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Ten Best, Worst, and Craziest Uses of RFID
An anonymous reader writes "This top 10 rounds up what it calls 'the best, worst and craziest' uses of RFID out there — including chipped kids at Legoland, smart pub tables that let you order drinks, smartcards for sports fans, and chipped airline passengers. The craziest use of the tech surely has to be RFID chips for Marks & Spencer suits — you couldn't pay most people to wear one of them."
I get the first tag on this article, but what's "beta" got to do with RFID?
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?
I used to be a bartender, and one of the best things about the job is that the customers have to do the legwork. A bar where you can order while staying at your seat is a...um...restaurant? Table-service bar? This neat use of RFID is a lot like the bells Larry David insisted on in his restaurant in Curb Your Enthusiasm. What an amazing future we live in.
Using RFID to track where things are. Those folks are CRAZY! CRAZY I tell you...
As a parent I have to say that having my child chipped at an amusement park is just fine.
I get scared every time I take my child to a fair or any other public gathering. I constantly watch him to ensure he's no more then ten feet away from me. I know that there are people who prowl such places on the lookout for unnattended children. paranoid? Perhaps, but I'd far rather be paranoid then the father of a dead child. No amount of paranoia is too much in such situations, so far as I'm concerned.
If a chip meant his location could be tracked constantly I'd feel a lot happier. It's not likely that I'd lose sight of him, but I can say with absolute certainty that if I did *any* means of locating him would be acceptable.
oh who are you little one? lets see...(reads the rfid reader) oh you are my ex girl friends 2nd child? ha h how..!!
The use of RFID that I worry about most are the chips that the government installs on us that we don't know about. These days they have been using air-guns to shoot them at unsuspecting citizens. All you hear is a slight buzzing and feel what feels and looks like a mosquito bite, and BAM! -- you're being tracked. I think this practice is just plain wrong and should be stopped. In the meantime, stay away from wooded or swampy areas because for some reason this is where these agents tend to hang out.
There's often a confusion between passive and active tags, which have different types of uses and different capabilities, read about it on wikipedia. Additionally, Slashgeo (yup, plug) has a section on RFID tags.
... let's not forget the actual range limitation of most RFID tags.
From TA: "RFID has also made an appearance in the army to try and reduce casualties from 'friendly fire' incidents."
Yes, RFID is one of the geospatial technology which will have a significant impact on our lives. The "100% organic matter RFID chip developed in Korea, costing only 0.5 cents" kind of headlines will only be seen more often in the near future.
Animoog.org
Steve B. of Redmond, WA, roundly condemned the inclusion of accelerometer-enabled RFID tags in chairs.
"I mean", he reported, "they're meant to stop abuse on the furniture, but they can be used to track the whereabouts of individuals who set them suddenly into motion. I don't know who is responsible for this initiative, but if I knew, I'd fucking kill them".
"The craziest use of the tech surely has to be RFID chips for Marks & Spencer suits -- you couldn't pay most people to wear one of them"
/.
This is just wrong, all they are doing is tracking things which they own in exactly the same way people currently do, you know those big-ass white things which are on your clothes and leave a hole in everything - it's essentially the same thing. It is just more efficient. No one would ever wear a suit with these in, and their article even accepts in when they state (the one they linked to from the article...) "[tags] are contained within throwaway paper labels called Intelligent Labels attached to, but not embedded in, a selection of men's suits". This sort of thing makes people who don't like the technology because it can track you look like tools who over-react. Don't keep doing this
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
What about chipping sex offenders so that schools and playgrounds can have detection equipment? It would also prevent sex offenders from getting jobs as bloody teachers. Most sex offenders commit the crime again. If they are on the street they should have limited rights and being chipped as a condition of release is very reasonable.
At a University Medical Center in the Southern United States...Cardiology Clinic patients wear clip on chips to track their progress through the clinic (check in, lab work, waiting areas, etc) so that the bureaucrats can blame the doctors for the longest wait.
The craziest use of the tech surely has to be RFID chips for Marks & Spencer suits you couldn't pay most people to wear one of them."
From another article linked from the main article...
The RFID tags are contained in throwaway paper labels attached to, but not embedded in, a variety of men's and women's clothing items in stores. M&S uses mobile scanners to scan garment tags on the shop floor, and portals at distribution centres and the loading bays of stores allow rails of hanging garments to be pushed through and read at speed. and The retailer is aiming to use RFID tags to help achieve its goal of 100 per cent stock accuracy by ensuring the right goods and sizes are in the right stores to meet demand.
It sure would be nice of submitters did a little bit of basic research about their comic headline statements before publishing them. It's quite obvious that M&S aren't aiming to get people to wear the tags. They're using them to improve their stock accuracy, and have provided a simple and easy way to get rid of the tag if you don't want it.
The craziest use of the tech surely has to be RFID chips for Marks & Spencer suits -- you couldn't pay most people to wear one of them.
Did the submitter bother finishing the paragraph about Marks & Spencer suits?
It makes clear that "The retailer has avoided questions of privacy protection by attaching the tag to a label on the suit that can be cut off."
As in, I'm pretty sure they're not using RFID tags to allow evil cigar-smoking executive types to track how many cases of M&S brand vodka or frozen samosas I happen to buy the next time I wear one of their suits through an M&S grocery checkout line.
And personally, I'd be happy to get paid to wear one. Not only are they very well-made and well-designed suits compared to the typical Made in Korea store-brand stuff we get here in the US, but the eeevil RFID tag can be snipped off as soon as I'm out the door. That's much preferred to the sewn-in (into the seams) magnetic security sensor tags I've seen on some clothes in the past few years.
3000+ comments meta-modded. 0 mod points awarded.
Lesson for other meta-suckers: Don't believe the hype!
If you enter a footrace you'll get a passive RFID tag to tangle in your shoelaces. This thing lets the race judging system give you a time. After you finish the race you throw the RFID tag in a bucket, and they reuse it on the next race. A great use of technology! Nice writeup here.
c eTimingWithChip.cfm
http://www.marathonguide.com/features/Articles/Ra
Toll transponders are another very convenient use of technology. Sure, there are some privacy issues, but they're convenient.
Children:
Japanese authorities decided to start chipping schoolchildren in one primary school in Osaka a couple of years ago. The kids' clothes and bags were fitted with RFID tags with readers installed in school gates and other key locations to track the minors' movements.
Legoland also introduced a similar scheme to stop children going astray by issuing RFID bracelets for the tots.
Pub tables:
Thirsty students can escape the busy bar and still get a pint thanks to RFID tables that deliver orders remotely.
The high-tech bar is fitted with touchscreens so students can get a round in, order a taxi or even chat-up someone at the next table.
Fulham Football Club:
Fulham FC has started issuing RFID-enabled smartcards to fans to cut queues at the turnstiles and increase safety around the stadium.
Around 20,000 of the smartcards have been issued to mainly season ticket holders and club members and contain data on matches each cardholder has paid for.
Air passengers:
It was also suggested by boffins at University College London that air passengers should be RFID-tagged as they mingle in the departure lounge to improve airport security.
silicon.com's audience called the idea, amongst other things, Orwellian, intrusive and detrimental to airport security.
Tanks:
RFID has also made an appearance in the army to try and reduce casualties from 'friendly fire' incidents.
Last year Nato's Operation Urgent Quest exercise tested the potential of a number of combat identity systems under battlefield conditions.
Hospital in-patients:
In an effort to trim clinical errors, hospitals in New York and Germany have been tagging their patients. Visitors to the hospitals are given RFID-chipped wristbands to wear which are scanned by medical personnel to bring up their records and make sure the patients are given the correct dosages of drugs.
Blood:
The same clinic which tags its patients is also tagging blood. No vampire-pleasing effort this, rather the Klinikum Saarbruecken is using the tags to make sure the right blood reaches the right patient. Nurses will be able to scan the tags using reader-equipped PDAs or tablet PCs and check that the blood data matches the information held on an RFID-tagged bracelet worn by the patient.
The National Patient Safety Agency in the UK is also considering a similar move.
Suits:
Marks and Spencer has long been associated with being at the forefront of flogging ladies' undies. It's also now at the forefront of item-level tagging, having chipped some of its men's clothes. The retailer has avoided questions of privacy protection by attaching the tag to a label on the suit that can be cut off.
M&S has now extended the trials nationwide.
Passports:
One of the more controversial applications is soon-to-be mandatory use of RFID in passports. The US is leading the way in deployments and the UK isn't far behind.
As well as the obvious privacy fears that surround such rollouts, experts have questioned how secure the passports are with some claiming to have cracked and cloned them already.
Books:
The first item-level rollout in Europe has already taken place in Dutch book store BGN. Each of the books in BGN's Almere store is chipped and a second store, in Maastricht, will soon go the same way, allowing the retailer to track each book from its central warehouse to the shop floor.
I have bad karma. What do I care what you think?
As long as he does't have a chip on him you watch him irl when at LEGO-land. But now that he has the chip you can safely go to the parent longe and watch where he is on the KidLocator(tm) - and there he is, safely in plain site of everyone, where noone can hurt him, perhaps standing in line for a ride. You feel absolutely safe! Then 30min later you start to wonder why he is still in line, he should be on the ride by now. So you start to get a little worried, soon you decide to go check on him. So you go to the line and look for him, but all you find is his rfid-bracelet behind the trashcan...
FRA: STFU GTFO
There's been great controversy in libraries about the privacy implications of tagging books. The San Francisco Public Library board nixed the library's idea to switch from barcodes to RFID, even though the latter makes library circulation more accurate. Berkeley essentially fired its library director for implementing RFID tagging of books. Studies show that there are potential threats to privacy either by setting up a scanner outside of the library to see what people are taking out, or by targeting certain "hot button" titles and scanning to see who exits the library with them. These threats seem to be pretty outlandish to me since there are generally easier ways to monitor people's reading, like just following them around the library to see what book they take off the shelf. But some people are very worked up about this. Yet the library use of RFID is much less likely to result in a loss of privacy because the RFID tag will contain only an accession code, not the title of the book nor the ISBN. This is because libraries use a true item-level number for circulation, since they can have more than one copy of the same book. One would have to access the staff module of the library system to make the connection between the code and the book. With bookstore tagging of items, my guess is that at least part of the code on the tag will be the ISBN, which reveals the book title. It will be interesting to see if the same people get worked up about the bookstore's use of RFID if it ever hits the US. Right now, it's still considered too expensive to tag individual books.
I just read
This is old news. Rangers FC were the first team in the world to use such technology and we have been using it since 2000/2001. It's excellent - I never have to deal with paper tickets except at away games. Simply order the tickets online whenever I want and turn up at the ground and have my card scanned for entry
I'm sorry. you can't return this. It's been in the bathroom...
Privacy issues aside, I think the OysterCard system in London is great.
There is a plan and I don't know if it has been implemented as of yet, to put RFID tags into every new American passport issued. Supposedly for 'security' etc...
This is truly stupid and dangerous because the people out there who believe that they were put on this planet by some god for the sole purpose of killing Americans (and there are a lot of people out there like that) can set up a small RFID detector in a public place and know exactly who is and who isn't an American as people move through the place. It doesn't matter that the data from the RFID can't be interpreted; all they need to know is whether someone causes the machine to trigger.
Of course the RFID detector could be responding to a tag that is not on a passport. But there will be a time between the wide implementation of RFID tags in American passports only and their widespread use for other things. During this time, the criminals may simply decide to kidnap and murder anyone who triggers their RFID machine and then let their benvolent and merciful god decide whether the random murdered stranger was an American infidel or a blessed martyr.
Now smart people (that's you Slashdaughters) will keep their new passports in lead-shielded passport folders in order to prevent random RFID targeting in foreign countries. But how many people are going to know about this? The first time any American gets criminalized as a result of a passport RFID ID then the people in US government who are responsible for this insane idea should be fired.
http://www.bmezine.com/news/presenttense/20050330. html
There are before and after pictures as well as a video of the procedure.
the writer of tfa does not really identify which they think are the best, worst or craziest... is it too much to ask that the substance of tfa actually elaborate on the headline?
sum.zero
Wondering what good RFID was for transmitting orders to the bar, I decided to break with tradition and read TFA. And lo and behold "Orders are transmitted to the bar using ethernet over powerline". The only use of RFID is on some payment cards.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
From last week's L&O:SUV --
Upon learning that a suspect had injected a cheatin' wife with an RFID chip, Det. Stabler quips,
"The guy just invented the Hojack."
nuf said.
Rad-hard tags will help make international shipping safer.
When the shipping container is filled, it is sealed with a rad-hard tamper-proof RFID global shipping tag seal. It is physically impossible to open the door without breaking the seal and the RFID tag inside.
Shipping container gets to destination port. If the GST doesn't respond or gives the wrong number, that's evidence of tampering and the container gets the thorough go-over.
The unopened container can be gamma-scanned, x-rayed, and dowsed for evil. If it passes, it goes on the truck or train to its unpacking destination.
So now you know that something is actually being done about port security.
(I'm sure that every Slashdot member can and will pick holes in this scheme, but I don't know the whole story so y'all smartasses need to do research before thinking you're smarter than the dudes working on it. Yes, tags can be copied. You'd need a wafer fab to do it, and a manufacturing facility to copy the mechanical aspects of the seal-tag, and there are much easier ways of smuggling Bad Stuff into a country, so it will very much help make ports safer.)
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/ 23/0111213
Combining RFID, SIDs, and Ruby..
"Dividuum...has built a very cool RFID application. He stores SID-files (SID is the music format for the C64) on RFID tags. When you put such a tag near to the reader, the music is played on the stereo."
Badass.
I think this rfid implant so customers can pay the disco in Barcelona is plain crazy stuff.
That said one of the things I want to ask a plastic surgeon is to make some kind of kangaroo pouch with my belly skin so i can carry my car keys and wallet in nudist beachs.
That this story got posted immediately after the Mafia story where an anonymous guy spills the beans on a secret RFID tire tracking project. This story is an important reminder that RFID devices are fun and safe for the whole family. Don't be paranoid now people.
For our undergrad senior design project, we build one of these guys.
;).
It uses an RFID card to store personal musical preferences, and then as you "buzz in" (walk by the reader), it averages your tastes with the others in the area and picks appropriate music from an on-board Flash device to play. The goal is to match the music playing to the general tastes of a crowd.
Here's the project. And thanks for the ad spot, Slashdot
In a good percentage of cases, the submitter of the article hasn't even bothered to read TFA.
This is truly stupid and dangerous because the people out there who believe that they were put on this planet by some god for the sole purpose of killing Americans (and there are a lot of people out there like that) can set up a small RFID detector in a public place and know exactly who is and who isn't an American as people move through the place
Which country is this? Maybe America should just invade them & spread democracy so that
such stuff won't happen there anymore.
You write as if the US is the only country implementing this system. It is not, as the ICAO is the entity responsible for defining the standards so their will be global interoperability. At some point, you will not be allowed into the US w/o a chip in your passport, but that will not be for about 10 years.
Oh, btw, my friend was just issued one and the cover also acts like a Faraday cage, so it has to be opened physically for the transponder to receive the signal.
The RFID chips are in the drinks. As you leave, they scan your belly so they know how much your tab was.
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
Fired? No.
They should have one of those tags shoved so far up thier wazoo that it's never going to come out then dropped into the same location.
-On the internet, no one cares if you're a dog.-
The Mass. active RFID toll-transponder system (which has the foolishly confusing brand-name "Fast Lane") misreads a lot. They really do have to use the license plate photos to get it right. I moved a transponder to another car once. They give you one grace ticket, then they start charging you $50 tickets. When the grace ticket came (after my FIRST day in the different car) I called them and added its license plate number, so they restored my grace ticket.
I'd worry about privacy on license plate photos, except that OCR automation on those things hasn't got a prayer of working accurately enough to write tickets unless they are illuminated by very good structured lighting and taken from slow-moving cars.
I bought one for a wedding that I couldn't avoid. Looks better than my +5 year old Hugo Boss suits, and it probably won't go shiny as quickly. I'll never buy a designer suit again. Next time I need a decent suit, for £600 quid, I'll go to tailor and get exactly what I want, made from a fabric which will wear well.
Or maybe a plain black £100 M&S suit will do again.
Canada's Cattle Identification System. We are able to trace a cow back to the yard it was born at... very cool to find diseased cows.
"Free software" is a matter of liberty, not price.
California law (Penal code 261.5(a) through (c)) specifically exempts sex with minors from the definition of statutory rape when the difference in age between the two parties is three years or less.
Dog is my co-pilot.
The RFID passport is a classic case of choosing the wrong technology just because it's the new whizbang thing. The last thing you want to do with personal security information is broadcast it. A smartcard or datastrip that has to be physically swiped or inserted into a reader may take an extra five seconds to process, but that gives the security clerk time to glance at the person's face, which is not a bad idea when they're passing through a checkpoint, and then you have a secure device that can hold just as much identifying data, but can't be read by some guy just standing next to a person.
Just some comments on RFID technology. I am trying to be sarcastic and funny but not sure if it will come across. Mostly this is a commentary on how many entities want to RFID the general populace.
Well I did not see a mention to the chipping of 007 in the latest Bond movie...
Not sure if that was a good or bad thing to suggest.
Now it had me thinking. Why not chip all elected officials? Would make it nice to see what they are doing...
Go to a web site, see your elected official is currently in the Bahamas on a "political retreat". See their credit report, see their history with the law, and etc.
Next to do is the CEO and other executive staff. As a stock holder, it should be known if they are working for the company. Just for fun example. A CEO makes 2 million a year (okay small to several of these companies). That amounts to 976.56 an hour (assuming a 40 hour week, roughly 2048 hours). So a restroom break of fifteen minutes amounts to $244 for it. Consider a small fart of say 2 seconds is now worth 32 dollars.
Why RFID your workers making $8 dollars an hour when an executive management person is more important to the company for making its success according to current theory? A stockholder (or board member) wants to make sure his/her "prime" investment in the executive management is doing its job with managing the company, dealing with issues and not spending to much time on rest room breaks...
Yes just a general commentary. I know the subject is on good, bad and crazy RFID tech but this is for general thought.
All spelling mistakes are my own.
Thanks
Every technology has a "pit of dispair" when the euphoria of a period when it has been hyped wears off. This article is very symptomatic of that. Look at the crazy uses ... RFID has been used in planes since WWII in the form of transponders. In fact this was it's first use. It works very well. There are many other great uses of it.
Just because Walmart hyped it up in the US doesn't mean it's dead elsewhere.
Here is something you should know: no, there are not a lot of people like that. There are extremely few people like that. Such people are fantastically uncommon.
$META_SIG_JOKE
The kid could have been somewhere else when the bracelet was removed from him, the bracelet could then have been carried to a place where it could fool the parent that the kid was safe and delay any action of said parent.
But why the kid had disappered is actually beside de point. The point was that the parent now felt safe enough to leave the kid alone somwhere when he othervise whouldn't.
FRA: STFU GTFO
I'm not really entertained by the idea of having my every step traced, although I haven't done anything wrong. So I bought the card in a shop, and I've filled it up with cash payments. The only problem is that there is still an association made between the card ID and your face by the station cameras.
...
Paper tickets are much more fun, I have managed repeatedly to cross the system without it ever going near a reader. All you need is luggage
I don't know if it qualifies as worst, but Porto Portugal's Andante RFID rail pass system is an example of a theoretically good system with poor implementation. I'd much rather go to the trouble of pulling a card from my wallet and having the system stamp (a paper trail) a validation so that I am not automatically assumed to be a criminal if (WHEN!) the system failed. When the system started, it was reported that 3% of passengers were incurring fines of 50 Euro or moree. Portugal's rail police and rail administrator seem to believe that that many people are trying to scam the system. The day after I had to choose between paying the Porto fine to avoid jail for me, my wife and my 3 year old daughter, the RFID for my workplace also failed. RFID is cool, but most implementations are nowhere near 6-sigma quality. Those who promote this technology should consider the possibility of a backlash when people see how failure prone such systems are and hear that it is going to be used for everything from inventory control to border control to medical tagging. Let's hope Portugal doesn't experiment with RFID voting
Anyone determined enough to plan and execute that sort of stunt comes under the heading of newsworth psyco and or estranged parent. the only defence is to lock ones child in a prison cell which by coincidence is what the psyco will probably do.
The word "them" is fatally ambiguous here.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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