Wal-Mart’s at it again. First censoring records, now more ig Brotherism.
Your views?
I believe i’ve seen articles describing systems like this they want to bring in here in the UK too.
I don’t have a problem with it, as as your link states:
“RFID tags have no built-in batteries or power supplies; they’re activated by radio waves sent out from RFID readers which emit just enough power to trigger the tags and have a range limit of only a few feet, so Orwellian nightmare scenarios involving avaricious corporations tracking the locations of every one of their products all over the globe are not yet a reality!”
Essentially there only use is as inventory tracking, and so that a cashier doesn’t have to scan your goods at the till. You wouldn’t even have to stop - you could just walk past a RFID reader on your way out and the total for all your goods could be autopmatically deducted from your card.
The chips would only have a range of a few feet, so its not like they’re going to track your movements once you’ve left the store. Maybe future tags will be different, and there will something to worry about then, but for now, i don’t feel my privacy would be infringed by these devices.
Having worked in inventory control for a number of years, I think it is a great idea and as mooka says, the technology doesn’t lend itself to Big Brotherism.
That is a great invention which will aid in stock management. For example, look at the problem of managing hotel room minibars. How do you know how long the can has been in there and if it is past expiration date? This will help with that. And, after you buy the item, it is your property and you can remove the tag. Why do you have a problem with the store having a tag on the item while it is their property?
That’s nothing, Bosda, car makers want to install (and in some cases already have) “black boxes” to collect information about your driving habits and how often you do routine maintence on your car. (Drive your car a little too fast, forget to change your oil at precisely 3,000 miles, and kiss your warranty good bye!)
The plan (or at least the account I read of it) is that the tag would be embedded inside the product packaging wherever possible (or built into the product itself in some cases), so removing it may not be an option.
I still think it is a great idea though.
Would that mean that anyone with one of those scanners could wander around your property and get a report on all your possessions (new ones anyway)?
I can just picture salesmen/markedroids driving around suburban neighbourhoods scanning for proporties that buy the competition’s product.
Not to mention life insurance companies scanning your kitchen for unhealthy food.
Now if the tags were only in the packaging and thus completely removable, that wouldn’t be so much of a problem. At least not after your garbage had been hauled away that is.
No, not unless you let people get within a couple feet of the tagged property. If its inside your house, they would have to trepass to get the scan, and there are already laws against that.
I worked on tags like these while studying to be an engineer, and really, there’s nothing ‘big brother’ about them. It’s not like they have an internal power source and can beacon out to a receiver somewhere their exact location. Unless you’re inside the store or someone’s bringing the RFID unit into your house, the tags will sit there like inert pieces of silicon.
Their first use was on military bases to tag equipment and other items so that if they were brought within a few feet of a gate station, the guards would know that inventoried items were going near that gate or potentially leaving the base. It’s a smart idea for loss prevention because they can be made tiny, cheap, updatable and put onto damn near anything.
Neat little things, but entirely useless outside a very confined area because they do not actually generate RF energy under their own power. Tags that have their own power supplies become much larger and harder to power, and anything with a range of more than a few feet is going to have to be a pretty complex and expensive design, at least with current techology for both RF transmission and battery power.
Thanks for posting this, Tuck. I think this is the one people really need to be worried about. There are many potential uses for this technology. Imagine how easy it would be to assign blame in collision cases. Parents could monitor their children’s driving habits and destinations. However, the gathered information should remain under legal seal that only the buyer can access or a judge may break.
Likewise, think of other advantages. A politicized judge can authorize the cops to track down who had gone to “undesirable group” meetings. Likewise, people with habits of taking different routes daily can be tracked down and slated for special observation, since anyone who dares deviate from an easily traceable routine must have some kind of subversive agenda. These items must be made mandatory, immediately!
Probably not because the chances are that the ID of the tags would just be a unique number, without any specific meaning, so when the store receives its delivery of 42" plasma TVs, the booking-in clerk could record the RF IDs of each of them in the booking in system, then when one of them goes through the checkout, the RF ID would be read and looked up in the store database.
When you get it home, the sneak outside the window might be able to excite the tag and get it to tell him that it is ID#98721086329807632549864325, but he won’t have a clue what that means because it doesn’t actually mean anything (unless you have the database that belongs to the company that sold it).
There would probably be some central agency controlling the issue and allocation of ID numbers, but all their database would tell you (if they chose to share the info) is that ID#98721086329807632549864325 was part of a block allocated to MagnetBox Inc - they wouldn’t know what product it was attached to.
From what I’ve read of the current “black box” technology in cars (brought up by a case in which the examination of one backed up forensic evidence in a car accident, showing that the driver was going over 130 MPH in a residential zone when he crashed and killed people, as opposed to the 60 he was claiming), it can’t transmit, and it erases itself every 10 minutes to make room for new data (only speed and such, I believe). This means that the car would actually have to be in an accident for you to get any information out of it.
Of course, this is CURRENT technology. It’s bound to improve.
Actually, current technology would allow much more information on car operations, and retention for a considerable length of time - it’s largely cost right now keeping it out of automobiles. That, and some unease on the part of the public.
There are some car rental companies that hook up a recorder to a GPS unit, allowing them to know where you take their car, how fast you drive it… renters have been surprised when they are charged extra fees for cross-state travel and speeding. These recorders keep records for days or even weeks.
Really, we’ve been doing this with airliners for decades. [sarcasm]If it would save just one life…![/sarcasm]
One day at work a women who had be arguing for years with me that small planes should be outfitted with the same flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders* as the big jets found out about the automobile "black boxes’. Oh MY, she was horrified! Seems she was OK with other people being watched but not her… makes you wonder if she might have had a tendency towards speeding or blowing red lights or something.
- My argument against CVR’s in small planes is based upon experience. In my experience, when I find myself flying through deep doo-doo my vocalizations consist mainly of whimperings and the occassional outburst of random swearing and has nothing to do with what I’m doing to shovel my way out of the manure pile. So I don’t see where it would serve a useful purpose, at least in my case.
Passive RFID tags are detected at a distance approximately equal to the size of the antenna used for detection. So if someone wheeled a 20ft antenna up your driveway they could detect tags a few yards into your house. But why would anyone?
You mean I could get me a device that would say that a 80in. plasma screen tv in my cart is a 13in. b&w? cool! 
Peace,
mangeorge
Well, it is their car…
As I understand it, many commercial tractor-trailers now also have these units in them, and I’ve reads news articles mentioning that they were used successfully to track and recover hijacked/stolen units.
Also the On-Star devices sold with many high-end automobiles include GPS devices and transmitters that can be used to remotely detect the location of those autos in the event of theft or accidents. I’ve heard several commercials for the On-Star service that specifically advertise that capability. (“Maam, I have your location as the corner of xxx and yyy and I’ve alerted the local police about your accident”)
Yup. There’s different kinds of units, some merely transmit basic information (location, speed, etc, etc, etc.), while others have two-way text messaging capability.
Another slick application I have heard of actually use the RFID tag to do the recieving. Pallets pass through detector arrays and pick up the RFID tags as they are unloaded. No need for recieving personell to post a reciept, it happens as it comes off the truck onto the dock. Also no chance for a typo on the part of recieving dock personell on quantity or item/SKU numbers of the item in question. Such tags could easily be put in various areas of the store to record movement of product in and out of recieving and or sales floor areas.
Even if alarms were not sounded a “misallocated” item might be found by a combination of time/date stamps on RFID signature reads and security cameras (see Ted set that 42" TV’s with the stack of 45" TV’s on the floor).
In many high volume movement environments this kind of thing happens all the time. It is hundreds of times more valuable as an inventory tracking and movement device than as any kind of “Minority Report” type recognition of product. Not to mention it is usually part of the packaging, not the actual product.
The next logical step up from barcode scams. It would be a pain to disable the first one to place a second tho.