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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.
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.
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
"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.''
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.
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
Before we could implement a system like this, the laws would need to be revised. Right now, if an 18 year old has sex with his 17 year old girlfriend, and her parents don't approve, he goes to jail and has to be branded a sex offender for the rest of his life. If a guy pulls over on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere to use the bathroom in the woods because he can't make it to town and a cop sees, it's indecent exposure, and he's branded a sex offender for the rest of his life.
Granted, children need to be protected, but this country has gone WWWWWAAAAAYYYY overboard with paranoia. I'm not saying that these things don't happen, but when you talk about taking people's rights away and branding them with a moniker like 'Sex Offender', you'd better be DAMN sure.
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
http://www.bmezine.com/news/presenttense/20050330. html
There are before and after pictures as well as a video of the procedure.
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.
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.