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Benetton Clothing to Carry RFID Tags
An anonymous reader writes "Clothing manufacturer Benetton has announced that they will begin embedding RFID tags in clothing for inventory control purposes. You can
read more about this at SF Gate." morcheeba adds more information: "EETimes is reporting that Benetton will be embedding a Philips RFID chip into the label of every new garment bearing the name of Benetton's core clothing brand, Sisley. The 15 million chips expected sold in 2003 will allow monitoring of garments from production to shipping, shelves and dressing rooms. The I.CODE chip (tech info) used in Benetton's labels will include 1,024 bits of EEPROM and operate at a distance of up to 1.5 meters. RFIDs look like they would be extremely uncomfortable in some Sisley clothes."
If they want to monitor the garment in their shipping system and store that's fine, but I hope they remove the tag after purchase...otherwise they're sitting there with someone's credit card number and some sort of tracking device and that means all of a sudden someone's trip through the mall is like an episode of the Crocodile Hunter where they track the habits of some migratory animal. I'm not quite sure I trust them to not abuse this technology.
"Where quality is like a dead stinking rat - you just can't miss it."
Now's your chance to make money. Make a handheld, heck, set up a kiosk in the mall.
Or perhaps the manufacturers will decide to do this at the checkout counter.
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
oh please. I doubt Benetton is going to be expecting these rfid tags to still work after people buy their clothing. Stuff like static electricity in hot dryers and just general wear and tear is going to wear them out. And when all else fails, there is the microwave oven.
I'm betting they are going to destroy the tag the minute you checkout so it won't beep when you walk out the store. They'll probably use the rfid tags as a new way to put security tags on the clothing instead of those heavy dongles you see sometimes on expensive clothing.
When the whole processor id thing was introduced way back when, people threw a big fit about it. Now what average Joe these days even know about it? Believe me, if big brother wants to track you down, they're gonna track you down and it won't be using unreliable stuff like rfid tags.
So we boycott the company just because they're using some new technology that everyone is afraid of. Early adopters often get the flak from public, but once everyone starts doing it, nobody cares!
They've invented a way to purify sewage water into drinkable water more pure than the water that normally comes out of the tap, but nobody is buying into it simply because they know where it came from. But in a few decades when it's too expensive to acquire fresh water for the increasingly high population, they are going to have to use alternatives like purifying sewage. By that time, everyone is going to be drinking purified sewage, yet nobody is going to even give it a second thought.
How much longer before they start introducing niggling little irritations if you buy with cash, and/or larger incentives if you buy with a credit card?
When credit card companies stop charging merchants for credit card transactions.
evil adrian
::sigh:: this really isn't a privacy issue...no matter how fun it is to make it into one.
you ever worked retail? you evern have to do inventory yourself, instead of having the luxury of a contractor doing it for you? it kinda sucks. becing able to query a transmitter for physical inventory counts is a lot cooler that couting everything by hand/scanner. Since these tags can't be read more than 15 feet or so away, and can be fried by exposure to your microwave oven, i'd say just don't sweat it
this is just a corp. cost saving tool, to decrease overhead and save the time and money of drudge-like inventory procedures..
i'm the biggest conspiracy freak when it comes to orwellian surveillance schemes, but this technology just isn't headed in that direction.
there are much bigger fish for us to fry, if you look around and take notice of them.
Me neither. What I'm afraid of is having to find a microwave that can hold car tires.
I wonder if I can use my oven?
I'm going to start walking around with a big hand full of these in my pocket.
Someone hates these cans.
There seems to be an awful lot of paranoia about this, and related, things. Sure, it is a potential surveillance and record keeping device. So are pen and paper and traditional, century old, photography. Just because Benetton/the CIA/the Mafia might possibly use them for surveillance, it doesn't mean that they will.
Remeber that the successfule police states - Tsarist Russia, Iron Curtain Eastern Europe, Iraq, N Korea and Comminist China today - have not depended on technology. They have depended upon having spies in every block, a complete and interlocking network of informers and informers on informers.
On of the criticisms of Western, and particularly US, unpreparedness for 9/11 was that it depended too much on technology. Intelligence agencies assumed that photo-reconnaisance, filtering emails, monitoring radio etc. would tell them everything. In fact, plots are hadtched by people talking to people, and "humint" has been unjustly neglected. This scare is the flip side of the same thing. Don't waste your time woprrying about what technology might possibly do. Worry about the political institutions might do with intelligence from whatever source. The new Department of Homeland Security is being given a lot of power. Well, OK, maybe the situation demands it. But is it getting the level of political oversight that it needs? Are the the checks and balances that were carefullly, expensively and IMO correctly (but I am a froeigner, so I don't count) built in to the Constitution being applied to this new department? From what I hear, recent anti-terrorist laws give the Executive an unprecedenteld level of power uncontrolled by the Legislature.
Don't get diverted by irrelevancies sucha s this RFID thing. It is a detail: if the Big Picture is right, any abuse of RFID will get stomped on quicly. If the Big Picture is wrong, RFID is only one of a thousand potential tools of oppression.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
From the article. .
The I.CODE chip used in Benetton's labels includes 1,024 bits of EEPROM and operates at 13.56-MHz carrier frequency. It can be operated without line of sight up to 1.5 meters. The label requires no internal power supply. Its contactless interface generates power and the system clock via the resonant circuitry by inductive coupling to the reader.
Inductive simply means a magnetic field is generated by the reader, activating the curcit in the chip, much like high-security keyless entry systems work today.
I may be bad with names, but I'll never forget your IP address
There are several good arguments for leaving the tag on ***for a limited period of time***.
(1) The tag could contain receipt information. How many times have you tried to return an item and lost the receipt?
(2) This could be used as a "gift receipt". Someone you give the clothing to could return it within a specified perioed without any paper receipt.
(3) For some product types, it could be used to store warrenty/service/product information. Imagine tagged prescription drug cases, combined with a home reader that can read out prescription details to a disabled owner.
(4) They can be used in toys. A stuffed animal with an integrated reader could detect and identify his "friends".
And many other uses.
These tags can provide signifigant savigs up to and just after the sale of products. On that alone they are justified (in a business sence) even if customers remove the tags at the time of purchase. But, they can also provide a platform for added services.
Just like you don't have to keep a paper receipt, why assume you have to keep the tag? Also, just like a paper receipt, if you loose it (or remove it) you may loose certain benefits (return/warrenty).
The tags are NEVER disabled EVER, merely noted in the data base as "not in stock" to ignore setting off theft alarms.
henceforth the us gov can track you just as they track car tire RFIDs already at canadian customs checkpoints and on Interstate I-75 in ohio in the remote stretches. In that case it is to locate previously-known cars to track.
All us cars must have rfids by 2004 by AIAG mandate. I mentioned this a year ago and no one believed me that car tire RFIDs were real. Everyone here is clueless it seams or a fed.
For those who read the post, Benetton is putting the RFID tags in the ordinary tags of the clothing. Remove the label from the garment, and no worries.
~Idarubicin