May 30th, 2005
Wired News covers the RFID and privacy issues; some attention to Accenture’s activities in promoting “silent commerce:”
Accenture has dubbed its vision for RFID-enabled marketing “silent commerce.” The company’s Silent Commerce Center, which [Accenture Technology Labs associate partner Joseph] Tobolski heads, is one of several research groups worldwide developing kiosks, store shelves, medicine cabinets and even bedroom armoires that read the RFID tags on purchased goods and offer consumers new products to go along with them.
Keeping the RFID tags in working order is in the consumer’s best interest, said Tobolski and others who attended an RFID industry conference in Chicago last week. Furnishings and appliances throughout future “smart” homes and stores will read the RFID tags on purchased goods to ensure consumers never run out of milk or medicine, or even walk out the door wearing the wrong tie, the industry representatives said.
But clearly “silent commerce” facilitates “silent surveillance,” if we wander about festooned with tags.
Posted in Policy | Comments Off
May 28th, 2005
CNET covers a GAO report on RFID use by Federal agencies, which suggests that they may be inattentive to security issues:
In a report published Friday, the Government Accountability Office said that 13 of the largest federal agencies are already using RFID or plan to use it. But only one of 23 agencies polled by the GAO had identified any legal or privacy issues–even though three admitted RFID would let them track employee movements.
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May 27th, 2005
Using SITIS, I posted a query on the DOD SBIR solicitation on “tracking important assets” noted previously; given the interest in identifying/tracking both “friendlies” and “unfriendlies” (which should presumably be RFID-tag-free, if they know what’s good for them!) RFID seems to be ruled out. The solicitation does seem a bit tilted toward magical solutions, though…
The SITIS page for the solicitation is here.
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May 26th, 2005
Telecoms Korea reports that the South Korean government, through its Ministry of Information Communication, is working on guidelines for RFID privacy protection:
The guidelines ban storing personal information on RFID tag against related laws or without clear statement of consent from the person in question. Furthermore, RFID-tagged products should be indicated with proper mark accompanied by methods of removing the tag. To install a RFID reader, you have to inform shoppers or customers of the fact.
Implanting RFID tags in human body or attaching them to any goods without users’ notice is prohibited, unless otherwise stated by specific provisions of the law.
Such guidelines all but obviate the use of RFID as an anti-theft measure in consumer retail, one would think, but do address the primary consumer privacy concerns.
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May 25th, 2005
CIO Magazine describes plans to deploy RFID in Seattle, to allow visitors (and focusing initially on the blind, as requiring more navigational support) to be informed by local businesses:
Some cafes and retail stores in Seattle are about to start individually marketing products and services to bypassers in Seattle using RFID (radio frequency identification) technology. The first target group is visually and hearing-impaired individuals who can benefit from positioning and navigation applications added to the system.
Six wireless public areas, called activation fields, will go live next week throughout downtown Seattle and at the city’s ferry terminal. Over a few months 15 more city areas will be added. Users carrying an active tag and entering the activation field are recognized as the tag is read, and then are presented with announcements….
Similar to the idea of authenticating individuals for “extreme marketing” discussed previously, or previous research on geospatial awareness at places like Xerox PARC, where one could have the phone nearest you (using active RFID badges on individuals for awareness) deliver your calls, with a user-specific distinctive ring. (This before the ubiquity of cell phones, of course!)
Posted in Deployments | Comments Off
May 24th, 2005
Chief Executive magazine provides an interesting snapshot of RFID deployment in DOD, during the conflict in Iraq:
The lesson for CEOs: Don’t worry so much about where your shipments are, but take care where you place RFID interrogators. A more important lesson is to have the RFID system fully ramped up before you try to use it. Meanwhile, [Centcom logistics chief Maj. Gen. William] Mortensen says, don’t sweat the small stuff. Executives shouldn’t worry every minute while the shipment is in transit. “How many points along the continuum do I really need to know where it is?” he asks. There are exceptions, of course, notably with precision munitions, which are tracked constantly by satellite.
“[In general], I have to know what it is that I’m moving,” says Mortensen, “and I have to be able to ascribe in detail how much data I really need. In some cases, there’s more data out there than you may need. So the smaller amount of data in that environment, the less cost or the less effort you spend because you don’t have to filter out the nonrequired data”…
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May 23rd, 2005
Knowledge@Wharton describes research on shopper behavior, collected via RFID tags on shopping carts:
In a new paper called “An Exploratory Look at Supermarket Shopping Paths,” Fader, Wharton marketing professor Eric T. Bradlow and doctoral candidate Jeffrey S. Larson analyze this RFID-captured grocery store data, focusing exclusively on travel patterns without regard to purchase behavior or merchandising tactics. The results, they conclude, challenge many long-standing perceptions of shopper travel behavior within a supermarket, including ideas related to aisle traffic, special promotional displays, and perimeter shopping patterns.
Using a new “multivariate clustering algorithm,” the authors identified 14 distinct grocery store travel paths during short, medium and long shopping trips…
Later in the article, there’s an interesting allusion to more fine-grained surveillance:
Until researchers are able to obtain positioning data directly from the shoppers themselves, Fader argues that PathTracker offers the next best thing — using customers’ grocery carts as a proxy for their shopping path…
Not clear either from the article that a tagged shopper would add too much to what’s being collected from tagged carts; even knowing where an individual was standing would give little information, unless one could also tell which direction s/he was looking, and especially if an item was selected. I suppose it would be possible to couple cart ID with POS purchase data, to retroactively label all the points where an item would have been selected and placed in the cart.
What’s really needed is a means to identify who the shoppers are who get a couple of pounds of deli meat, and stash it on a shelf in the cereal aisle… what’s up with that?
This is a reasonably interesting application of RFID for collection of personal data in a reasonably nonthreatening way, though it’s also possible to do this sort of data collection via video (e.g., using in-store cameras, with the shoppers’ trajectories calculated through use of machine vision).
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May 19th, 2005
According to RFID Journal, California State Senator Simitian’s bill, banning the use of RFID in state, county or municipal identification cards, has been passed in the Senate, and awaits consideration in the Assembly.
If passed into law, the act would prohibit California state-, county- or municipality-issued ID cards from containing radio frequency identification (or any contactless integrated circuit). Tollway transponders would be exempt from the law, as would RFID devices used to track inmates and patients in mental institutions and children in hospitals operated by the state or by a county or municipal government. Senator Simitian says further exceptions or changes might be made to the bill as it moves through the assembly, but he is happy about its movement through the state senate.
“I was pleased by the bipartisan support for the bill,” says Senator Simitian, who explains that the bill is intended to address the privacy, personal safety and financial security of individuals. He adds that the vote incited a lot of good discussion on the senate floor, showing “a general acknowledgement about the issues to be addressed. While it is clear that RFID is an extraordinary utility, there are places were its use is not appropriate, and one of those places is in government IDs.”
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May 13th, 2005
According to RFID Journal, UCLA’s Wireless Internet for the Mobile Enterprise Consortium (WINMEC) is investigating use of RFID to secure digital content on DVDs:
The UCLA research group is developing the software and hardware components of a system that would embed DVDs with an RFID tag and DVD players with an RFID reader so that the tagged DVDs would play only in RFID-enabled players and only if the reader could authenticate the DVD’s tag. In order to authenticate, the player would also need to link to some type of online network, similar to the EPCglobal Network, that would associate the DVD with a legal sale. Through this system, the copyright owners (the film production company and any other license-holders of the content) would have digital rights management over the work. But viewers would not be able to play the DVDs without an RFID-enabled player because the tag would essentially lock the disc.
But why? A DVD is nothing if not a big data storage device, intended to be read. Rather than encumber a DVD player with an additional RFID reader input device, just have the DVD player read the DVD, and refuse to play it unless it passes some sort of handshaking. What? People hack that sort of security? Hmmmm… not like that won’t happen with RFIDs attached either…
It feels like a proposal to apply RFID to an insoluble problem; no great gains, but some potential downside, as more and more physical objects become surveillable through RFID.
Posted in Applications | Comments Off
May 12th, 2005
Computer Crime Research Center and many others reports on Cisco’s offering technology for (active) RFID location and tracking:
Another new Cisco offering out of the Airespace labs is the Wireless Location Appliance 2700, which is designed to help customers track and locate 802.11 devices, such as laptops, PDAs and Wi-Fi enabled RFID tags, to within a few meters. This will be used for recovering lost property and for asset management applications.
Thus Cisco has come under fire from privacy groups as it prepares to launch a wireless RFID server that can track people and equipment using existing Wi-Fi networks.
(I’m reminded of the idea of using cell phone signal as the active part of a radar system for detecting targets… I think we’ll find “existing X,” e.g., existing Wi-Fi networks, RFID readers previously deployed for [this old application], etc., continually fitted with new applications, and, with more and more things being tagged, the product of [more readers] and [more tags] is lots of opportunities for tag readings and data collection.)
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