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RFID Casino Chips
scubacuda writes "Could casinos be the next Gillette or Wal-Mart? New Scientist and others report that casinos could soon start using RFID tags to spot counterfeits and thefts, and also to monitor the behaviour of gamblers. Embedded RFID tags should make the chips much harder to counterfeit, and placing tag readers at staff exits could cut down on theft by employees.
(With companies like Infosys helping clients identify and plan pilot RFID projects, we'll no doubt be seeing more and more companies dabbling in this area. Those interested in reading objections to RFID use should check out the position paper issued by CASPIAN, EPIC, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, Junkbusters, ACLU, Meyda Online, EFF, and PrivacyActivism.)"
just outlaw tinfoil under the DMCA.. problem solved
This is a great use for RFID tags. Watch all the chips, watch where the move, and track which ones I have.
I love to go to the casino and play card games like Blackjack or more importantly Craps. Accurate tracking of chips tagged to me would mean two things: accurate comping and the ability to have a technical solution to ensuring payouts are correct.
Those of you who have played craps at a busy table will know what I mean -- the accuracy of your payouts when you win is always in the hands of the "dealer" working your half of the table. I've been payed wrong many times, sometimes in my favor, sometimes not. Sometimes money comes in from bets I forgot I had on the table, sometimes I wonder if I got missed on a payout.
If this means that questioning a missed payout can be more accurate or means at a minimum the casino can see in aggregate when they have someone working the table who consistently makes payout errors, more power to them.
This isn't a privacy issue. If you think you have one spec of anonymity or privacy in a casino, you're nuckin futs.
It's finally happened. The SlashThink phenomenon of "RFID is bad" has officially deteriorated into irrelevancy. This time, we're apparently supposed to think that RFID in casinos has something to do with our rights. It doesn't, and shouldn't. Nobody goes into a casino against their will, and nobody should be surprised that casinos exist for the sole purpose of tracking and taking money. For casinos to *not* use RFID to their advantage would be stupid and irresponsible.
I doubt they care too much if you take the chips out of the casino. After all, chips that go away don't have to be converted back into cash -- it's just that much extra profit.
What they don't want is for you to walk out the door with a stack of $1 chips and bring them back made to look like $100 chips. Presumably the RFID would also make it easier for them to detect fake chips that had never been in any casino before.
(Posting anonymously under fear of karma loss from that knee gently jerking back and forth in the Slashdot community. "Ahhhh! He's not agreeing with my anti-RFID stance! Heretic! Mod him down!")
How does this even remotely relate to "your rights"? Casino chips are the equivalent of "disney cash" in theme parks, IE under normal circumstances they are only used within the casino itself. Preventing loss would make the casino more money, and they might even use that to raise your pay tables when you're gaming.
The articles mention monitoring gamblers, but come on... you're in a casino! Your movements are tracked by a hundred cameras from the time you walk in to the time you walk out. Casino employees on the floor are designed to monitor your movement and habits and either 1) ask you to leave or 2) give you a free buffet coupon, depending on what you are doing. You have no privacy whatsoever and very little anonymosity in a casino. Sometimes that works out to your advantage.
Yes, there are bad uses for RFID. I don't see this as being one of them. Next thing you know people will be crying out because a warehouse wants to use RFID on crates for inventory control.
Oh, wait...
The article talks mainly about being able to identify the chips as being authentic. I think that installing the equipment at each betting spot on the table to read the different IDs, lookup the dollar value in a central database and do the math to figure out total bet would be a little much. It would take some serious hardware to do real-time tracking of every chip in play. Considering that dealers, pit-bosses and the eye in the sky already are fairly good at catching counters (who can't take the casino for too much if they don't want to get banned), I don't think the ROI would be there for such a massive system.
Having a few readers in the cage to verify authenticity before giving out cash in exchange, would be a much more efficient use of RFID.
At the casino I worked at, employees who have acess to the kitchen are not the same ones that have access to enough chips to make it worthwhile. There are cameras everywhere in a casino, out on the floor as well as behind the scenes.
I honestly can't think that employee theft of chips is really that huge of an issue since the ammount of money that each cashier has is counted at the end of shift and if you are off enough money to make stealing chips worth it, say $500+ then they will not let you work there long if you are off that much very often. They even went so far as to make us use clear cups with clear liquid in them in the cage so that we could drop things in them.
Dealers are under a lot more scrutiny from the cameras than cashiers. There are dedicated cameras looking at the chips on the table.
At the casino I worked at, chips in the chip bank, (in storage) are supposed to be counted and verified every shift so a theft there would be caught fairly easilly.
When I worked in the cashier cage and was the banker in charge of the cashiers in the cage, it wasn't uncommon to call down to the vault and have half a million dollars in cash delivered. So with that kind of money floating around, if I was going to steal, i wouldn't have been chips. If, as an employee, you are going to steal from the casino, you need to go big becasue if you do it multiple times, you will get caught.
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