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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."
big brother is watching you... *through* your underwear....!!!!
At least ill have an excuse to have big holes in my clothes now huh
Assuming that you cannot locate the chip, any info on how to 'burn it out'?
no sissy clothing... chip-containing or otherwise!
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.
Will this help me find matching socks?
Cool they're using an EEPROM, that presents some interesting possibilities, although lugging a laptop into a department store to give yourself a price markdown might be a little obvious.
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.
That's a beautiful top you got on. What are you clocking in at girl? ooOoOOo honey, i tell you.. with the heat you generating, you must be running at 10 TeraHertz, and ooh baby does it hurtz like hell."
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?
So now will we'll be able to tell if she's wearing the "I'm getting lucky tonight" panties or the "He's not worth more than dinner" panties. Might help us decide how much to spend on the date.
Who am I kidding, we'd just be happy to be on a date with.
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.
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.
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 can't wait till bikinis are just RFID tags!
Privacy? You pretty much give it up in more ways than one at that point!
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.
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?
That's because the stopped doing it. Motherboard manufacturers even started shipping boards where the default setting was to disable the # in case your chip did have it. Since it's stopped, it's not a very big issue anymore.
Life is too short to proofread.
I think this one is a better example of not wanting to wear clothes, honestly.
I'm a lawyer, but not yours. I wouldn't represent someone who thinks taking legal advice from Slashdot is a good idea.
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
How can i make my underwear scan like a can of ravioli?
Can I fool scanners into thinking I'm wearing original kilobuck designer duds, or that they scan as tools from the hardware store?
I can forsee the web sites popping up for scan code exchange, and I know there will be tons of creative hacks that I can't yet imagine.
::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.
Start paying a little closer attention. You don't need x-ray vision to be able to tell (unless she's wearing a T-back or G-string.) At first it might be hard to tell, but the more you practice you'll get better at it. It's kinda like the next level up from being able to tell if she's bra-less.
Damn, I probably just ruined my rep with all the hotties on Slashdot. Oh, wait...
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.
I see girls pracing around in lacy underwear...
They don't see each other...
They don't know they are in lacy underwear...
Hey... you are not a freak. Don't you believe anybody
that tells you that. It's bullshit and you don't have
to grow up believing that. You hear me?
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Because the tags are powerless, they have to be powered via the field induced by the reader. This drops off as the inverse square of the distance. The tag then has to transmit back to the reader - again power is the inverse square of the distance. Therefore, the range is related to the inverse fourth power of the power output of the reader. I.e. to ramp up the range to 15m you'd have to increase the power output by a factor of 10000! You might start melting things at that point.
The 1.5m range is already with big heavily optimised antennas (like the big theft detection antennas by shop entrances) which are operating at the maximum legal power output.
So in summary - you're going to have more luck taking a pair of binoculars and war-driving looking out for barcodes
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;
The easy way would be to simply physically remove the tag, then switch it with someone else. See how the store reacts to you wearing 5 pairs of socks, or other "unusual" combinations.
Oh and here is the close up shot...
http://www.benetton.com/press/sito/photo/product_a dver/sisley/2003_wet/sisley08.html
a ^= b; b ^= a; a ^= b;
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
I want to install this into my home, no more "This bag ? Oh that's just groceries honey" from my wife. Maybe I can keep inventory for her as well, so I can bring my PDA with her closet inventory with me when we go shopping: "See darling, you already have fourteen of those, now let's go buy some books"
beauty is only a light switch away
This company had an add campaign several years ago which featured death row murders as the spokesmen. This is brutally insensitive to the families of those they murdered. This was a shameless attempt to generate publicity. As a result of their campaign their largest retailer, Sears, dropped Benetton's products (which is commendable). We should all do the same.
She might look hot, but she appears to have a white cloud of some kind of noxious vapor escaping from her crotch area. Thanks, but no thanks.
For more information about radio-frequency identification tags, or RFIDs, you can check these two columns, "Bye-Bye Bar Codes?" and "The Eerie Possibilities of RFID Tags". The first one contains illustrations about how RFID tags are tested at McDonalds or Prada.
I'm going to start walking around with a big hand full of these in my pocket.
Someone hates these cans.
The next thing you know, they won't sell them to you, they will license you to wear it. You will find a huge piece of paper when you first try to put them on. It will say you did not in fact buy the shirt only licensed it and by weraing them you agree to the license. Of course, you are then not allowed to let anyone else use the shirt. IN fact, they may at any time actually enter your homw to check that you actually have license for ALL your clothes and they may even at any time modify their short (that you licensed) in any way they want, like puting in short sleeves instead of long and changing thr colour of it. Well, it is a 10 page thing, I won't go through it all here.
Oh well, on the other hand lets hope not...
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.
I'm bemused. This is slashdot talking about a new piece of technology - and yet I've not found a single post talking about installing Linux on it, seting up the first 'underwear web server', or connecting up a 120GB hard disk to it.
And of course, the very real possibility of having your own personal beowolf cluster of clothes...
If these chips contain EEPROM, they can be hacked right? You could:
1. Confuse the checkout by having a porsche 911 in your shopping trolley.
2. Make your pants look like a rocket launcher to freak out the secret police.
3. Remotely reprogram other people's pants to look like yours, hence stealing there frequent flyer/loyalty points.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
Why can't the chips be made microwave-resistant?
They can. McCain make microwave-proof chips.
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.
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.
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 ...
You just go into the dressing room with 3 things, cut the tag off with scissors, then walk out with 2 items, and leave the store unnoticed with the third.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
You mean low security. These systems use a static 32 bit code (16 bit site ID and 16 bit individual ID). The transmission is one-way, not encrypted, and a card's code can be read by anyone at any distance (equipment permitting). These things should not be used for anything important.
Background: Once upon a time there was a brand of clothes for kids called "Garanimal." There was nothing special about the clothes except that they had tags featuring different animals inside. The ideas was that if you matched a monkey-tagged-shirt with monkey-tagged pants, you'd know that they went together and you were fit to be seen in public.
Obviously, knowing what clothes go together is a useful skill, and the potential for a geekware line of clothes featuring O'Reilly animals would be cool (I'd feel right sexy in vi-guy underwear).
But why settle for an obvious (and potentially embarasing) visible tag when you can have a hidden, electronic tag that does the same thing and requires a (hackable) computing device?
The store security has to actually witness the theft. If the item in question is your Sisley panties, then I imagine a huge out of court settlement will curb future behaviour.