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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.
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.
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