags stay with the razor for the life of the product?
Someone(from both angles) help me out, there seems to be confusion.
Maybe I am just not paranoid enough but what exactly is the problem here?
I could understand if they didn't take the tags off (and indeed thats what I was worried about) or if they didn't de-activate them. But what exactly can they tell about you before you hit the door? (or more accurately the register, where I read most of the tags are deactivated.)
They don't have your CC# or any other informationa bout you, all they know is someone picked it up off the shelf. The same their their current inventory system could easily tell them, albeit it with more human intervention and alot less accuracy.
Personally as long as they deactivate these tags (or better yet, remove them) I don't care. Because until I buy it they haven't infringed upon my privacy in any way I can tell. Because I am not linked to that product yet. So them being able to tell that a Gillete Machwhatever just walked out the door doesnt make much difference, unless they correlate that in some way with me having been the one to buy it (which is again equally as possible to do anyway).
"The saddest words of mice and men, are not those which were, but should have been."
it would be like the thick plastic armoring that music stores encase CDs and Tapes in
No, they are strips of "foil" just a few microns thick. They are very easily concealed. So far they are usually held on under a bit of tape but, they can be embedded into the materials that make up the product. Some manufacturers are discussing doing this. In the case of Gillette, the strip could be easily embedded in the plastic shell of the individual razor blade. RFID tags can also be easily laminated into the paper of books etc.
Take a US currency note, greater than one dollar, and hold it up to the light. You will(should) notice a milar strip embedded into the bill that denotes the face value of the bill. An RFID tag could be as simple as this milar strip. In fact, the tag could be even smaller that the milar strip in the bill.
Oh wait, my local supermarket does this already, and uses this info when I log into their online shopping section to populate my favourites list, so I don't have to bother searching for things I purchase regularly. So does Amazon. This is an infringement of my civil liberties because wasting my time is an inalienable human right... or something.
Seriously, what can someone actually do with my purchase history? Maybe target me with adverts for things I might want to buy? (no, I am not a good person to try to sell feminine hygein products to. And no I don't want to consolidate my debt, thank you. HINT TO ADVERTISERS: The only banner ad I have ever clicked on deliberately was for food.) Maybe they could use this information for blackmail, after all I wouldn't want it getting around that I make my own pizzas, or the men from Domino's will be after me.
Honestly, it's not like I buy things over the counter for spreading sedition. I use my other identity for that...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
When will we be able to directly bag stuff in carts and then leave w/o going through cashiers? (I mean, w/o stealing).
Going to the cashier is such a waste of time. I think this is a step through the right direction.
-- Leeeter than leet
The way I see it is that it is their right and responsibility to gather that information. What business owner wouldn't want to have that kind of information? And while you are on their property you are subject to whatever legal things they want to do. If you don't like it... leave. Although I'd imagine it would only be crazy extremist people and theives that would go to such lengths.
Now if they tracked their goods past their doors... then I'd be signing whatever petition is required to get that tracking system out of there.
But think about it though... especially in walmarts of the world... 1/2 the fun of going there is switching where things are hung. So isn't it only fair that the people who work there can actually have the ability to find something for someone who can't find where another customer put it?
There, a "smart shelf" continuously queries tiny radio chips embedded in the packages it holds, and senses the silence when one is removed. The system may soon be programmed to alert security when several are taken at once, Greg Sage, a Tesco spokesman, said.
So, if I decide to buy several packs of blades at once, so I stock up for the fall of society, I'll be stopped and treated like a terrorist?
Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
I'm not especially worried about RFID tags in stores. Yes, it could be a serious privacy problem if a store tracked everything you picked up looked at in horror and disbelief, and set back down again hastily. (Like the Teddy Grahams bedsheets I saw the other week in a surplus store... a kiddie marketing tie-in gone horribly too far.) They might conclude that people were actually interested in such things.
But I digress.
What would bother me is the tracking products by RFID once I was out of the store. If stores are going to use RFID tags, I want them to expire, permanently, the moment I walk out of the place of purchase. And somehow I'm doubting that I can really trust the stores, the government, or the RFID manufacturers to take care of this little detail for me.
So if there's any EE's out there who can tell us, what does it take to reliably kill an RFID tag? (A microwave oven?) If there's no easy way, would it be feasable to make a device that would reliably burn them out?
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
I'm not very worried about potiential tracking since that is already done everytime I use a credit card. However, I would think this could bring about the easier checkouts that we have been hearing about for the last decade where we just take our items through an automated checkout lane and simply pay up without having to scan our items.
Right now, at certain KMarts, you can check yourself out, but you have to scan each individual item. I tried this once but after waiting 10 minutes as the technically inept attempt to accomplish this otherwise simple feat, I realized that the process was flawed. Putting these tags on all items will make it as simple as walking through a lane, sliding your debit card through a reader (or even simplier if you have an account with the store itself) and walking out the door.
Now if they can only figure out how to automatically bag everything.
There is nothing inherently safe about liberty. That's why so many people died protecting it.
John Anderton! You look like you could use a Guinness right now!
Well, in Washington State... I'm not so worried about RFID, etc., on those size 10 panties you're buying. I'm worried about them being able to video record/photograph the panties you were already wearing when you came in.
Not only would you not want your supplier to know, you especially wouldn't want your competitors to be able to track your inventory. All it would take would be a person walking up and down the aisles carrying a little recorder that captured inventory levels as they moved along. A stroll through your competitor's store and you know to the item what's being stocked.
http://saveie6.com/
Isn't it a tad on the ironic side that this story is carried by a site to which you have to log on?
I work for a company that sells to one of the worlds largest retailers. This retailer recently held a meeting with all suppliers in the division and stated that RFIDs will be used on all pallets entering the DC this year and all products sold within a couple years. The benefits such as walking past the checkout and knowing exactly what's in your cart was discussed. Inventory management is the really big benefit though. Concerns such as thieves potentially knowing what's in your cart as you walk to your car were also discussed. Someone also voiced the concern that thieves with proper equipment could know exactly what's sitting in your car. It seems like the retailers know what the risks are. They are seriously trying to reduce those risks but the benefits are far too great for them to ignore. We're just hoping that the price comes down. The tags cost half as much as our product.
has anyone else had the thought that maybe by putting your new shirt, panties, ect in a microwave for a few seconds you would effectively destroy the RFID when you got it home if you were so inclined? I can definitely see a problem with anything metal but since i'm not into BDSM i don't wear metal panties....
Harry S Truman is a very happy man.
My drugstore one is listed under Ted Nugent.
Wal-Mart, for example, has a database TWICE the size of all the U.S. Government, combined.
EVERY purchase you have ever made with a credit card is tracked right down to you. All your preferences are known, right down to your favorite deodorant.
Wal-Mart, however you might think of it, is a brilliant company. Did you know that most of the products on the Wal-Mart shelf have NOT been bought by Wal-Mart? No, the manufacturer sends the products to Wal-Mart and waits until the item is actually run through the checkout scanner before it receives a check. The manufacturer is responsible for sending more products for Wal-Mart to stock. In return, they get access to that titanic-sized wealth of marketing data.
This is where the radio tags come in. If you know exactly where any product is in your store, you can see what products sell better in what location -- in real time, across the country. And yes, shoplifting will become far more difficult for the petty theives -- I doubt the pros will be stopped by this technology.
RFID tags aren't about big brother -- they're about big bucks.
-- We live in a world where lemonade is artificial and soap has real lemon.
Wouldn't the minimal range of an RFID alleviate almost all privacy concerns?
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
Well how about a would-be burglar slowly rolling down the street and scanning houses until he finds a collection of tags he'd like to take home with him? Does that make your sphincter wobble any?
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
people really need to learn the technology before they comment. rfid tags are activated by a radio signal, which the tag bounces bag with it's info. if a high enough radio signal is sent to the tag, the tag fries. no more tag. end of privacy concerns.
Do you see the sig? Do you have it in your sights? Why yes, Miss Moneypenny...
Here's my take on this.
First, let's assume that the stores want this to prevent shoplifting. Fair enough. If that's true, and if the RFID tag just says, "I'm a pair of Dockers pants, size 33, beige," that's fine. If that's the case, then it'd be in the store's interest to either remove or destroy the tag at checkout. Otherwise, each time the customer came back in wearing those pants, the store security system would register a false positive.
OTOH, if the tag is unique on that particular pair of pants, such as with a serial number, and if the store cares to check every single tag against a database of serial numbers of sold goods vs. goods that are supposed to still be on the shelves, then we have a problem. Then, there's no need to remove or destroy the tags. At that point, you can build extensive databases of what people have bought and are carrying around with them. At least until someone starts selling a device to burn out the tags. I think I'd be first in line to go buy one.
I used to work at Rite-Aid, and we attached small security chips tag, which would set off the alarm if they left the door, to our most tempting products. This is why most stores 'demagnitize' products already. This may not be as advanced, but it's a similar concept ethically, since the store is using electronics, often unseen, to protect their merchandise from Bob Stickyfingers.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Since retail outlets lose at least as much to "five-fingered discounting" employees as they do to shoplifting, I presume that the stores are setting up RFID-detection systems at the employee entrance / exits as well.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
But what happens to privacy when everything you buy can be tracked from store floor to door?
Umm... Walmart already knows you bought size 10 panties & has your credit card number to boot. I don't see how tracking those panties from the shelf to the cash register has any additional impact on your privacy - unless you are trying to sneak them out without paying.
Dont shop at stores that implement the technology if you dont like it. No one is forcing you to shop there.
Throw clothes in microwave for 5 seconds. Problem solved ;)
-foxxz
The greatest use for these would be to bypass the entire checkout process. Let me fill up bags while I am shopping, and on exit let me present my Wal-Mart "speedpass" or equivalent. The sensors should be able to sense all of the merchandise in my cart and take it from my account.
You all "It stops at the shopdoor" people
forget that these RFID-tags are small : 0.4 mm^2
Have a look at
http://www.hitachi.co.jp/Prod/mu-chip/
for details
These are small enough to embed them into bank notes or the seam of your new panties.
These tags will not be removed from the products.
You will always carry them with you.
Next time in front of the restaurant door:
"Sorry sir you can not enter here, you only have 17 dollars with you"
Its this crap here that does more harm than you could possibly ever imagine (and probably do not care). I am a MAJOR (not LtCol yet, but working on it) advocate for privacy and personal security. Even without going into the obvious hypocricy of people attacking this method and ignoring the stores rights inside their own buildings with THEIR merchandise, I would have to say that some people are not breathing enough oxygen.
Please people, try to understand that mindless zealots only drive people away from seeing truth. Crap like this only serves as ammunition from those who wish to destroy your liberty and privacy. Try and apply a little logic and reason.
Pay Cash
Sometimes I think I am the only person in the world who isn't unique in some way.
Active ID costs too much and lacks durabilty for consumer use.
Passive ID is a better solution.
The per unit cost is lower than chip-based active IDs will ever reach. They can be manufactured into products for tracking and anticounterfeiting, are less affected by shock, heat, pressure, and cannot be duplicated.
It isn't the tags that I am afraid of. After all, they are inanimate objects.
..... and show up on my doorstep with a search warrant to search my house for said illegal activity, even though they have NO evidence of any illegal activity, only HERESAY evidence.
I am afraid of the person who queries the database of all the items I have bought at the local Junk-Mart (tm) and profiles my buying habits and reports those buying habits to the local authorities, who will no doubt conclude that my purchases can be assembled into a WOMD or illigal drug or
That is what I am afraid of.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Okay, time to wire up my door frame to emit a focused EM pulse every time someone enters/leaves my house.
Come to think of it, that would be a great way to deal with people who bring in cell phones too...
We read about this in my CS300 class. Basically, the manufacturers created this technology with an opt-out option, so that consumers could choose not to participate in the tracking if they did not want to.
In college, really poor, need a flatscreen.
Geez, I can't believe how many posts don't understand the privacy issue. Let me summarize:
1). the tags cannot be deactivated, are not deactivated when you purchase the item.
2.) each tag has a unique ID - buy 3 identical pants, 3 tags have 3 different ID numbers.
3.) pay with a traceable currency, like a credit card, and into the database goes your credit card info AND the IDs of the things you bought.
4.) From now on, anyone with a scanner and access to the database where you bought stuff can know who you are, where you are. Walk into a Walmart on the other side of the world, and your RFID tag can identify you (or at least the purchaser of the goods). Have not only your buying habits, but your shopping habits tracked, stored, and datamined. Buy a shirt at a garage sale and get arrested for being someone else! Have more of your info make it into the Total Information Awareeness uberdatabase.
It's a wonderful world.
no, they are NOT "completely unique", they are RADIO-FREQUENCY BARCODES. That is all. Get a clue as to how a barcode works. Now be able to scan it passively from 15 feet away without knowing exactly where it is.
THAT'S ALL THIS SHIT IS, DAMMIT.
Geezumly crow, go take a fucking Valium or something.
From Minority Report Has Ad-ded Value:
"It's targeted marketing," said Jeff Boortz, creative director for the 14 spots while at 3 Ring and founder of Philadelphia-based Concrete Pictures. "The individual is only shown ads for products they want to buy. The goal is to promote a relationship between brands and the consumer. I don't think that's a bad thing."
For those of you more interested in the technical issues of RFID tags than the political issues, here are the books to read (associate links, feel free to avoid):
Rf/I Application
RFID Handbook
I've had this sig for three days.
You see all those ships flying the american flags going to Iraq just to pick a fight with a country despite what the rest of the world says?
And why? Because you have a sneaking suspicion that their leader personally trained a whole bunch of people from other countries (mostly in Africa) that flew a couple of planes? Or is it for oil? Perhaps it's to destroy the Sheikdoms around your precious little friends, the Isrealies. You say sweet fuck all when the Jews massacre towns, answer picketing and rock throwing with deadly force, or amass the largest military, complete with stockpile of Chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. You even gave them a FUCKING homeland, something that they couldn't even have for more than 40 fucking years in all of recorded history!
Face it, you people are racist, arrogant, and a fucking puppet of the Jews!
- Buy merchandise
- Remove tag, reactivate anf affix to your underwear
- Return to store
- Try to leave store
- Insist that if they want to search your shorts, you'll only let (pick the cutest staffer) do the search, and it must be in public, to protect your rights
- Sue (profit)
or, to do the MasterCard thingee...i seem to remember from an ARS Technica article (unable to find with ARS's search, unfortunately) that all of these run on different frequencies. they dont have any of their own power, so you can fry them with the right frequency signal, rendering them inpotent
Boy, I'm paranoid conspiracy theorist today.
Right now, RFID tags are tiny foil strips. These can be taped on to the product or even embedded into the product. The embedding adds to the manufacturing process and cost. The taped on tags add to the packaging process and cost.
How long before RFID tags are applied with metalic paint or ink, such as what is used for the numbers on the bottom of bank cheques? In a short time they will be able to apply RFID tags with inkjet-like printers. This will not only make them much cheaper and easier to apply, it will also make them much harder to detect(by humans) and remove.
The ability to track something ALWAYS sounds great at first. But eventually, the technology is abused and people realize that it is a bad thing. The problem is that by then, it is too late and nothing can be done about it. Frankly, I think it is already too late to stop RFID tags.
I have absolutely no problem with a store using RFID tags to track their own merchandise as long as the RFID is removed/expired when I leave the store. As many other people have said, this is not a privacy issue, it's just the store tracking it's own merchandise.
What I do have a problem with is walking into a store and having RFID tags embedded in my clothing read by scanners so salesdrones can target their pitches to me. Sadly, I don't expect to see this issue addressed until the first time a fetishist stalker is caught wandering a mall with an RFID scanner and following attractive women whose undergarments have the same RFID tag IDs that you see in Victoria's Secret.
199.239.136.212 www.nytimes.com
i'm not sure how often the ip address of archive.nytimes.com changes, but this will work as long as www.nytimes.com and archive.nytimes.com share the same directory structure and the ip address of the archive stays the same . . .
(you might have to restart your browser)
track7.org has all kinds of interesting stuff!
I think it may be time that we all start having to go commando
Just carry around little EMP's to fry them in store.
It seems to me that the main use of these transmitters is just to do the job of lazy employees. For instance, with the Gap store, why wouldn't they be looking at their shelves? Shouldn't the employees restock the shelves once they are emptied? Isn't that why they work there?
The folks at the AutoID Center at MIT have already gotten plenty of feedback on this. The current proposed standard has a KILL command that disables the tag; the assumption is that as soon as you check out, the tag is killed and becomes inert.
Well for some vendors it is important for them to know what the stock is. For example the Frito Lay guy. Frito Lay puts chips in your store on consignment.. heck If I run a store I would love for him to know when supplies are running short.
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
companies will know that women are keeping their bikini areas shaved. Unless of course, a man is buying the paisley panties. That is when things begin to get interesting.
Hopefully it will reduce theft. The amount of inventory "shrink" these stores suffer is incredible. The theft losses from one Circuit City super store in Virginia wiped out the profits for every Circuit City express in the Washington DC area combined in 2001. Personally I'm sick of paying higher prices to cover thefts. Maybe a system that locks the doors when one of these activates a system as the person is trying to leave the store would work. Before anyone starts rambling about this happening to an innocent shopper, hear me out. It would do no more to an innocent person than the current systems. Alarm goes off, employee asks person to inspect merchandise, finds one tag not deactivated, apologizes to person; they are on their way. On the other hand, a shoplifter tries to run out of the store and the doors lock so the person can be detained. Not perfect but it would help.
Imagine packing your shopping cart at the supermarket and simply pushing the cart up to the checkout counter, where the RFID tags would be read automatically. You pay, possibly to a machine, and you leave! No more messing around with long queues, barcode readers, etc.
I'd love to see this happen.
I'd also love to see these RFID tags deactivated as soon as I leave the store. There's really no need for my things broadcasting their possibly unique IDs in the air for anybody to read.
Then they'll know when I left, no worse than a camera. Whats the big deal?
I don't know about you, but I am at my wits end trying to keep
tabs on grandma. Hopefully this will help!
what? what I thought we were in the trust tree in the nest, were we not?
You know how to make a minature radio transmitter with a battery life of more than a few days, for only a few cents (If it cost more, the shop would certainly remove it at POS, or it would cost them too much)? Oh, and has a range of more than a few feet? I'm impressed. Perhaps you should patent the design and we can use it for chipping children in case they are kidnapped. The transmitter will almost certainly be attatched to the packaging rather than the item itself, and so throwing away the box is likely to get rid of it, assuming the battery lasts long enough to trouble you. Of course I suppose that the would-be burglar could tell that you've just bought a nice new plasma screen because of the box in your trash, but then he probably could anyway, right?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The EPC spec has all those bits so the instances of objects can be tracked. An EPC is broken down into four sections:
- WH -002.pdfT -AUTOID-WH -008.pdf
bits 00-07 = header
bits 08-35 = manufacturer (EPC Manager)
bits 36-59 = Object Class
bits 60-95 = Serial Number
There's another EPC, the Compact EPC, that's only 64 bits long, because the longer bit length translates into higher-cost tags.
So saying that RFID tags are -not- instance specific is incorrect. They can be (and the EPC is designed to be) instance specific, but it's up to the manufacturer.
http://www.autoidcenter.org/research/MIT-AUTOID
http://www.autoidcenter.org/research/MI
"As a store owner though I certainly wouldn't want a supplier being able to track my inventory . . ."
Yeah, but this could revolutionize goods sold on consignment. In fact, we just may see the majority of products sold in stores switch to a model of consignment. The actual stores would just be hollow shells, without any inventory at all.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
How long do you think it will be before shoplifters learnto find and remove these tags? How many times do the cops kick in your door and demand to see the recipt for something you just bought?
People like you scare the crap outta me.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Get a clue. What do you think club cards/saving cards are for at Grocery stores/Retail shopping centers? Just so you can get a discount? Think again.. Everything you purchase is recorded so the store can more accurately tell you what you want to buy through advertising. Check the back of your receipts when you check out, I doubt you will ever see one for dog or cat food if you have never purchased any items relating to a dog or cat. It's subtle now, but give it a year or two.. things will start to be more in your face.
Moreover, this has the chance to obviate the checkout procedure altogether. Who wouldn't consider that a giant step forward?
The thought of a wife going to the store, grabbing stuff and walking out, and then getting the bill at the end of the month ought to scare the living shit out of every husband on Earth.
They day that happens, I cancel every card we have.
Shave your face with rocks and wrap banana leaves around your "secret realm".
it will save you money, and reduce theft. As long as it stops as I leave there door.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Most people don't care how a company tracks its products when they belong to the company. What we care about is how the product is tracked when it belongs to us. Sure, they collect purchase data and histories on us. But this system essentially ties our physical presence to the database of purchasing habits based on proximity, not on a sale. Sort of like a manditory national id card with gps built in. The path is sadly clear. In time, these will get implemented. The population might be concerned at first, but will quickly lose interest. The visible advantage of a speedier find/purchase will be more positive than the hidden potential for loss of privacy. It will be very easy to link the data and position together allowing the merchants to present you with plenty of spam you may or may not be interested in, all at very low cost per delivery. Think your inbox is full?
No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulder blades will seriously cramp his style.
Are we talking size of dime, grain of salt, too small o see with naked eye?
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
NYT is reporting that slashdot is reporting that NYT is reporting that slashdot posts nothing but duplicate stories.
This just in... that fact that another new source mentions this story does in fact make it newsworthy again, despite no new turn of events.
Scott
To my knowledge, no electrical circuit oscillates the same as others. It is known fact that every Oscillation ciruitry propogates radiation that is unique. This is due to imperfections in the manufacturing process that perhaps may never be re-calibrated or constructed with absolute physical precision.
I remember a story about World War II...a United States Navy Destroyer (vessel, big iron boat with big metal-hurling pipes, etc) was heading on a course for the Indonesia area for patrol and a Japanese Submersible boat (submarine, big underwater boat with underwater missiles/torpedos) mysteriously was able to track and sink the United States Navy's Destroyer. The culprit: it was discovered, that after the crew shortly was collected by neighboring United States Navy vessels, that the Destroyer was maintaning a state of silence and it turns out one of the crew members had a homebrew radio-reception device's antenna wire dangled out the porthole/window and the Japanese vessel's skilled crew was able to "seek" the source of the radiation propogation and in-deed sink the United States Navy's Destroyer.
In essence, not to be "funny", the same principle may be applied to RFID tags by them being a source of radio wave propogation that may be analyzed and discriminated with equipment capable of maximizing the analytical data of each unique RFID's oscillation of radio waves. In short, it is simple for the marketers of RFIDs to release mis-leading statments that all RFIDs are equal, the same, and indiscriminately unable to eavsdrop on the daily activities of people. Yet to the scientific community's understanding and reasoning, it is FALSE that a RFID is incapable of providing information that can allow directional tracking of whatever vessel or being it is implanted upon. With the increasing precision of Electrical Equipment every moment of the retail-year, it is in-deed a matter of time before the United States government stops the mis-leading display of its desire to track every human being or animal because it nows the means to do so is already part of the design of complex organisms' nervous systems. We, as organic life-forms with complex nervous systems, already have provided a means to be "tracked"; the United States [Das Korporation] simply throws FUD in the air about electronics to be used to "track" and "identify" objects and living things that it realy has distracted everyone to such as simple human-constructed principle only to fore-shadow the advanced research it secretly commits to...
IN EVEN SHORTER WORDS, "RFID" POSESSES YOU TECHNOLOGICALLY!
IN CRYPTIC WORDS THAT AVERAGE BEINGS HAVE YET TO COMPREHEND, "GOVERNMENT" METAPHYSICALLY TRACKS YOU!
Yes, it is honest to say
"in Soviet Russia, Television watches you"
as it is equally honest to say
"in and after purchasing property and effects in commercial store, Fascist United States LLC traces you with RFID until it is complete with research to metaphysicaly/naturaly track you"
!!!
But I'm sure you already Gnu that.
As if it wasn't bad enough to hear; "I'm going to the store, I should be back in a few hours..."
The thing is, there are situations where you will want it to keep working after you leave. Like you return the item, but you don't have your receipt, like it said in the article (yeah, I RTFA! :>) It would be great if the RFID from the item was stored with the purchase price in the database. And that necessitates the thing staying alive.
So stores WILL be able to determine your buying history if you use a CC to pay(Grocery stores do now - with that little card they extorted you into giving them each time). And I bet the RFID manufacturer ends up selling these things in consecutive runs of ID #'s - making it EASY for the feds to determine where the panties were bought and to correlate them with a CC#, then a mailing address, etc.
So what do we do? I think consumers will need to educate themselves a bit - especially with regard to where they buy clothing. We will need a privacy policy law like with the net. Try to pay for clothing with cash. And the greatest hope, I swear to God, will be sensationalist journalism. Even regular people will be creeped out by the idea of being tracked by their underwear. And you know Dateline or one of those crappy shows will do a thing on it if the NYTimes is on it now.
Also, I plan on using a big fscking magnet on my clothes from now on. 5 Tesla should work ;)
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
I can see it now -- they stripped in Seattle to protest the Gap's use of sweatshops, now it'll be "ooooh, let's jam the store!"
he'd have to be rolling down your hallway, due to range limitations. Burglers don't need RFID tags to pick good marks, there are better clues, like receipts, surveillance, and just paying attention.
You made my imagination start running...
I imagine a shoplifter wants to carry a bag all-through the store, yet doesn't want to look *obvious*, so tada: here comes a Crossdresser (transvestite?) with a hefty stylish-woman's canvas bag (or backpack even?) and lookout because Walmart's lipstick is soon to disappear!
But I'm sure you already Gnu that.
The actual RFID tag is a passive device, about the size of a grain of rice (kind of a big one) that gets injected between your pets shoulder blades. I think occasionally they have been known to 'migrate' from that position, but there are almost no health issues.
Our vet implanted an 'Avid' chip (http://www/avidid.com. The vet charged us $30 U.S. Registering with the database is a one time $15 charge (now I'm reading from the website) and it costs $6 to change information in the database when you move.
As to privacy concerns with RFID in general, there are many reasons to be concerned, or at least watchful, of current trends, but I think this is a good application of technology.
-matt
"But what happens to privacy when everything you buy can be tracked from store floor to door?"
simple, mr. watson: nothing.
when they don't know what you take out of the store is when you have stolen something.
it's not like you used to say at the clerk that "i bought stuff worth x-amount-of $, here you go."
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
"But what happens to privacy when everything you buy can be tracked from store floor to door?"
I hate to be the one to break this too you, but Walmart already tracks EVERYTHING they sell. Every purchase goes into these giant NCR Terradata setups back at their home office. They mine it for trends and such already and have been doing so for years. So this really don't change that. The real question is how to you make sure the RFID tag is really deactivated?
Sorry folks, but Wally World and Smas Club already track everything you purchase from them via Credit Card address information, or via membership information.
I've had replacement items show up on my doorstep for defective product recalls before I even knew there was a recall issue on items I have purchased from both locations...
Yeah, you're really private shopping alright...
Eventually there will be daily on-site metrics for how fast the average customer shopped, and perhaps times spent contemplating each purchase. Product positioning and pricing can be adjusted per store for differing behaviors in the populations served by different branches.
What, you think RFID tags are invisible or something? Take off the #$%@ tag!
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
When they do, I say "No" and keep on going
Don't simply say "no". Tell them they can search your bag if you are compensated, partial refund, gift certificate, etc. Make them say "no".
Some of the researchers doing this are part of the engineering department at Cambridge Uni, and their vision is that this will completely change the world. See:
http://www.autoidcenter.org/
e.g. Why have supermarket checkouts when you can just drive your trolley through a reader and you're presented with a bill? There will be enough ID numbers to identify pretty much every manufactured product in the world. Need instructions on how to repair something? No problem, just enter the ID number into a database and out pops your answer. I don't know how they're addressing the privacy concerns, but just think for a moment about all the neat things that can be done, if it is possible to identify *everything*. Kinda like ISBN, but universal...
_begin Disclaimer_
- in-grotesque-and-anger*)
I AM NOT A SUBSCRIBER OF ADULT-TOYS AND ADULT MERCHANDISE AND DISLIKE THEIR AUDIENCE AND SUBSCRIBERS.
_end Disclaimer_
This doesn't bode well for those people using their adult-oriented-merchandise upon eachother, neither the law-enforcment officers that are assigned to reclaim shoplifted adult-oriented merchandise. I can only imagine the conversation going-on in the placidly-marked white van outside a building of a stake-out...
eavsdropper1: The log is February-25-2003, in the parking lot of "Bill and Ted's Adult Store"...we are awaiting the infamous WalMart Condomn shoplifter to exit the building and placed in custody. It appears the shoplifted product's RFID is reporting its position is reciprocating within a close radius of approximatly 9 inches. The suspected shoplifter appears to be in a remote area of the building, in a booth that hints, by the building's blueprints as being the proximity of a closed-video-viewing area for the store customers.
eavsdropper2:Damn corporate officers; I wish we didn't get these kind of assignments. Walmart should be dispensing their damn condomn merchandise from vending machines. Now we gotta reclaim the stolen property and return it to WalMart's product-return center...(*nashing-teeth*shivering-uncontrollably
But I'm sure you already Gnu that.
How about making this technology work for you as well as the store? I can imagine a wireless PDA with a tag reader card that automatically compares prices for an item from other retailers withing a geography that you define, e.g. "I'm interested in these razors. Anyone within 10 miles of this location want to sell them more than my time & travel cheaply?".
Imagine someone with a portable scanner walking through the mall parking lot knowing exactly which recently purchased items are in each vehicle...
youch!
Oh, I love this idea. Back in college in my intro cultural anthropology class, I read about a small town being giving a survey where very few confessed to drinking beer. Of course in the local dump an anthropologist decided to check those numbers against the used beer cans. Apparently those 3 people drank something like 698 beers a week.
Of course this could make finding out what your politicans are doing so much easier.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
Bob clocks-in, meets with employer for today's business... Employer commands Bob to tend to marketing research that Bob already happens to know, yet the employer re-enforces [it:him/her]self over Bob's objections and uses RFID to be certain Bob is in proximity of expected area of where is supposed to be "researching". Rather, Bob walks to area, displaces RFID tag, walks to the movies and has a nice day while getting payed. :)
Bob returns to clock-out, is congratulated for his steadfast work; "You're great Bob! By the record of your RFID's movment, you didn't take your eyes off your research, not even for a single moment to waslk over to the PlayBoy girls's booth to receive a free product they were dispensing".
Bob continues clocking-out, walks to his hugo, and shrugs for missing the PlayBoy girls; "why, Lord, why did I go to the movies instead?"
But I'm sure you already Gnu that.
I would be impressed if they make my socks track each other through the journey of hamper-washer-dryer-closet drawer.
Baseball Bat:Hello Kitty!
Kitty: Hello Basebal*crunch*
Baseball Bat: Hello dead Kitty!
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
just microwave your panties before you wear them. Not only will they be nice and toasty but the RFID will be fried.
Two of the advantages of RFID tags is that they are 1) standardized and 2) preinstalled in the product. As they are powered by the reader, they also do not deactivate when they leave the store. They simply remain passive until activated by a reader. Also, since they are preinstalled, they are not necessarily easy to locate and remove - to create a theft deterrent. Washing should eventually damage RFID tags sufficiently to render them inoperative, as long as the product is washable. Until then, they can be activated by any reader, including the reader at the store next door. You walk in to the Gap and they note that you just purchased something at a competitor. All the better to target you for cross/up sales. But it's not just the store that can target you. Anyone with access to a scanner can walk around and find who has the expensive electronic item that is easy to fence, even if it's well hidden. And do you ever leave your laptop in your trunk. With RFID tags, they can target the item easily. So it's a privacy issue. Just not the way that you might at first expect.
But what happens to privacy when everything you buy can be tracked from store floor to door?
... and to what use do the NY Times put this information, we wonder?
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The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
So I got a new dockers leather wallet for christmas. It's nice, I go about my daily activity, and when I walk into Target, it sets off the alarm. Meh. Nobody stopped me. Happens again when I walked out. It also happened at Barnes and Noble and Marshall Fields. Funny thing is, nobody stopped me for weeks.
At one point I decided I should figure out what exactly was doing it(I didn't know it was the wallet at this point) so I emptied my pockets and passed them through one by one. I narrowed it down to the wallet, emptied it out completely, and it still set it off. No visible tags or anything on it. It just appears to be a leather wallet.
Eventually I was actually stopped at Barnes and Noble and the guy waved my wallet over something and it deactivated the RFID tag I assume. Thats my story.
A cheesecake shot of a little girl and her new puppy, with the text:
"what if...
her new puppy was...."
and then in HUGE WHITE ON BLACK FONT:
"LOST AND NEVER FOUND!!!!!!!"
too bad those posters don't come with an orchestra to play a jarring chord when you get to the third line.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
We MUST defend the great American right to shoplift! It is tanamount that we never lose the ability to get a free case of soda becauuse the cashier never looks underneath your cart.
Winona Ryders of the world, UNITE!
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
generator anyone ? using a very small power source you should be able to become "hurricane RF" with an eye about 3 feet wide, just enough to put these small tags out of touch. Any physical electronics guru's out there with some real info on this kind of thing ??
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
But what happens to privacy when everything you read can be tracked?
I assume that these devices contain somesort of solid state circuitry. Therefore they could/should
be vulnerable to an EM pulse. The question , how strong? My guess would be not much would be needed
or the strips would be to big/expensive.
I think that the milar strip starts with the 5. It used to start with the 20, but was added to the 5 and the 10 with the re-design.
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
One deal discussion board I frequent sometimes discusses clearance items at a major discount retailer. When an item goes on clearance, the store takes certain % markdowns each week. Some less ethical people will take items that just went on clearance, hide them somewhere in the stores, and wait long enough for them to go to 75% or 90% off.
While good for the hider, this is obviously bad for the store (which misses the chance to sell the item for 25% off instead of 75% off) as well as the customer who is willing to buy the item at 25% off. With these tags, the store can track down hidden (or accidently misshelved) items and restore them to their proper place
I have blog like everyone else
These tags don't work off of an internal power supply. Instead they work off of an external power supply. When they are hit by the appropriate frequency broadcast, they use the energy they absorbed to re-transmit their tags, which are then picked up by the scanning device (which is emmitting the power-supply-signal).
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
What if Wal Mart HAD invented the Thing Longer?
This guy is way out there
Now we'll have all those RFID kiddies pointing their RFID scanners at us and giving us another dose of microwaves we don't need. Can anybody say "Beam me the RFID out of here" Maybe it's time I brought my old aluminum suit out of the closet!
But what happens to privacy when everything you buy can be tracked from store floor to door?
You start bringing a magnet and destroy the really small circuitry which is transmitting your location.
"There is also the problem of privacy motivated shoplifting, which is the reason why preparation H is the most shoplifted piece of merchandise in the country."
Well. Next to cigarettes, it's the most needed item in prisons.
Given that, what would it take to mask RFID tags?
Since the frequency of the "standard" is already known, could one create a true transmitter that would overload (and possibly burn out) the tranceiver unit?
Or, would it be possible to create a transmitter that would just transmit and mask all other signals given to it by true RFID tags?
Karma? Karma? I don't need no stinkin' karma.
naahh
some game company will invent a way to make it so that points are given for particular RFID values...
(like the device that uses bar codes to gat points for monsters)
--
Time is on my side
uh, then what about places like Goodwill, the Salvation Army thrift store, Value Village, etc? If these tags were really persistant, and I give my old jeans to the Union Gospel Mission to give to the homeless, and they rape and/or murder someone....?
-- R
Er ... since when does one expect privacy in a public place (such as a shop)?
This is of course what the Internet fridge requires, a way of tracking what is inside it, and maybe even what is inside the kitchen cupboards. And then add products that have fallen below desired stock levels to your next online grocery order, and maybe even order them.
...you get the idea.
And the tag should be encoded with expiry date of the product...
You assume incorrectly. They can be read over and over again, and if they are embedded in something stable like inside your tires, or inside the handle of the shaver, then it will basically never break, unless you manage to get some strong electrical current or RF to damage the electronics (household microwaves will). The article says something about putting the tags on the box, but some companies are already embedding them inside their products were you can't easily remove them (expensive sporting equipment for example). The issue then becomes that once they start tracking that data (and if you think about how corporations work.. they will) and connect it with your payment data and whatever else they can gather on you (like making you slide your id through a card reader to proove your age) and voila we live in a world where corporations know more about you then yourself. Marketing companies would love this. And a system like that is incredibly prone to abuse, especially without and real legislation for it. Your boss can install an RFID tag reader at the door and check if you wear the same underwear every day. Oh joy.
Reinard
It uses an external power source and reacts when hit by a detection frequency.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=RFID
Consider, Many stores seek to prevent other stores from learning about sales activity.
Many other stores employ people to go into other stores to research prices and sales activity.
Now a competitive store can setup a monitor station outside the store and monitor activity remotely.
Wanna monitor shipping activity or factory production?
(Anyone remember Miniscribe shipping bricks instead of hard drives?)
No more lies about inventory levels. Do you have inventory tax in your area? Personal property taxes?
Thinking of investing in a company, this offers whole new chances for research.
Once stores realize this, I wonder what their feelings on this technology would be?
Tracking others is one thing, but what happens when the trackers start being tracked?
Don't just look at how you will be affected, help the stores realize the full ramification of the technology and how it will affect them.
it's called cash morons... and if you're worried about panties and your a guy... you have more problems than Wal-Mart... how about the FBI!
For privacy reasons, no. For counterfeiting reasons, yes. US money is one of the easiest to counterfeit, compared to other countries, even with the new changes.
Serial numbers have been used to track individuals. It's common enough that 'marked money' is one of those cliches of crime drama cinema and television.
Serial numbers on currency aren't that useful for anti-counterfeiting. Counterfeiters make their money by passing the bills to the kind of people who don't look at S/N's, not big banks that might notice 48 twenties came through recently with the same S/N.
All others pay cash...
Baseballbat, meet Hello Kitty. Hello Kitty, meet baseballbat.
Hello Kitty: Hi!
Baseballbat: *thwack*
Thanks to http://news.google.com/ here it is:
A Radio Chip in every consumer product
-- MicAttAck
Religon is an insult to human dignity.
Like in Vegas???
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
_begin Disclaimer_
I AM NOT A SUBSCRIBER OF ADULT-TOYS AND ADULT MERCHANDISE AND DISLIKE THEIR AUDIENCE AND SUBSCRIBERS.
_end Disclaimer_
Why?
This _is_ a serious question, by the way. Why should it bother you what this audience do in their spare time?
..just pay with cash - that way your purchases (tagged or not) can't be tied to you as a consumer via your credit/debit card.
It's not like the tags identify YOU. All they do is indicate when an item has been removed from inventory. I fail to see why this is a problem. If privacy is a concern then DON'T USE CREDIT CARDS. But inventory tags are perfectly fine.
~CGameProgrammer( );
What some people do not realize as well is that this technology will interfere with existing usage of the radio frequency spectrum. You will also be able to get set up devices that will read these RFID tags from a car, thus enabling anyone with enough know-how to know exactly what you have bought.
Ah...The United States of America, beautiful country, governement....iffy!
For as long as a war driven president reigns over the country, this type of thing will happen.
Right now, you can't stop RFID, because the governement is most likely already involved and pushing for this, as this is perfect for them.
Basically what I am saying, the terrorists are winning the war against them. They have managed to put so much fear into the country, that the governement is taking action against its own citizens. Everyone seems to be too blind to see it, but it's been going to shit even before sept 11th, I will point the Kevin Mitnick issue that they thought was a terrorist (locked up, throw away the key)...now with the president having the right to declare anyone an enemy combatant? Even US citizens? And now, RFID tags so people can monitor everything you buy and what you do with it. The war is fought against americans instead of terrorists....maybe due the fact that the terrorists cannot be found, who knows...
Posting useless rant since 2003.
People can also tell that you haven't changed your underwear for a few days...
People, don't be so stupid.
"We don't have any rights now so there is no reason to fight for them?"
How pathetic! What a poor excuse for an american.
YES, the RFID tags stay on the item you purchased. That is BAD News!
Join CASPIAN! It is FREE! Learn about this!
http://www.NoCards.org/
See for yourself
I used to be somebody... until I gave the account away...
You're walking around the mall. Each time you enter and exit a store that sells the same item you've already bought you get charged again? Maybe one retailler was just incompetent and didn't deactivate the tag.
In order to fix this problem so that we don't have to pay for things more than once, I propose that we establish a centralized database that keeps track of everything you have ever purchased so that you never have to pay for it again.
Of course, paying for it twice would be a boon to the economy. Anything that is good for corporations is automatically good for the economy, right?
Those who would give up liberty in exchange for security and DRM should switch to Microsoft Palladium!
Read between the lines, dude.
"I AM NOT A SUBSCRIBER OF ADULT-TOYS AND ADULT MERCHANDISE AND DISLIKE THEIR AUDIENCE AND SUBSCRIBERS."
Obviosly he knows someone that does that "subscribes" to that shit and it had affected him some way. PS: If second-hand smoke makes some people angry, obviously second-hand adult-...I'm not going there.
With the addition of some software i am sure someone can/will write, I will be able to drive buy a store and see if they have what I want and i will not have to waste time running up and down the aisles. cool...
TIME is the Aether...
You can strip the guts out of an old microwave oven and use it as a WEAPON against this crap.
Try talking on a 2.4ghz cordless phone or using a Rat Shack 2.4ghz TV repeater, or any other 2.4ghz device and run your microwave oven.. The ovens are SUPPOSED to be shielded to protect you from the HARMFUL RADIATION but it would seem that they don't do that too well eh??
Mount the microwave transmitter in a pipe with the back end sealed so that you can direct the radiation in the direction you want and AWAY from you! Don't point it at people close range, you can cook them!
Over 30 feet away should be safe range. But, you could do this from a van parked next to a store, it will go through the walls and cook the RFID tags and render them useless.
There must be other ways too, let's hear it, we have to fight this!!
The most effective has probably been Linux/8086 - that was a joke
that got out of hand. So far out of hand in fact its almost approaching
usability because other folks thought it worth doing - Alistair Riddoch
especially.
-- Alan Cox
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