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RFID Coming 'Whether You Like It Or Not'
VTBassMatt writes "According to an interview with Scott McGregor of Philips Semiconductor in BusinessWeek, RFID tags are coming whether we like it or not but of course won't affect our privacy. Choice quotes from the article include such gems as, '[P]rivacy concerns around RFID tags are a little like concerns about supermarket scanners years ago. When the laser scanners were coming out, everybody was saying, retailers are going to collect information about what you buy. And none of that happened.' Is that why I have two loyalty cards on my keyring and three more in my wallet?"
At most Kroger stores, you can hit the top center grey button on the CC input box. The screen will show a K+ on the display. Type in the phone number associated with your Kroger Plus card, and it will process the discounts.
Just an FYI.
----- LoboSoft specializes in Digital Language Lab
Here's one solution.
You probably shouldn't click this.
Fortunately, Trader Joe's has no card requirements, and Sprout's has better produce- and better prices. The coming of the card to Albertson's has really opened my eyes to other options in the neighborhood. Now we're eating better and it's costing us less.
surely you know, your name is encoded on that little magnetic strip?
with your real name- they can find your snail mail address-- truly..
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Hello!?! This is the horse. I'm dead, so you can stop hitting me.
Accept it now and save yourself years of worry and frustration. Privacy is nothing more than a nostalgic memory.
If you want privacy, dig a hole, climb in it, and pull the dirt over yourself.
Here is a culture jamming prank that has been going on in Sacramento for some time:
h opper.html
http://www.cockeyed.com/pranks/safeway/ultimate_s
Basically, it gives instructions for how to create a Safeway barcode. Hundreds of people use this same number when shopping, getting all the discounts, but completely obscuring their own tracks.
Please join!
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
At first glance I don't really care, either, I mean what do I care that they know how much beer I drink and how many steaks I am scarfing down?
The issue, in the USA at least, is that they might share this information with other people: I do care if my health insurance company knows how many bottles of wine I drink per week, or that I might be buying more fatty foods than are healthy. It's not just paranoia - There are already cases of people having their personal information used against them. In that case, the info was ostensibly being collected for another purpose. Just like the grocery store loyalty cards.
And I love the name loyalty card. When the Albertsons I frequented in Rapid City, South Dakota introduced them, I thought, "What sap is going to fall for that gimmick?" And then I walked around the store and realized that if I didn't want to have to suck up a 15% increase in my grocery bill, I was going to be one of those saps. Since I had shopped prior to the loyalty card introduction and immediately afterwards, I could see where the price increases were.
Anyway, my impression is that most European countries have laws protecting people from dissemination of their personal info.
Oyster (and Navigo in France) does not use RFID proper. They use RFID-style technology (i.e. electromagnetic signals ). :( (not that I like RFID)
There is certainly people who will build custom solution based on RF tech everywhere provided you pay the price. But it seems harder to find RFID standards based providers
When the laser scanners were coming out, everybody was saying, retailers are going to collect information about what you buy. And none of that happened.' Is that why I have two loyalty cards on my keyring and three more in my wallet?"
My friend was the project manager on the project that brought the loyalty cards to Giant Foods (big in the Mid-Atlantic region of the US, not sure about elsewhere) and he told me this is _exactly_ what they do. They track all your purchases and which sale items you buy, etc. Heck, the management there was giving him crap about not shopping at their stores because they were looking up his records at work!!
We are being tracked... more and more and with greater efficency every day. Personally, it scares the crap out of me.
---- It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. It does this whenever it's told.
Yup, 10% of all retail good sold in stores are sold through WalMart. 10%. That's huge. They can make you (as a supplier), but then they'll probably break you later on.
And coupons for things that they want you to start buying. Do you really think they're doing you a favour? There's no way they are making a loss on "sale" prices, so the more generous-looking the offer, the more they're screwing you by default.
A good site for this stuff.
- I didn't have to give out my name or address to get the card, so it's anonymous data
- The data from my purchases helps them run their store better, so everyone's happy
Well, no. The data from your purchases helps them ditch "unprofitable" customers, so they ain't happy.
Around 1999, the supermarket industry got wise that the larger part of their profit was being made from a small minority of customers, ones that buy high profit items (like premium ice-cream). The card data lets them profile what the "profitable" shopper buys, and they send coupons and stock the shelves to please them. In the mean time, they try and discourage "unprofitable" customer by shrinking shelfspace for the lines that they buy, and the "profit" guys don't. Because of this, they don't really care what your name is (like they ever did as long as they got your money). They just want to know your profile and work out whether they still want you as a customer.
It doesn't take an Einstein to work out that the end result is to phase out the cheap, low margin, staples that the lower income bracket depend on in favour of Haagen-Daaz and Organic Cider. So after stamping out the local Ma and Pa stores with agressive pricing of these basic goods, they want to be absolved of the responsibility of providing them because they have a low margin.
In the UK, this is fairly mild at present. You get a percentage discount (as redeemable coupons) and the odd (targetted) product coupon. Some lines have extra "points" on them but the price stays the same whether you have a card or not. I hear in the US some stores pretty much enforce the uptake of these cards by using punitive prices on some basic goods - like offering the "sale price" pretty much where it was before but raising the no-card price to a silly level. Although the UK market does have a number of synergistic loyalty cards that cover several outlets (e.g. Shopping + Fuel + Electric + Others).
Curiously, the Wal-Mart (Asda) stores in the UK are one of the few that don't have profiling cards. But I wouldn't be surprised if they were tying shopping records to one-way hashes of payment card info (or if anyone else was).
In the meantime, can you imagine the opportunities afforded by RFID? No more do they have to offer the semblance of "loyalty" to get their profile data - they can just tie the purchase logs to the RFID in your shoes. Chains that collaborate can start tying clothes preferences to food preferences to any other preference, tracking your movement through stores (no purchase required!), hell, even noting how long you pause in front of the rack of iPods, with sub-floor RFID pickups. (<Marketroid>"He stopped and drooled for 10 minutes today, send him another brochure!")
Even if their records show that you bought that item recently, how can the computer tell whether it's the one you bought or a new one? They're not going to have a unique id for every sock ever sold.
Actually, they are going to have unique numbers. So they will know if your girlfriend buys your boxer shorts.
They aren't doing this with UPC codes, because it would take too much space. But with RFID, it is nearly as easy to store 256 bits as it is 20.
Safeway definitely keeps track of everything you buy. I remember when I lived in CA, I would use safeway home delivery. I remember the first time that I logged into safeway.com, it had EVERYTHING I had bought using my safeway card listed there. Everything. So apparently they have a huge database of all of this stuff. Personally, I don't really care. But it definitely does happen. What was kind of nice about it was that I could just choose my last shopping trip and have them deliver exactly what I had gotten the last time (or use it as a template).
Regards,
-JD-
My memory isn't what it was! I remmber the time when I invaded Canada all by myself ...
Q: A lot of people worry that RFID will infringe on their privacy. Is that a valid concern?
...except when the RFID tag isn't on the tag, or there is more than one RFID tag.
...At the low end, the primary differentiator is price. At the high end, it's more about features, such as security, encryption, protection from evildoers.
...except the evildoers the system trusts, who can use RFID for their activities.
A: There's a theoretical risk. But we have safeguards, and more are coming. Our tags have a kill function that will destroy the tag in case of tampering.
Destruction in case of tampering is to protect the retailer, not the customer.
There are ways to simply erase the information on the tag. There are also less high-tech ways to deal with this: When I buy a garment, one of the first things I do when I get it home is cut off the tags. You can cut off RFID tags the same way.
Also, privacy concerns around RFID tags are a little like concerns about supermarket scanners years ago. When the laser scanners were coming out, everybody was saying, retailers are going to collect information about what you buy. And none of that happened. I think the situation with RFID is similar.
Exactly that happened: retailers gather data on customers, made possible by barcodes. RFID is like a barcode which can be scanned as you walk past the scanner, even if it's in a pocket or inside the sole of a shoe:
And for a lot of makers of sports shoes, RFID provides added benefit to customers. The average life of a sports-shoe model is about three months. Say that when your shoes wear out, you want a similar pair. It's incredibly difficult today for the retailer to tell a customer which new model corresponds to the old one. But we could fix that with RFID. That's a great sales tool.
As if current shoes couldn't have their model number printed on the inside. And what was that above about removing the RFID tag? How do you do that when it's embedded in the shoe? What better place to put a unique serial number than in a person's shoes, to be read by floor-based scanners under doorways.
I frequently use my debit card to get cash out without purchasing anything. For some reason the system magically knows that I purchase baby diapers and formula without me actually buying anything on my current order and prints me out coupons for diapers and formula. I don't have a club card either.
Long before the law, they'll just stop telling you about the tags. In fact, they'll probably stop telling you before they introduce them. Playing "find the tag" will be an interesting game.
And it's a game the consumer can't win, because the chain will have paid for the tag by what it saved in the warehouse. Anything it gets on the store floor or at the register will be gravy. But they'll still suck for all the gravy they can get.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
well.
Wal-mart forces a monopoly in small towns.
Where I am currently sitting, the town is population 18,000; pre-wally world, the town had 4 grocery stores, 2 department stores.
since Supper Wally came in, we have 2 grocery stores (and 1 of those will be closing within the year) and 0 department stores.
I've seen them go into a town of 8000 and cause everything but the walmart go out of business.
So, unless you live in a fairly urbanized area, walmart does it's best to become your ONLY choice.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
They're not out to spy on you
The point of loyalty cards is not to allow a secret cabal of abstemious zealots to monitor whether you buy yellow mustard or brown. The point is to be able to identify frequent shoppers, and their buying preferences, and thus tailor the inventory of the store (and its "specials") to those frequent customers. Key point: they're identifying a class of people, not keeping track of you.
Here's how it works
Let's pretend that you and I are the management team at a local supermarket. The seafood manager says that we've sold every ounce of salmon in the store today--and we sold out yesterday, too. He wants to expand the space in the display case for salmon. In the old days you and I would look at one another, shrug, and say, "go ahead, Gene, sounds like a plan." Today we'd look to see whether the salmon was purchased by our core customers or not.
The point of a loyalty card plan is to identify customers who shop in our store every week. The industry has a pretty good picture of retail shopping patterns: they know that people spend roughly $30-40 per week (per person) on groceries. If they identify someone who is spending over a hundred dollars per week in a store, they can confidently identify that person as a "core shopper." Those core shoppers constitute the vast bulk of that store's business: it will pay the grocery chain big time to tailor that store's inventory and pricing to the tastes and preferences of those core shoppers.
Think back to our conversation with Gene, the seafood manager. He's selling salmon like, well, hotcakes--and now we've identified that practically all of that salmon is being bought by core shoppers. We notice that lots of other seafood is being bought by core shoppers. And, we notice, deli sales are more or less flat. Perhaps we can increase revenue by giving a bit more case space to the seafood counter, and take a little space from the deli (pretend they're adjacent).
Once upon a time grocery stores used to "floorplan" every store to a similar pattern. And for some categories (laundry soap) they will continue to plan each store similarly. But for lots of categories store inventories within a chain will vary widely--because your local store has a customer base that buys lots of salmon, or lots of kosher food, or lots of home baking products.
This concept of tailoring inventory to match customer demand is crucial to the grocery store chain--because the margins in groceries are so small. The essence of the grocery store business (at least financially) is inventory management: and the essence of inventory management is to turn your inventory as many times per year as you can. Inventory turn is a simple calculation: sales divided by inventory. If you have $5 million in sales, and you have $800,000 in inventory, your inventory turn is a respectable 6.25. If you have a 2% profit margin on sales, you're earning $100,000 in profit on those sales, which amounts to a 12.5% return on your investment in inventory. (This is a crude example [e.g. it doesn't include capital expenses] but you get the general idea.) A 12.5% return on investment (ROI) is terrific these days--but using those loyalty cards you can break down your sales figures by department, and determine your ROI, literally, aisle by aisle through your store. And you can determine how much of your sales are to core customers, aisle by aisle through your store. And thus you can tailor your inventory--dropping slow movers, expanding shelf space for hot products, and using your knowledge to better guess what new products to shelve.
In short, improving profitability by focusing on your core customers and serving them better is a pretty cool use of technology.
So what's the end result?
You shop at a grocery store that has more of what you want, and less of what you don't. Yes--the truly paranoid are correct in saying that the grocery store company could deduce a lot about you by examining what you buy (lots
I think, though, that they are a little unnerved by the fact that all these great, objective, scientific minds arrived at the conclusion that a god exists. This either means they have to wonder what these "great minds" were smoking or what they themselves are smoking to not see it.
.sig as somewhat of a logical fallacy, namely the appeal to authority. Some "great minds" weren't theistic.
I think it means neither.
My opinion, FWIW: I think people see the poster's
And actually I think the military might be a prime driver of wide scale adoption. Government Computer News has an article in today's edition about this very thing. The story can be found here: http://www.gcn.com/vol1_no1/daily-updates/25389-1. html
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/77/walmart.htm l
RSA developed an RFID Blocker Tag which annoys RFID readers by responding grumpily to all RFID read requests. It's a passive device like RFIDs, and doesn't burn out anything, just blocks requests.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks