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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."
Assuming that you cannot locate the chip, any info on how to 'burn it out'?
IMHO, their ability to track their clothing stops when I pay money and take ownership of it.
I doubt they'll remove all the tags. I doubt consumers will know to.
I already found a sweater of my girlfriend's with one. She had asked me to snip off a scratchy tag and lo and behold, sewn inside the tag was an RFID tag. (Ann Taylor sweater? Not sure, so I won't say for sure.) Either way, if she wore it back to the store, would she show up as a repeat customer and be treated differently?
I just don't trust these things, even though I know they are pretty benign, so don't try to convince me otherwise.
Cheers,
Jim, the stubborn Luddite
-- My Weblog.
Ottenberg said such tags could be used for "customer loyalty" rewards that could earn consumers such benefits as frequent flyer miles, free music downloads or discount coupons.
Why, while I read this, did the phrase "bread and circuses, bread and circuses..." keep on looping through my brain?
Ah well, I suppose a majority of people will be quite happy to give away their right to privacy in return for some extra frequent-flyer miles, dragging the rest of us along by default.
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?
What happens to an RFID tag if you put it in a microwave on high power for 30 seconds? Should we make it a regular practice to nuke any new piece of clothing we buy nowadays? Just watch out for zippers...
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Those who would sacrifice essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. These tags have the potential to invade privacy. Big brother can more easily track what you buy, and will force stores to start using these to keep track of such things. If you buy certain things, they might enter you in a database of potential terrorists and get you on some FBI watch list. These RFID tags just have too much potential to invade privacy. I certainly won't be purchasing anything with RFID tags anytime soon.
-- Phil Coleman, Board Member, American Institute for Freedom and Privacy
They should remove it for the same reason they remove those big bulky things that set off the alarms--they're selling you the _CLOTHING_, not the stuff they stick on it for their own benefit. I'd like to see what would happen if you went into a store an purchased a piece of clothing and demanded they give you that thing because it was _YOUR_ property because _YOU_ paid for it.
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.
If the tags have memory, wouldn't it be possible to have a bought-bit? By setting that you won't beep and they can still track you.
If you ask me it should be mandatory to remove the tags upon purchasing the product. The abuse risk is just too great.
Just my two cents anyway.
.: Max Romantschuk
Do you really think boycotting Benetton will even cause them to give in a 15 minute thought? Benetton markets to non-geeks who have money to throw around. Most of these people don't know what rfid is and probably won't care if they also stuck a bluetooth device in every underwear. There are better solutions than a boycott coming from the slashdot crowd. A bunch of slashdot geeks boycotting Benetton is like a bunch of football players boycotting Transmeta.
Eh. I just hope that the video stores around here catch on with this RFID tagging... Have you ever phoned to reserve a movie, been told it's there, and spent an hour trying to locate the damned thing in a store with 10 thousand movies?
I see this as a major convenience.
You think its a pretty damn hot photo? Check this one out. Same site, maybe same chick. More than hot!
a ^= b; b ^= a; a ^= b;
It may be intended for just inventory purposes - but unless the rfid tags are disabled or removed on sale, it IS possible to abuse the benign benefit of inventory control to track a person's movement in close quarters (say... embed sensors in the floor of an airport).
By the way, since rfids respond to a frequency range, is there such a thing as an rfid scanner available that will just try out the entire spectrum and look for hits? (kind of like a port scanner I figure).
The whole reason they're doing this is to track the clothes through their inventory system. However, they'll probably want to be able to identify refunds too: if it's simple for them to track which batches of clothes have a higher return rate (due to defects), then it'll help their quality control.
:)
The flip side of this is that it'll probably annoy the hell out of them when the clothes you're wearing while trying to buy a new item start registering at the checkout
They (passive RFID tags) derive their power from the RF scanner. The transmission pulse actually powers the tag (the wave induces a current in the receiving antenna). Really clever stuff.
The scanner supplies it in the form of microwave energy. The more primitive versions of this would rely on a coil, that recieved the microwave, turned it into just enough juice to power the transmitter and send data.
I think with this though, that they've managed to integrate it into a single piece of silicon though.
Ok, so are we gonna have a contest for the most fucked up thing to hack your clothes to scan as? Sextoys of one variety or another seem to obvious, though I bet you'd get the best faces when the security guard sees 27" Monster Double-headed Jackhammer Dildo pop up on the screen.
Imagine the day (which will come soon), when the propability of a randomly choosen person being tagged by an RFID in some of his clothes gets close to 100%. Then tracing visitors, customers, pupils, employees in malls, school, university, at work ... gets very easy and CHEAP. Just install at every narrow passageway (i mean doors) a RFID scanner. And if You can correlate at one point a name to an ID (at the entrace, near a cam with face-recognition, at the cashpoint if You use credit card, ...), that trace gets personalized. Over the time the observers could have a databases of IDs correlated to names (so that You have to buy a full set of new clothes if You want to get traced only anonymized).
If big brother now wants to find out, who's the owner of ID xyz (because that owner did something big brother doesn't like) there a lot of database to search for. Or he just calls benetton and asks "Did the buyer of RFID xyz pay with credit card? If so, gimme that number!")
It does not help, if some geeks disable them. They should be disabled as soon as I buy that shirt.
ps: i read here on slashdot about RFIDs that are so small that You can tag food with it. Eaten a salad for lunch at the snackbar? Tagged! Ok, You could open that microwave in front of You ...
I'm pretty sure that at least one of the RF ID articles has mentioned the possibility of including unique identification numbers on each chip. It's a useful feature from a non-privacy aspect in that it would allow for fine-tuned, automated inventory (as opposed to dealing with the problem of trying to figure out just how many chips are broadcasting that they are product #238).
Futhermore, the chips have 1024 bits (128 bytes) of storage. If you were to divide that up with a 32 bit company id, a 32 bit item id, and a 64 bit unique serial number, that would allow 4 billion companies to have 4 billion different products each with up to 18 quintillion different units. As long as your chip making machine is capable of automatically incrementing the serial number as it writes out each chip, there's no technical reason not to implement this system.
So I'd at least be a little vigilant. Privacy concerns may be the only thing that prevents us from being potentially trackable with this system. Fortunately, I suspect that retailers are much more interested in the benign uses (inventory tracking and such), so I have a feeling that a decent compromise will be reached (i.e. the deactivation of chips post-sale) as long as consumers stay vocal about wanting their privacy protected.
Benetton never has spokespersons. No one in Benetton's ads ever speak, or are ever attributed with speech. You just read "United Colors of Benetton".
Benetton has always been a socially conscious clothing company. The Benetton family are very active in social causes ranging from lobbying to stop war to AIDS research funding. There are a large group of people that believe murder is immoral period. Whether it is government sanctioned (such as the death penalty) or not. Benetton has also never featured its own clothing in any of its ads.
Sears was not their largest retailer. Outside of Sears Benetton has never sold their clothes anywhere other then Benetton boutiques and their catalog. The line of Benetton in Sears was a unique line (and subquality in many people's opinion) created specifically for Sears. Sears failed to market this well and therefore Benetton would not agree to making a second line.
Like most Americans you view the USA as the world. Benetton has always been wildly successful in Europe, after all, it is an Italian brand, just like Diesel. If everyone in America stopped buying Benetton it would make very little difference as this is one of their smallest audiences.
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.