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?"
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
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."
Link
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 ;-)?
I suspect "shoppers" specifically means people in the gap for the purpose of purchasing something. Walkthroughs and chain-gang shopping are probably not counted. It is meant, I suspect, to highlight the fact that they can FIND what you want. Even if your 36-34 pants are mixed into the womens jeans on the other side of the store, a single RFID query going "where the hell are you" would locate the one they _know_ they have in stock, but some jerk put on the wrong shelf.
Maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
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
Never having to worry about losing things like remote controls, car keys, and pets (wearing a collar with an RFID of course).
Yesterdays "tech of tomorrow" (I think) had an interesting segment on how they are using "smart chips" in horses these days. Specifically, thoroughbred racing horses that can be easily confused for one another at sales. (they had two who were sold under the wrong names, and then proceeded to run under crossed names for at least five races before anyone figured it out).
This is kind of a neat technology, because if it is applied here as it is being applied in the UK, it makes it DAMN hard to steal horses. As of now, you have to wave the "reader" right over the chip to get the unique identifier from the horse, but I could see where this could be amplified to find, say, stolen horses.
Maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
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.
Read the spec sheet from the company making them. 64-bit address space, factory or field programmable. Not only could they track individual items, but they could re-encode a portion of it when you purchase it.
Whether you care or not, it's always nice to know what capabilities are available..
A. Coward
I do have a right to privacy when patronizing their store. They can't strip search me, they can't search through my property, they can't search my bags from other stores even if they put up signs saying they can. Such signs are unenforceable and serve no purpose other than to dupe the ignorant into thinking the store has a right to treat them like cattle. Rights, you see, are largely things which someone in the past has had the backbone to stand up for and insist upon.
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.
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
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...