Innovative Uses of RFID Tags

Roland Piquepaille writes "When your newspapers write something about RFID tags, it's almost always about Wal-Mart or how these tags are threatening our privacy. But they often miss the important innovations brought by this technology. For example, in Florida, RFID drives highway traffic reports on more than 200 miles of toll roads. Or take DHL, which is tracking fashion with RFID tags on more than 70 million garments in its French distribution center. Elsewhere, in Texas, 28,000 students test an e-tagging system which promises better security for them. And what about RFID tags which could prevent surgical errors and have just been approved in the U.S last week? So, what do you think? Are these innovations promising a better future for us or not? For your convenience, this overview contains the essential details from the different articles mentioned above."

Comments

Good thing

[CyberThalamus]

I don't understand how pro-future and pro-technology people can have this knee-jerk reaction to RFID. Another example is the Intel processor serial number circa Pentium III. This could have been a really useful tool, but it was sunk by "privacy" types.

Re:Good thing

[Anonymous Coward]

This could have been a really useful tool, but it was sunk by "privacy" types.

I think a large proportion of the privacy types are just people who like to think that their lives are interesting or important enough to make it worth protecting. The reality is that most people's lives are so far under anyones radar that no one cares.

Re:Good thing

[Anonymous Coward]

The P-III tag was sunk for good reason. THERE ARE NO LAWS PROTECTING THE PRIVACY OF YOUR CORRELATED NETWORK TRAFFIC .
Of course, by "no laws", I don't mean the usual blend of common law and a few odd state laws that protect everything from letters to phone calls to internet, etc. What I mean is that the only "privacy protection" you now have on the internet is that there is no feasible way to track each packet from users of interest. In other words, you have some privacy because your traffic gets lost in a sea of user traffic, and there's no easy way to fish out just yours across sessions.

If P-III ID tags were enabled, the enormous processing power and computational state it would otherwise would require to track individuals would be eliminated. Transactions would be tracked across sessions. Now, that's a key term: "across sessions". Just what do I mean by it? And why is that so important?

Consider, for example, that the police can observe your car on the street, and by consulting a computer, the cop will know it's your car, where you live, etc. But there's no way for the police to also know that 2 weeks ago, you were at the same intersection making a left. And that 34% of the time, you instead make a right. And that you usually blow through the light at 30MPH, even if it's raining. Your driving sessions are not tracked and correlated across sessions. The cop can see you just this instance, but we don't expect that we live in an old East German state where every little action gets recorded and reported to some authority.

Similarly, on the internet you can visit a web page and (if you remember to flush your cookies and use DHCP), there's no easy way for the site to tell that it's you again.

The key idea is that in accumulation small pieces of information add up, and infringe on a piece of liberty that we all hold dear: privacy. We reasonably expect that our actions, although observed and perhaps inspected in a given instance, are not tracked and correlated with all our previous actions.

So, while you think the P-III unique ID was a cool technical idea, it in fact was:

1. Trivially spoofed and evaded by some simple assembly, letting me implicate my neighbor with my traffic to, say, a pr0n site.
2. For the unsuspecting, a tremendous leak of information. Remember, we naturally expect that although a given action is inspected/observed by others, and perhaps the state, we do not expect all our actions to be recorded.
3. A one-sided deal, since online merchants gained more customer data, and in exchange for the loss of privacy, the customer gains nothing. (And no, I will not accept "better service" as a fair benefit in exchange--that's just advertisting talk!)

Consider that if a corporation tracks every piece of individual information you "leak" throughout the day, it's called market research. But if an individual did this to another individual, it's called stalking .

So, be thankful for us "privacy types". We and others see these social problems not as black and white, and perhaps a little grey, but as the complex hues they really are.

* * * If you or other readers appreciated my explanation, I'd be happy to write more, and submit a short piece for consideration by the editors (such as they are) of Slashdot.

I can be known by this key fingerprint: 2D57 1CCA 24C8 9AFE E35D F3B1 3665 B3F3 0E35 F221

On/off switch...

[pdboddy]

RFID tags *could* promise a better future. But, like anything that provides potentially personal information to anyone with the right scanning device, RFID tags could be abused on a scale never seen before.

Have you seen anywhere at all that mentions anything about the ability to turn *off* an RFID switch?

Not to mention the possible side effects of having a radio transmitting from inside a human body for long periods of time.

Abuse by car insurance companies able to read your car's performance?

The chance of abuse is too great...

Re:On/off switch...

[Compholio]

Not to mention the possible side effects of having a radio transmitting from inside a human body for long periods of time.

RFID chips don't use wavelengths capable of causing damage (radio waves don't have enough energy to punch pieces of your DNA out). Your privacy concerns are probably valid but from a health standpoint you have more to worry about the radiation from sleeping with your SO then you do from radio waves.

Re:On/off switch...

[pdboddy]

Yes, most RFID tags are passive. But how long before they install RFID readers everywhere? And the passive ones are worse than the active ones, since they have a "virtually unlimited lifespan".

Re:On/off switch...

[Aeiri]

If that happens, we might have to teach our grandkids what it means to "lose" an object, and they'll just stare at us like we are crazy.

Re:On/off switch...

[macrom]

I don't think it was RFID (this is almost 3 years ago), but when my daughter was born, the umbilical cord clamp was actually a device much like what department stores use on clothing items. At the exits to the maternity ward were sensors that would trigger an alarm if you took your baby past the checkpoint. They warned people over and over that taking your child out to see everyone in the waiting room would cause chaos -- the doors to the floor would be automatically locked, the elevators disabled, etc. Something like this is a great use of medical industry RFID.

Re:On/off switch...

[Planesdragon]

In your headlong rush to be clever you failed to notice, or deliberately avoided noticing, that bar codes cannot be read without being on the outside of something

RFID tags can be read by a bunch of folks for a bunch of reasons, but the "why" is relatively low. Wal-Mart could track your time in their store via the RFID tag in the shirt you bought there, but that'd only affect the portion of their customer base that buys shirts at Wal-Mart. They could do the exact same thing with random surveys and in-store video tracking, with the added benefit that no one gets wonkey.

The federal government could require RFID tags on all state IDs and data-mine the habits of every single citizen. But if they wanted to do that, they could do it via non-RFID identification cards too.

RFID isn't a boogyman. It's not a horrid violation of privacy. It's a less obtrusive bar-code whose worse abuses will be quickly checked by a cottage industry of chip-detectors and scanproof wallets.

All I will say is....

[Richard_at_work]

this is what the standard slashdot rhetoric is:

• P2P - ooh it has legitimate uses (tho you have to look hard to find them in actual usage), you cant ban it
• RFID - ooh it can be used for bad things (but hasnt yet), ban it

I welcome this article, as it points out the many positive uses of RFID technology, so heres hoping it might change some slashdotters minds. Personally, I see RFID as a hugely positive thing, with a great potential in front of it (for good or bad, but thats the same for P2P).

Re:All I will say is....

[Laurence Wood]

I think the key is who is doing the bad things.
With P2P its the people theoretically hurting artists and record labels. Record labels certainly aren't considered worth helping and artists are generally felt to live a good life. Whether this is true or not I don't want to get into.
If RFID is abused as in the slashdot paranoia, it means a clamp-down on the freedom and privacy of the masses. I consider this a far worse fate than some obscenely rich people not getting much richer and artists having to perform live to make a living.

Re:All I will say is....

[A beautiful mind]

Okay, lets be frank. To avoid legal problems we need to find a "legitimate" excuse for P2P programs to be able to exist. It is because sharing files shouldn't be considered a crime, though it is. I agree, its an excuse, but its with reason. With RFID, the exact opposite happens: something invading privacy, which is a real concern is not banned or at least sancioned (to use with care). I would freak out at the idea if i were one of the Texas students tracked by RFID.

Did you know?

[Capt'n Hector]

Did you know that you can use nuclear bombs to terraform mars? Or use snake venom to make antidote? Or use P2P networks for legit purposes? Everything has good uses and bad, it's just that the bad far outweigh the good for RFIDs. Or rather, they're so powerful that people WILL abuse them. Just like nuclear bombs, P2P networks and, err, snake venom.

Religion versus technology

[totallygeek]

I just cannot stand people like this that fear RFID is a step toward "the mark of the beast". First, religious groups said that Social Security numbers were evil, and now it is RFID targetted.

Can anyone point to technology that religion embraced in its infancy? I really would be interested.

Are you a good graphics designer?

Re:Religion versus technology

[lxw56]

If I remember right, they were afraid that the printing press would disseminate crap (they were right) and corrupt peoples' minds.

Don't assume that all religous people are of this opinion toward science/technology, though. I'm a fairly fundamentalist Christian and cautiously pro-technology. I hold to Neil Postman's philosophy on technology: it's all in how you use it; it changes peoples' lives for good and ill, so neither fear nor hate it.

Religious technophobia is a shame; I don't really understand it. In spite of its prevalence, I can't find it in the Bible. The principle of man's inherent wickedness is probably a factor, but people will be wicked with or without technology.

Roland Piquepaille

[TrumpetPower!]

So...how much d'ya figure he paid for this one?

Cheers,

b&

Re:Roland Piquepaille

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone else think this guy is just a pen name for our old friend Jon Katz? Both gave us endless amounts of stupid, technology-boosting stories that never should have been posted.

Dunno

[hackstraw]

When your newspapers write something about RFID tags, it's almost always about Wal-Mart or how these tags are threatening our privacy.

I don't know if newspapers signficantly differ from online news, but the Wal-Mart and privacy issues seem to be more of a /. thing.

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=rfid&bt nG=Search+News

Like Any Other Device

[cdcarter]

RFID has it's pro's and con's. It is great for doing shipping, I did a big report on it's uses for tracking products and controling distrubtion. IT could also be used for tracking people, which is bad. Everything in the history of this universe has both a good and bad side. If you can, please name just one thing that is only good or only bad. But for now, I say that when correctly implemented, RFID will be a great thing.

Real-life abuse - a possibility

[Lifewish]

It's quite hard usually to judge the dangers, in a "stalkerey fun" sense, of new technology. The stalkers aren't particularly interested in being interviewed and no-one else is willing to run the experiment to find out.

I'm in a university society called the Assassins' Guild, which is a cross between roleplay and live-action Quake Deathmatch. The game we play involves hunting down other people playing the same game until only one is standing, and is cooler than it sounds (hey, we have girls playing!). The thing that's interesting with respect to this discussion is the excellent testing ground this gives for new technologies vis-a-vis the tracking of indivisuals.

Number one on the list is, surprisingly, static IP addresses on home-user machines. If you know your target's IP address, it is trivial in many cases to check whether he/she is in his/her room, and secondary information like lecture times (and hence the target's course) can be inferred.

On a more sophisticated level, it is possible to examine the movement patterns of a target by the public workstations he/she uses (they have to be regulars on the #assassins IRC channel for this to apply), although this is more easily maskable using screen/irssi off a unix server. The holy grail would be to scan the mobile phone command frequency band - one would only need to know one's target's phone number to triangulate his/her position. I don't know of anyone who's done this, but I'll be attempting it myself over the holidays.

RFID tags present an issue at a similar level, albeit with far greater possibilities for abuse due to their small size. If I were to have access to a reader (of the sort that, if this technology were to become widespread, would be available with no hardware hackery required), I would wait til the target were dumb enough to leave something outside his/her door and drop a suitably crafted tag in it. This would enable me to trail and ambush the target fairly easily when they didn't have any means of defense to hand.

This would be a slightly overworked solution for the purposes of the guild (albeit an excellent way of dealing with one of the more skilled assassins) but would come into its own in the hands of an actual stalker. Imagine someone you can't flee, can't hide from. Imagine what could happen if this technology were abused.

Imagine tags in designer clothes. An excellent way for criminals to know that yes, that coat is genuinely worth a hell of a lot. Imagine tags in young children. Do you really want paedophiles to know exactly when kids have run away from mummy's care? Imagine tags in students. Your grades are fine but you skipped too many lectures - you're out. Imagine tags in employees. Now your fundamentalist boss knows about your trip to the sex toys shop a block over from the office.

Imagine tags in you. Imagine anyone who wanted to being able to track your motions. How secure does that make you feel?

Re:RFID is cool!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that sounds a lot more practical than a stupid paper catalog you can take home and read on the bus. Much better to come up with some sort of technical solution that requires extra hardware.

Re:RFID unnecessary for these purposes

[pdboddy]

Heh, in addition to the use of barcoding surgical instruments, what they leave out is, the original article assumes that the RFID in the instrument has been scanned into the database to begin with. I mean, surgical instruments being left inside people wouldn't happen if someone just counted the damn things beforehand, and then counted again afterwards to make sure they're all there. No scanning necessary.

wrong debate.

[Anne Honime]

My belief is that whatever we feel about it, RFID is such a major improvement over paper tags that it WILL be used. So it's not a debate between ow, wonderful, look at ALL those neat uses and but that MIGHT be used wrongfully .

The debate is how the consummers will organise to set limits on the use of it ; for instance refuse the rfid to be made PART of the good (molded in the plastic of a handle for instance), and force the producer to leave the possibility to rip it after purchase.

Where not possible (for rfid embeded into a ID card), the citizens should have a LAW passed to clearly limit the scope of use, with regards to WHO may know, and WHAT should be known. And make abuses criminal under the law.

Just my 2 .

Nice strawman

[ElMiguel]

Nobody is proposing to ban RFID, people here just don't want RFID forced on them. But hey, that wouldn't fit your argument so nicely, so I guess you can just ignore it.

Re:RFID unnecessary for these purposes

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually... I have a friend who's an OR nurse, and this is exactly what they do now (count before + after). Usual problem is that at the end of a procedure, they're short a needle or two, so it's someone's job to hunt around on the floor until they find the one the surgeon dropped. If they can't find it, they have to file an incident report (which is a pretty good incentive to spend lots of time searching the floor).

Of course not sure how you attach RFIDs to all your needles and sponges.

Re:Use in schools is particularly worrisome

[abulafia]

A telling bit from one of the articles (emphasis mine):

Hoping to prevent the loss of a child through kidnapping or more innocent circumstances, a few schools have begun monitoring student arrivals and departures using technology similar to that used to track livestock and pallets of retail shipments.

Re:RFID unnecessary for these purposes

[rusty0101]

This still does not eliminate the obvious falicy of the argument to begin with.

The use of RFID in any capacity for surgury is a cruch that is not necessary.

ID the paitent? How about doing a hand geometry check to see if the paitent on the table is the right one for the charts that have been brought up?

Tools count? (I.E. don't leave surgical tools in the paitent you did surgury on) As the grandparent of this missive points out, it might be a good idea to take a count of how many tools have been brought to the paitent, and make sure that many tools left the paitent (except for those elements that are expected to be installed, such as replacement hips.)

For that matter pretty much every situation where you can envision using RFID tags, there exists alternatives.

The one thing that I can think of that an RFID tag may provide fundamentally better result than the existing alternatives is in counter-shoplifting. As it is, not a day goes by when people walk past the panels at the door of their store, and some tag that didn't get erased at the checkout counter doesn't trip the system. Likewise I have personally purchased products at one store, successfully passed their system, only to walk into the store next door, tripping theirs.

A system that asks for all the rfid numbers, and checks to see if they are in the sold catagory would tend to reduce the number of false hits. Likewise if it isn't in the inventory to begin with, you wouldn't trip an alarm either.

While that does give a positive use of the technology to the very same retailers who are doing their best to take advantage of it, I am not sure that it passes the cost/savings benifit for just that, and I know it sets up a prime example of the very same arguments that people specifically hate aboute retailers using this technology, in that Every time you walk in or out of the doors of that retailer, the possibility exists for them to track you, track your interests, and collect marketable information tied directly to you that may be sold or even used internally in ways you don't want it to be used (Bill always selects Lavoris over Scope, He's walking down the mouthwash line, send a signal to the Lavoris display to bump the price up 5 cents.) and in other ways that neither you, nor I can predict today.

Granted that's my opinion, and I accept that I can be wrong.

-Rusty

an example....

[ecalkin]

I used to believe the PIII serial number was a good idea. It would have made network management a lot easier as tracking by computer name or ip address is not real reliable on some networks.

That was then...

I spend about half my time cleaning up spyware off of peoples computers. The people that write this crud would have looooved to get serial numbers. And they would have. Even with the systems that required a reboot to 'activate' the serial number. Most people don't even think twice about a random crash. Make the config change (bios or os), make it look like something bad happened and reboot (or just be patient and wait for it). Presto, on your way to a hugely correlated database. Yuck!

I have the same problem with rfid. It's wonderful technology and if the rfid tags get burned out when you're done, great. But the *same* problem exits:

People with a clue will Own the People without a clue.

I keep on seeing all this neat stuff and then i ask the question: how can this be mis-used?

Here is a wonderful example: There is a goal of putting rfids on bulk bottles of medicine (in the caps? which could end up on the wrong bottle? did it matter which cap went before?). ok, I see the advantage for inventory and quality control, as you really do want people the get the proper medicine. What about the dark side? If I'm am understanding this correctly, you can use sensitive scanners that allow for greater distances. Does your pharmicist want anyone to know when the next 1000ct bottle of Oxycontin gets there? (any maybe where in the store to look for it?) Does this mean rf shielded storage?

If the problem people have with being phished is any indicator, RFID is just going to be a disaster.

eric

Re:Roland

[Anonymous Coward]

yet another indication of the decline of Slashdot

Re:/Real/-life abuse - a fantasy

[Anonymous Coward]

This is pathetic. Here's how the Walmart example works:

The RFID tags are read from inside the store -- most likely from a reader that is only a couple feet away. The reader then sends that information to a computer in the store. The computer in the store sends the information to the researchers 750 miles away using a normal internet connection.

You cannot track somenoe with RFID tags. To do so you would need to be several feet away from them, and if you are that close, you don't need any externel help tracking someone.

Passive RFID in bullets?

[melios]

If an RFID tag was developed that could be embedded in a bullet and withstand the force of impact it could make solving some crimes involving handguns easier. Have every bullet in a box of ammo tied to the UPC and require identification for purchase. Then when John Doe is found dead with one of your bullets in his head the cops know who to look for.