IFTF's Future Now

Interview on Canadian radio

Spark, a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation show about technology, is running a segment on RFID in which I'm interviewed. (I wrote several articles about RFID for the Institute a couple years ago, and have done a few talks about the technology since then.) The full details, a link to the podcast, etc. are available at the Spark blog. (Or just download the MP3.)

I did the interview a few days ago over Skype, and I was pleasantly surprised at how good the sound quality was. I used to think it was very hit and miss, but now I'm turning into a true believer: my experience recently has been pretty good.

We spoke for about 40 minutes; they used discussions of the Internet of Things, smart home applications of RFID, and privacy issues.

The show is pretty amusing, in a good way. Nora Young has a light touch, but I still get the sense that she works hard to make the show engaging.

Technorati Tags: interview, RFID, IFTF, media

File under, "Bad uses of technology"

According to Australian newspaper The Age, "Lawmakers in Indonesia's Papua are mulling the selective use of chip implants in HIV carriers to monitor their behaviour in a bid to keep them from infecting others."

John Manangsang, a doctor who is helping to prepare a new healthcare regulation bill for Papua's provincial parliament, said that unusual measures were needed to combat the virus.

"We in the government in Papua have to think hard on ways to provide protection to people from the spread of the disease.... Some of the infected people experience a change of behaviour and can turn more aggressive and would not think twice of infecting others.... Among one of the means being considered is the monitoring of those infected people who can pose a danger to others.... The use of chip implants is one of the ways to do so."

The National AIDS Council does report an increase in the number of HIV/AIDS cases, but unless these are chips featuring a level of hitherto unheard-of sophistication (brain scanning? real-time analysis of blood chemistry, blood pressure, and heartbeat?) combined with super-accurate GPS, it's not clear that this could work. Putting ordinary RFID tags in people tells you whether they're within range of an RFID reader, but nothing else; and unless you're going to blanket a country (or just a city) with readers, that's not very useful.

[Hat tip to Sean]

Technorati Tags: RFID

Yesterday, the future of RFID; today, the reality

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Wal-Mart's RFID rollout is hitting some major snags.

Wal-Mart has pushed its suppliers to use exotic radio-activated tags to chop labor and inventory costs anew. But tests using the tags aren't showing any savings, and suppliers forced to invest in the relatively expensive technology are grumbling....

Wal-Mart once hoped to have up to 12 of its roughly 120 distribution centers using the Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID, technology by January 2006. But so far it has installed the technology at just five, plus 1,000 stores. Wal-Mart expects to add a further 400 stores this year....

Wal-Mart has long been one of the biggest advocates of RFID. I think it's no secret that some of the company's suppliers have been less enthusiastic about the technology: they worried that they would bear most of the costs, while Wal-Mart would get most of the benefit. But at the same time, none of the retail giant's partners felt they could resist the mandate. So what we're seeing now is colored by this lingering resentment.

Wal-Mart is pushing the RFID technology on the idea it will increase efficiency and eventually save everyone money -- manufacturers as well as Wal-Mart. Yet as Wal-Mart searches for an answer to its rising costs, suppliers are saying RFID isn't it.

The current generation of RFID tags cost about 15 cents apiece while bar codes cost a fraction of a cent. Beyond the tags, suppliers have had to bear the cost of buying hardware -- readers, transponders, antennas -- and computer software to track and analyze the data. The suppliers have had to pay for additional programming to integrate that software with their current inventory and manufacturing applications. On top of that, suppliers say that instead of saving labor, RFID tagging actually takes more: While bar codes are printed on cases at the factory, because most manufacturers have yet to adopt RFID, those tags have to be put on by hand at the warehouse....

John Fontanella, a vice president at AMR Research Inc., a Boston firm that studies supply chains, [says that the] "payoff is reducing human labor and replacing it with technology. For most companies, there are no software applications that can even approach the problem like that."...

More problems have come into play in recent years, including the high cost of retrofitting warehouses and stores with electronic readers, and consumer concerns that once the tags are on each item on a store's shelves -- from tubes of toothpaste to personal computers -- that they could be used to track individual buyers.

My understanding is that the retrofitting problems have actually been pretty substantial in some cases: warehouses can have a lot of background electrical noise from generators, aging wiring, and the like, which can interfere with tag-reader communications.

This certainly represents something of a setback, but hardly a mortal blow to the technology or the industry.

Technorati Tags: business, RFID

RFID gets smaller and edible... and bigger

A little over a year ago the Institute published a set of reports on the future of RFID. One of the things we argued was that in the future, RFID tags would be seen by consumers as just one of a kind Great Chain of (Digital) Being, part of a much bigger spectrum of information technologies that lived in or connected to the physical world. In addition to passive and active RFID tags, we'd have extremely small, disposable RFID tags; tags that had enough processing power and memory to almost be very small computers; RFID tags that were tailored to different functions and industries (e.g., security, asset management, object provenance and history and everything in between.

This, in turn, would affect public perceptions of RFID. Among other things, RFID would probably seem less alien and intrusive in a world in which lots of objects have digital functionalities. And if designed and used well, the consumer benefits could definitely outweigh the disadvantages.

Two data-points suggest that RFID may undergo (to switch from Renaissance to contemporary biological metaphors) a Cambrian explosion in the next few years.

First, Hitachi has announced development of what it's calling "RFID powder," RFID tags "measuring 0.05 x 0.05 mm" and 5 microns thick, "which they aim to begin marketing in 2 to 3 years."

By relying on semiconductor miniaturization technology and using electron beams to write data on the chip substrates, Hitachi was able to create RFID chips 64 times smaller than their currently available 0.4 x 0.4 mm mu-chips. Like mu-chips, which have been used as an anti-counterfeit measure in admission tickets, the new chips have a 128-bit ROM for storing a unique 38-digit ID number.

The new chips are also 9 times smaller than the prototype chips Hitachi unveiled last year, which measure 0.15 x 0.15 mm.

The second data-point is a patent filing by Kodak for an edible-- and more important, digestible-- RFID tag. (The patent describes it as a "System to monitor the ingestion of medicines") New Scientist reports that

The tags would be covered with soft gelatin that takes a while to dissolve in the stomach. After swallowing a tag a patient need only sit next to a radio source and receiver.

They stop working when exposed to gastric acid for a specific period of time, providing a subtle way to monitor a patient's digestive tract.

Kodak says that similar radio tags could also be embedded in an artificial knee or hip joint in such a way that they disintegrate as the joint does, warning of the need for more surgery. Attaching tags to ordinary pills could also help nurses confirm that a patient has really taken their medicine as ordered.

The Kodak patent describes the tags as

a system that uses intentionally fragile tags to provide useful information by identifying when such tags are destroyed. The system then responds to this basic change of state by providing a useful service. Such intentionally fragile tags can be composed of materials that can be not only be ingested but also digested with the understanding that break down is a desirable quality and one that enables the tag materials to be eliminated in the standard manner. Such a fragile tag that is also digestible lends itself to applications such as being included in objects meant to be ingested, such as pills, lozenges, and glycol strips.

The patent is mainly concerned with describing a system that would let health care providers (or insurance companies, or nursing home management) see that patients are taking their drugs, and also generate some feedback about how those drugs are interacting with the person's body. Personally, I'm skeptical that these systems are going to take off-- in their current incarnations (or imagined incarnations) they're at once too clunky, too invasive, and too easy to spoof-- but I think the more promising application is described later on:

A clearly appropriate application for such an embedded fragile tag is as part of a protective layer on top of bone 240 or other surface that experiences wear. In the case of bone, the wear is due to mechanical friction as well chemical reaction. In either case, there is value in ascertaining the breakdown of the surface of bone or of an artificial or natural bone replacement.

So the tags could essentially be used as sensors. But wait, there's more:

Other embodiments of mechanical interaction could be a fragile tag whose fragility is derived from response to external pressure. A typical application for such a fragile tag would be where following being embedded, such a fragile tag would function until a loss of blood pressure below a set limit occurred at which point the tag would be destroyed, giving an immediate indication of the metabolic state of the recipient of the fragile tag. Similar applications can be extrapolated for loss of air pressure in the lungs.

Other embodiments of mechanical interaction could further include a fragile tag that fails when temperature exceeds a certain limit. Compound fragile tags of this type could provide a rapid means of remotely and automatically monitoring internal body temperature.

An embodiment that combines aspects of mechanical and chemical fragility is the bio-reactive fragile tag. A casing, substrate, or component of the fragile tag would be designed to support the growth of a specific mold, fungus, bacteria or virus. The destruction of the fragile tag would then indicate the presence of the organism.

Somewhat whackier are the possible security applications:

An additional feature is the possible use of the embedded tag to monitor internal vibration in much the same manner as the Thermin listening device referred to in the background. Such vibration monitoring devices, functioning as a miniature stethoscope, can be remotely queried as originally used by Thermin in his U.S. Moscow embassy listening device.

It should be noted that fragile tags may not only be embedded surgically, but may be embedded by shooting or jabbing the body to insert the fragile RFID tag, thereby providing a safe and convenient method for testing the state of a body of a person or animal that would otherwise not cooperate in such test. An example of such an application would be an uncooperative animal that needs to be tested by a veterinarian or tagging an animal in the wild.

Or, it hardly need be said, a suspected criminal or terrorist whose food could be tagged.

One other thing jumped out at me: the term "intentionally fragile," which strikes me as a little note with with a big undertone. Normally, the last thing you want a product to be is fragile: that's what you design to avoid. Recognizing that fragility can, under the right conditions, be a feature rather than a bug, probably requires rethinking your approach to design.

But the main thing to note is this: the RFID tags that we've been arguing about are to the RFID world of a decade hence as the Altair computer is to today's world of laptops, desktops, handhelds, iPods, microprocessor-enabled automobile airbags, etc., etc..

[thanks to Sean Ness and Eugene Chang]

Technorati Tags: R&D, RFID

Smart homes and smart aging

The Associated Press has an article on a new JAMA study documenting the relationship between daily exercise and longevity:

Chores can keep elderly alive

Just doing household chores and other mundane activities of daily living is enough to help older adults live longer, new research suggests.

Elderly couch potatoes were much more likely to die within about six years than those whose lives included regular activity no more strenuous than washing dishes, vacuuming, gardening and climbing stairs, according to a study of adults age 72 to 80.

About 12 percent of people with the highest amount of daily activity died during the six-year follow-up, compared with nearly 25 percent of the least active participants.

This is the latest in several studies establishing a relationship between activity and longevity among elders. Taken together, they send a clear message about the design of smart home technology, one that we advanced in last year's RFID report:

The ideal smart house used to be thought of as one that would take care of everything for you. It would be a “machine for living in,” to borrow modern architect Le Courbusierʼs phrase. In contrast, some of todayʼs best scientists aim to create systems that help residents do things, instead of systems that doing things for them. As professor Stephen Intille has described the MIT House_n project:

Our primary vision is not one where computer technology ubiquitously and proactively manages the details of the home. Technology should require human effort in ways that keep life as mentally and physically challenging as possible as people age.

Work on communications and monitoring systems has taken off thanks, in part, to the discovery of a clear relationship between isolation and depression. Elders are much more likely to stay active when their social lives are active and theyʼre in touch with family and friends. Active elders are healthier elders. Sedentary elders are at greater risk of heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. (Elders often need encouragement to remain active. In Japan and the United States, the elderly watch 5–6 hours of television per day.) Likewise, there is evidence that, by remaining mentally and physically active, elders can fight the onset of Alzheimerʼs. Having a house that does too much to take care of you can be bad for you.

Technorati Tags: aging, architecture, design, RFID, smart_home

More on RFID

Last year the Institute wrote a series of memos on the present and future of RFID. They're now publicly available as PDFs on the Institute Web site.

Titles and links:

• Thinking About RFID
• Public Concerns and the Near Future of RFID
• Flashpoint and Controversies
• Smart Homes and Sociable Devices
• Implications and Recommendations

Technorati Tags: future, IFTF, RFID

Memory spots

HP has announced a new device, Memory Spots. They're similar to RFID tags, in that they're passive, wireless, and are designed to carry information around on physical objects; however, they have more processing power and memory, and HP doesn't envision them being used in the supply chain.

My instinct is that while the company talks about early uses in documents and medical contexts, the big niches will be elsewhere, as an augment objects that have have complicated histories or are embedded in rich social networks.

More on the Spots at End of Cyberspace.

Technorati Tags: digital-physical, memory, pervasive computing, RFID, ubicomp

Interview on RFID

Bruce Schneier and I are interviewed in IT Business Net on RFID. I didn't get to actually meet Schneier in person, but it's certainly an honor to get paired with him in an article.

Technorati Tags: privacy, RFID, security

Clip that RFID tag

In a project on the future of RFID that the Institute did last year, one of the big conclusions we came to was that users were far more likely to trust RFID tags if they had more control over tag properties and content. This boiled down to designing two capabilities.

First, the ideal trustworthy tag would be rewritable. Giving buyers the ability to put their own information on tags would turn RFID tags into devices that, once they were out of the store, were clearly of benefit only to end-users (the ID numbers I use for tagging and tracking all my stuff won't make sense to retailers or marketers unless they have a copy of my personal inventory database).

Second, for users who want to disable them, RFID tags should be removable, or at the very least, be designed so that users could unambiguously render them inoperative-- by tearing off part of the antenna, for example. This seemed especially important, given that it would otherwise be impossible to tell easily if a tag was alive or not (especially given that, as Bruce Schneier points out, "all sorts of interests [are] vying for control of your computer" or designing functionalities that benefit them and their partners).

So the recent announcement that IBM has created a tag that users can modify is heartening.

IBM is introducing a new kind of wireless identification tag this week that it hopes will quell privacy unrest over plans to use RFID technology in retail stores.

The so-called Clipped Tag has a notched antenna that consumers can tear off, much like the end of a ketchup packet. Removing this panel drastically reduces the readable range of the device, from about 30 feet to less than 2 inches, according to IBM.

"It effectively changes a long-range tag into a proximity tag," said Paul Moskowitz, a research staff member in IBM's research division.

Technorati Tags: business, privacy, rfid, security

Designer Tags Children's Clothes for Safety

From Baseline: Lauren Scott California: At the Seams of RFID, the designer is tagging their children's clothes. Tagging clothing is a case study often seen at future home labs, to identify clothing to a washing machine. The designer is already getting much commentary, positive and negative. To be linked to readers in the home, and (as yet nonexistent) readers in places like hospital emergency rooms. Working with Smartwear Technologies of San Diego, whose site strongly plays the anti-abduction benefit. A nice study of the approach, with a quick economic analysis. Not too far from RFID implants.

Gillette Fuses RFID With Product Launch

Very nice overview in the RFID Journal of tagging for product launch supply visibility. It should be noted that Gillette was an early pioneer in the AutoID Consortium. This short article is a good read on how tagging provides understanding of how a supply chain operates and how it can be fine tuned to optimize its operation.

Metro Pushes Back the Forecast

Forecasts are tricky. When I gave technology talks in 2000 my standing position was that most items in retail would be RF tagged by 2005. From the Cebit Trade show: "We will see RFID increasingly replace bar code for certain products but the technology won't be used to identify all products for a good 15 years or more," Gerd Wolfram, managing director of MGI Metro Group Information Technology, at a news conference on Wednesday in Hanover, Germany, ahead of the Cebit trade show..." ... Case-level tagging moves on at a strong pace. Metro RFID Newsletter.

Workplace RFID tagging

The Financial Times reports that an American company has had two employees tagged with Verichip RFID tags as part of a trial of an RFID security system:

US group implants electronic tags in workers

An Ohio company has embedded silicon chips in two of its employees - the first known case in which US workers have been “tagged” electronically as a way of identifying them.

CityWatcher.com, a private video surveillance company, said it was testing the technology as a way of controlling access to a room where it holds security video footage for government agencies and the police.

Embedding slivers of silicon in workers is likely to add to the controversy over RFID technology, widely seen as one of the next big growth industries.

According to its Web site, "CityWatcher.com provides security cameras, and digital video storage that are recorded over the Internet."

This isn't the first example of implanted RFID tags being used for security purposes: the Mexican Attorney General had some of his staff chipped in 2004.

Technorati Tags: privacy, RFID, security

RFID Implants; podcast available

The Vancover Sun has an article about a couple who use RFID implants to replace keys for their car and home.  The key quote: "As Graafstra (the guy with the implanted RFID chip) puts it, he could be buck naked and still be carrying the virtual keys to unlock his home." 

It makes you wonder just how often he finds himself locked out of his house while buck naked.  It also makes me glad I'm not one of his neighbors.

Another interesting thing is this article is available as a podcast.  Voice Print Canada is a non-profit that creates audio version of news stories.  While this service is aimed at people who have trouble reading, I used the service to multi-task.

Yet more flexible battery madness

Okay, not "madness" in the sense of "crazy," but rather in the sense of "people won't stop announcing stuff." This latest from BBC News:

Gel battery boost for radio tags

Japanese company NEC has developed a lightweight, flexible battery that is less than a millimetre thick and can be recharged in half a minute.

It is called the Organic Radical Battery (ORB) and is based on a type of plastic that exists in a gel state.

The gel allows the battery to be extremely pliant, with a thickness of 300 microns.

ORBs could eventually be embedded into devices such as smart cards, wearable computers and intelligent paper.

Currently the battery, when in card form, can be recharged with a card reader device in 30 seconds.

The absence of harmful chemicals typically used in rechargeable batteries also makes it quite environmentally friendly, according to NEC.

The ORB has huge potential when combined with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags - tiny microchips that hold unique identifier information attached to a small antenna.

Technorati Tags: batteries, epaper

Caspian, RFID & Spy Chips

One of the founders of Caspian (consumers against privacy invasion and numbering) has released a book on RFID chips called "Spy Chips".  They also have a web site called Spy Chips.  Advertising Age has an article about the book (registration required), which is apparently selling fairly well.  I've ordered the book but have not read it yet.

Based on the Spy Chips website the book reflects Caspian's view that RFID is a huge threat to consumer privacy and will be used very nefariously by corporations.  Caspian's view of RFID is extreme and shows little understanding of the technical capabilities and limitations of the technolgy. 

Having said that, there definitely are potential privacy issues with RFID and other sensor technologies.  Examining and debating these issues is well worthwhile - I just hope extreme positions like Caspian's don't carry the day.

Tag Costs Drop, IBM Pushes Technology

An eWeek article that discusses how IBM is seeking to legitimize RFID, working with OatSystems, TrueDemand and Marc Global. Also an announcement of decreasing tag costs: "..... hardware provider Alien Technology Corp. unveiled new tags designed to significantly reduce the cost of using RFID technology. Alien's EPC Class 1 RFID labels are priced at just under 13 cents—a 44 percent decrease in the price of 96-bit labels from Alien in the past 12 months, officials said, and a hairbreadth closer to the 5-cents-per-tag price industry experts have pinpointed as necessary for a return on investment. That price is good for tags ordered in quantities of 1 million or more ...." Tag cost is not the only barrier to seeing their broad rollout in retail, but a step in the right direction. From last week's ePC Global conference.

Search engines in the real world

A brief article on using RFID to track items, with quotes from Paul Saffo and myself.

One point I made in the interview that didn't make it into the article: I think that for a lot of applications, reprogrammable RFID tags will become a must. I'm just paranoid enough of the scenario of thieves using RFID readers to identify who's got the iPod, or the real Rolex versus the fake, to be wary of having factory-issued tags on everything. If, on the other hand, I could rewrite them with my own personal serial numbers that mean nothing to anyone else, they'd become a lot more useful, and I'd be more comfortable using them.

Whether that entirely negates any post-purchase value retailers and manufacturers would gain from RFID tags remains to be seen. But if I have to choose between creating value for myself and creating value for a store, there's really no contest.

Technorati Tags: RFID, search

Anti-Skimming in Japan

The following short article excerpt from RFID Japan shows the increasing concern over skimming, or the surreptitious acquisition of RF encoded information, say in a card in your wallet. There have been a number of 'blocking' devices proposed, but the interest in the US has been minimal. A more advanced version of this is called a blocker tag, the idea is covered in Garfinkel and Rosenberg's recent book: RFID Applications ... (p. 332-) The use of RF encoded mass-transit cards in Japan have made it an interesting testbed for this. Reliability or even necessity is unclear, since reads typically occur at only a few cm. Lining your purse or wallet with metal foil might work just as well! Skimming also occurs with ordinary bar codes, typically at an ATM.

...Takashimaya, which is one of the largest retailers in Japan, now sells anti-skimming cards called "Sherry" at their department stores. Consumers can just put the cards in their wallets in order to prevent their RFID-chipped train passes etc. from skimming attacks. The anti-skimming card functions by creating "reverse" electro-magnetic field ...

RFID and religion

In a study of the future of RFID that I worked on last year and this spring, I spent some time looking at religious-- or more specifically, millenarian and apocalyptic-- arguments against RFID. Many of the arguments that we saw against bar codes a couple decades ago-- that they're a tool for building a surveillance state that's either Orwellian or biblical-- are now made against RFID.

Today's Wired News has a new twist on the story: CASPIAN founder Katherine Albrecht believes that "technological developments of the last 10 to 20 years could be combining to make the Mark of the Beast a reality, and possibly even in our lifetimes":

Albrecht fears that retailers will match the data emitted by the tags with their customers' information, turning each tag into a potential tracking beacon. She also suspects the government will want access to the retailers' RFID databases.

But one aspect of Albrecht's anti-RFID crusade has been attracting a lot of attention from other privacy groups: her religious beliefs.

Albrecht does not often discuss her religious views with reporters. But she believes that RFID technology may be part of the fulfillment of the Mark of the Beast prophesied in the Book of Revelation.

Other privacy rights advocates want Albrecht to help them connect with Christians who believe that RFID tags -- tiny chips that emit serial numbers -- are the Mark of the Beast. Many of those Christians believe humans one day will be compelled to bear a mark on their heads or wrists, to engage in the buying and selling of goods.

I had not, frankly, expected that the apocalyptic arguments would have much effect on the future of RFID; but maybe I underestimated the odds of their shaping the technology, and the depth of their potential impact.

It certainly would be interesting to see how retailers reacted to a call by, say, James Dodson to boycott stores that plan to implement item-level RFID tagging.

Update: Gizmodo's post on the subject is inspired. Scroll to the last paragraph.

Technorati Tags: RFID

Introduction to RFID Issues

Procter & Gamble's Chief Privacy Officer, Sandy Hughes, has contributed to a forthcoming book (July 8) : RFID: Applications, Security and Privacy, edited by Samuel Garfinkel and Beth Rosenberg. I have the book on order, but based on the extensive excerpt at the Amazon post above, it contains a good overview of the technology and the issues it raises, with lots of examples. The excerpt serves as a nice introduction to the topic.

Rethinking RFID passports

Yet another data-point on just how malleable, still-under-construction a technology RFID is:

Feds Rethinking RFID Passport

Following criticism from computer security professionals and civil libertarians about the privacy risks posed by new RFID passports the government plans to begin issuing, a State Department official said his office is reconsidering a privacy solution it rejected earlier that would help protect passport holders' data.

The solution would require an RFID reader to provide a key or password before it could read data embedded on an RFID passport's chip. It would also encrypt data as it's transmitted from the chip to a reader so that no one could read the data if they intercepted it in transit.

Frank Moss, deputy assistant secretary for passport services, told Wired News on Monday that the government was "taking a very serious look" at the privacy solution in light of the 2,400-plus comments the department received about the e-passport rule and concerns expressed last week in Seattle by participants at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference. Moss said recent work on the passports conducted with the National Institute of Standards and Technology had also led him to rethink the issue.

At the Commerce Department conference I attended earlier this month, I heard a couple speakers express concern that while RFID tags were secure enough for supply chain applications, the versions being put into credit cards, and proposed for passports, were way too insecure. It strikes me that if these criticisms aren't either dealt with or disproven, the technology's reputation, and its deployment in other less sensitive contexts, could suffer. Fortunately, in this case, things seem to be moving in the right direction.

RFID Issues

An insightful article in the RFID Journal on RFID tagging application do's and dont's ... while some are debatable, they do cover many of the key issues in play. "... In a study by Allied Business Intelligence, RFID transponders used for supply chain management in 2002 represented a paltry 1 percent of sales volume. Yet by 2007, supply chain usage is expected to represent a whopping 46 percent of the RFID market..."

Paul Saffo on RFID

Several of us at the Institute seem to have been drawn into the vortex of RFID. Paul Saffo spoke at the RFID Journal Live! conference earlier this week.

[W]hile the benefits that RFID can provide seem close at hand [Saffo said], "most ideas take 20 years to become an overnight success." He cautioned against giving up on RFID's potential impact. "Just when people thought MP3 players were dead," he said, "along came the iPod.

"Your business is just at the point where you could bury yourself in RFID issues and that would be a horrible mistake, because you'll miss the big opportunities," Saffo said. "Your business is too small to generate its own lift. The biggest impact on your business is going to come from things utterly outside of it. So pay attention to the things on the outside."

Saffo advised the crowd to concentrate not only on the technology but also on how it will change our lives. "It's not about technology," he said. "You are in the early stages of helping build a real, new kind of media revolution."

Over the next 10 years, he said, RFID, wireless communications and robotics will each play an important role in what he calls the sensor revolution. Saffo said sensors are creating an early phase of "smartifacts," or intelligent artifacts, that are "observing the world on our behalf and increasingly manipulating it on our behalf. This is why I view RFID as a media technology. This is where I think the opportunities are for you."

Commerce Department conference online

An audiocast of last week's "RFID in 2005" conference, where I gave one of the opening talks, is now available online. Some of the PowerPoints are also available from the same page.

RFID in casino chips

The Financial Times has an article (available in its entirety to subscribers) on RFID in casinos. Previous articles have talked mainly about how putting chips in... chips... would thwart scammers trying to introduce fake chips onto a table; this article spins a scenario in which casinos use the tags to more precisely track the behavior of players.

Casinos bet on the new chip identification

At the casino cage, you cash in for $100,000 and start battling against the blackjack dealers. You are winning and every time you make a bet, you slip a few casino chips into your pocket for safe-keeping. Then your luck changes and you can't catch a hand. The money in front of you disappears and you tell your hosts that you have lost your allowance for the night. And then the casino host asks: "What about the $29,500 you have stowed in your pocket? I know you're not busted out. When I gave you the limo, suite and the butler, you promised to play until you won or lost $100,000. Keep playing if you don't want to get downgraded to a normal room."...

Casinos... have been tracking player play since the 1950s, but technology has allowed them to record many more players' gambling habits - mainly using loyalty cards - and to reward players for their action. But until now, much of the recording at table games - notably blackjack, baccarat and roulette - has been guess work. RFID chips should produce reliable information, allowing casinos to reward the customers who give them the greatest profit.

More on RFID and passports

I'm currently in Baltimore, having gone yesterday to a Commerce Department-sponsored event on RFID. It was an interesting time, and I'll have some notes posted later today.

In the meantime, this article from the Washington Post, on continued debate over the use of RFID in passports, caught my eye. (If this sounds familiar, you're right; we've posted about plans to put tags in passports before.)

Privacy Advocates Criticize Plan To Embed ID Chips in Passports

A government plan to embed U.S. passports with radio frequency chips starting this summer is being met by resistance from travel and privacy groups who say the technology is untested and could create a security risk for travelers.

The embedded chips are designed to make passports work more like employee ID cards that can be passed over an electronic reader to gain access to a building. State Department officials said the new technology, commonly known as radio frequency identification (RFID), would allow customs agents to quickly process passengers at airports and borders.

One more interesting thing in the article:

Frank Moss, deputy assistant secretary for passport services at the State Department... said the department does not like to call the passport chip RFID, because people typically refer to the technology as it is used by retailers, such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc., and the Defense Department, which use it to track shipments. Instead, he calls it "contactless smart card technology".

A couple quick points.

First, the State Department's preference for "contactless smart card" rather than "RFID" might seem at first like a piece of linguistic jujitsu (or just smoke and mirrors), but it does point to something more significant: the fact that the variety of applications for RFID seems likely to grow pretty dramatically in the next few years. It's a bit like the difference between gamma rays and x-rays: at one level there is no difference (they're both high-frequency electromagnetic rays), but scientists continue to use the two terms because they have different sources.

Second, I suspect that the variety of applications could be a problem for the technology's public image, and that the use of RFID in IDs is much more likely to be controversial than its use in consumer products. EPC tags, after all, are designed to be pretty simple and stupid; if someone skims the data off the RFID tag in your printer, they're not going to be able to do much harm with it. On the other hand, skimming off contactless credit cards or passports holds the potential to create a lot more harm. Should passport RFID be as problematic as its critics say it is, it could raise problems for deployment of the technology in other areas, fairly or not.

Wal-Mart and Alternative Uses of RFID

The most common proposed use of RFID is to track goods in supply chains, but since the early penny-tag days at MIT, other ideas have been proposed for the tags, making them part of a larger sensor network. Here are some proposals from Wal-Mart. All require a level of tagging ubiquity.

RFID in passports

Wired News reports on a recent non-decision to not encrypt data embedded in next-generation passports. As we've noted previously, a number of governments plan to issue passports with RFID chips containing a variety of digital information. The theory is that just as EPC tags are the successors to bar codes, passport RFID will be the successor to the machine-readable lines at the bottom of the photo page of your passport (go look at it).

For customs and border guards, RFID is supposed to improve security and speed passage through customs.

Border agents, equipped with readers, would be able to pull up passport information on a screen and visually compare the digitized photo against the passport bearer.

Agents will also be able to use facial identification software to compare the person to the digitized photo, which is not feasible with current passports....

The government will use chips that can only be written to once, and a further safeguard is provided in the form of a digital signature, which allows readers to verify that the information on the chip is the information originally written to it.

But the rules, which are open for comment until April 4, rule out encrypting the bearer's name, birth date and digital photo, saying such a move would impede worldwide adoption of e-passports and that encrypted data would slow down entry and exit at customs.

The lack of encryption baffles privacy advocates and security researchers, who say the new passports are vulnerable to "skimming," an attack that uses an unauthorized reader to gather information from the RFID chip without the passport owner's knowledge.

It's worth noting that there is an NGO affiliated with the UN that's officially responsible for setting standards in passports, so while the U.S. has been a big proponent of unencrypted passport data, formal responsibility for the standard rests with the International Civil Aviation Organization. These tags are also different from the Electronic Product Code tags that get most press these days: those are designed to be cheap, fairly stupid, and have small memories.

In the history of science, there's a big literature that looks at scientific controversies-- arguments over discoveries, competing theories, that sort of thing. The value of controversies is that they force participants to be explicit about things that normally they don't have to articulate: you don't have to define what you really think "elegance" is, or what makes evidence robust, until you have to defend it. Controversies over technology can have a similar value. The debate over unencrypted RFID in passports is an interesting one, because along with the recent school RFID fiasco here in California, and other controversial rollouts or trials, we're beginning to get a much better sense of the circumstances under which people consider RFID to be problematic, intrusive, or otherwise bothersome.

What are those circumstances? Gee, look at the time....

RFID value add for consumers

It is not sensational news, last weeks story on BBC news about European consumers concern over RFID tags and the potential misuse by retailers to monitor the customers. The survey included 2000 persons and more half of the surveyed had privacy worries. A similar study in the US by BGresearch published in FutureWire highlights identical concerns among Americans. The US study notes that while only 35% of the surveyed had heard about RFID more than 50% were concerned about misuse. This fact could hint a potential for an information campaign for increased awareness.

While the consumer concern is to be expected at this point - privacy is an issue - preliminary results from the EU funded project SustainPack is cause for greater concern. A limited number of European retailers have been interviewed about sensors and RFID technology. A majority of the retailers apparantly are against giving consumers access to sensor and RFID data. If the result reflects a general trend, this is a serious problem, which should be be addressed.

The consumer concern about privacy is not new, numerous technologies hold keys to compromising privacy, yet due to the benefits they offer (consider your mobile phone) we tend to accept potential riscs. Yet the RFID deployment has so far entirely been a question of improving supply chain logistics. Customers will benefit from this as well, it is argued, they will not experience empty shelves, once the technology is implemented...

Not good enough. To win the consumers the industry must do better than that. In a near future with RFID readers in mobile phones a wealth of product infomation stored on the internet could be made available to the consumers through reference from the RFID tag ID. As an example, imagine the benefits for diabetics, persons with allergy, ecologists or fitness freaks retrieving information about food products fitting their specific situation. That is the win-win scenario for the consumers leading to acceptance.The industry need to have this in mind.

Other tagging methods

Datadots is a fairly old idea: as early as the 1940s they were being used to trace high value items and identify counterfeit products. They can be sprayed onto an item to be tagged. It is not remotely readable like an RFID tag is. Its also quite expensive. Another form of physical tag is a Microtaggant, which is a yet smaller form of this idea, originally under a 3M patent. Could we ultimately have near universal identifiability? What are the implications?

Spot-On Solution for Car Thefts By Stephen Leahy
Australia has implemented a tiny solution to reduce its big car-theft problem: plastering thousands of plastic microdots on late-model vehicles.

As small as grains of sand, up to 10,000 DataDots are laser-etched with vehicle identification numbers and spray-glued on the engine and most other parts, making it very difficult to "re-birth" cars or sell cannibalized parts. The dots glow under a black light for easy spotting and can be read with a 30-power magnifying glass. Each microdot has room for 50 characters, and the glues can be modified for application on all sorts of household and business items ...

RFID sniper rifle

Science fiction, hoaxes, and art installations can shine at least a small light on perceptions of technologies, and the anxieties they cause. Think, for example, of Cold War science fiction movies that reflected contemporary fears of nuclear war, or stories featuring evil robots and computers.

In the case of RFID, there are a growing number of sometimes-clever hoaxes-- news stories, fake devices or services-- that play on worries about how RFID could be used in surveillance and privacy invasion. Last year, an April Fools' report that welfare agencies were going to start tagging the homeless was widely reproduced on the Web.

Now, there's the case of ID-Sniper, the brainchild of Danish artist Jakob Boeskov. He's the "founder" of Empire North, a "company" developing non-lethal weaponry that features "outstanding Danish design and know-how." From their Web site:

As the urban battlefield grows more complex and intense, new ways of managing and controlling crowds are needed. The attention of the media changes the rules of the game. Sometimes it is difficult to engage the enemy in the streets without causing damage to the all important image of the state. Instead EMPIRE NORTH suggests to mark and identify a suspicious subject on a safe distance, enabeling the national law enforcement agency to keep track on the target through a satellite in the weeks to come....

[The ID-Sniper rile] implant[s] a GPS-microchip in the body of a human being, using a high powered sniper rifle as the long distance injector. The microchip will enter the body and stay there, causing no internal damage, and only a very small amount of physical pain to the target. It will feel like a mosquito-bite lasting a fraction of a second.

The "company" has another "product" that's more clearly a spoof. I think.

[via Bruce Schneier]

RFID Update from NRF

A good update, In InformationWeek, from the recent NRF conference, on the state of RFID implementations, at Wal-Mart and elsewhere. Note the comment on reading reliability for full pallets. This remains one of the most important unresolved issues of tagging, to gain benefits from tagging and the transparency of product movement, read accuracy must be very high.

... RFID is already in use in 104 Wal-Mart stores, 36 Sam's Clubs, and three distribution centers, Dillman said. Wal-Mart has installed more than 14,000 pieces of hardware and run 230 miles of cable. Halfway into this month's deadline, 57 out of the 100 suppliers due to implement RFID are shipping tagged cases and pallets. So far this month, Wal-Mart has read 7,161 tagged pallets and 210,390 tagged cases and has recorded 1.5 million electronic product code reads.

On the conveyers in the distribution centers, the retailer has achieved the ability to read 95% of the cases. At the end of the distribution process where the cartons are broken down and thrown into the trash compactor, Wal-Mart is achieving 98% read rates. Reading all cases on a fully loaded pallet remains the biggest challenge at 66% ....

AD-ID Meets RFID

This would provide a great deal of data that relates spending to sales, and further the linking to RFID that contructs a more reliable data stream about promotional decisions and their linkages to product movement. An analytical connection between moments of truth. see also tech details.

U.S. advertisers go digital to track ads
By Michele Gershberg, Reuters
NEW YORK � Top marketers are going digital to track the delivery of commercials into U.S. homes with a system some advocates say will revolutionize advertising the way product codes changed the selling of sliced bread. One day, it could even enable advertisers to target individual households.

The top four U.S. broadcast networks � CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox � have signed on to comply with a new 12-character code for tracking all advertising, a system heralded as a new standard for monitoring the $263 billion U.S. ad industry, the two advertising trade groups behind the system said. Called Ad-ID, the technical switch is being compared to the introduction of the universal product code, or UPC � the tiny bar codes that 30 years ago changed the way supermarket chains tracked and delivered inventory across the country.

Ad-ID gives advertisers a centralized Web-based system that helps assign unique codes to their properties. More than 100 leading advertisers and other trade groups have endorsed the system. The compliance of top broadcast networks paves the way for making it a standard....

Retailer Tracks with RFID

Note the implication that this does several types of tracking ... carts and employees ... to understand movement in the store. From Financial Times 12/15, Quoted in FMI DailyLead.

...Supermarket turns to RFID to improve efficiency: Netherlands-based Jumbo supermarket is using "active" RFID tags to keep tabs on its employees in an effort to better evaluate product revenue as it relates to handling efficiency. The chain plans to step up its efforts by adding tags to shopping carts to track customers as they shop, in order to better meet their needs...

RFID at Wal-Mart

In todays NYT (registration required) an article on the current state of the Wal-Mart RFID test.

... the pilot testing this year has offered evidence that, before most businesses can justify big investments in the technology, its costs must fall sharply and the scanners must be able to read tags faster and in more varied conditions. To drive down costs, manufacturers want the recently adopted American standards to be made compatible with those being developed elsewhere. Still, if the size of the challenge became apparent in 2004, so were the ways in which it could be tackled. Wal-Mart and others say that, in 2005, not only will tagging be expanded, but there will also be a sharp increase in the testing of software and business strategies that use the data captured from the tags ...

RFID in toys

Greetings from Copenhagen. I'm here for the next couple days, giving a talk at the Next 2004 conference on Wednesday.

Popgadget has a piece on RFID in toys:

There’s probably no better way to indoctrinate your kids into the ways of RFID than with the MagiCook Kitchen from Little Tikes, a toy kitchen where all the fake food comes embedded with RIFD tags. Swipe a plastic waffle over the built-in sensor in the fake stovetop and you’ll hear a variety food and cooking-related phrases.

A number of toy companies are looking at RFID uses in toys, but I think this may be the first to actually get to market.

RFID bracelets in amusement parks

The insouciant but extremely informative blog we make money not art recently noted the use of RFIID bracelets at Kindercity, a children's science park in Zurich:

Instead of paper tickets, kids get bracelets on their arrival and as soon as they approach a particular attraction, the bracelet is activated. They are identified, and the price of the entrance is automatically taken from their account (just like an electronic wallet.) So they pay only for the attractions they visit.

There are a few amusement parks that have adopted RFID bracelet systems, mainly as a way to identify lost children. Even though I have two under 5 and under, I have yet to go to a park that's so equipped, so I don't have any first-hand experience with the technology. But it does strike me that it's a smart use: amusement parks are already chock-a-block with surveillance technology (so one can assume that privacy issues aren't going to be a big problem) the systems are voluntary; amusement parks are contained spaces that you can blanket with readers; and these services play to parents' desires to keep track of their kids in an attractive and unfamiliar environment.

It'll be interesting to see if these services help build a more relaxed public attitude towards RFID.

Slate on RFID implants

Yesterday's Slate has a piece on RFID implants, and their pros, cons, and capabilities.

Subdermal chips are being sold as having two major applications: in health care, and security. In the health application, hospital staff could read the chip to pull down a (let's say unconscious, unidentified) patient's medical records; it's a technology for matching up people and medical information.

In the security application, it isn't so much people who are being protected from harm; the implant acts as a security badge, protecting secure spaces from unauthorized entry. Unfortunately, some implants have been sold as anti-kidnapping devices, but as the article points out,

The idea of using RFID gear to thwart kidnappers betrays a fundamental misunderstanding-- or a deliberate misrepresentation-- of how the technology works. An RFID implant is useful for tracking within a controlled area like a warehouse-- "Where's widget No. 4,343?"-- but not so useful for the kind Tommy Lee Jones does in The Fugitive. The RFID readers now on the market have a maximum range of about 30 feet. To monitor kidnappings in progress, Mexico would need to install RFID readers in every building, office, store, and street corner.... RFID chips will come in handy mostly in identifying dead bodies�that is, assuming kidnappers have the decency not to dig the chips out of their victims' arms.

Likewise, in order for medical RFID implants to really be useful,

you'll have to wait for VeriChip to connect its database�containing your medical records�with each hospital's individual system. By the time we get a national medical database, you'll probably have died of natural causes.

Note that for VeriChip, the implant is but the thin edge of a wedge, one that puts the company in the management of medical data. (It's also not completely clear whether there'll be a subscription service that you'll have to buy to keep your chip and records active.)

Both of these applications highlight another, more general aspect of RFID. If you're interested in (or worried about) RFID and security or surveillance, it's better to think not in terms of a single device-- the chip in your arm, the tag on the box-- but to think terms of technological systems. RFID chips by themselves are useless; only when you have readers, and computers that can gather, process, and interpret data from readers, do they begin to have any real utility. (Indeed, the RFID tag itself can be looked at as a system, consisting of the IC, the antenna, the programming on the chip, the connector linking chip and antenna, and the substrate that they're all stuck to.) More broadly, its worth thinking of FCC regulations governing the strength of readers and the frequencies they can use, corporate privacy policies, and state and federal laws as part of the system, too.

There are several things that such an approach highlights. First, all the components work together: in isolation, they don't do anything. Second, changes in one component can affect the overall behavior of the system: any given problem may be solved by changing the tag, reader, software, encryption, or regulatory policy. (This is true of any technological system. There's a giant literature on technologies as systems; for an introduction, I highly recommend Thomas Hughes' The Human-Build World.)

Third, it suggests that a lot of the utility of RFID is only going to show up with ubiquitous deployment of very cheap tags, and widespread diffusion of readers-- not just in public spaces or stores, but in homes, cars, my briefcase, etc..

David Truch: Smart Dust at BP

An article that provides rich example detail on how Smart Dust ideas are currently being used, especially at BP. Saw a recent talk by David Truch of BP (Who is responsible for game-changing ideas at BP, including sensors) on their many applications creating sensor networks using cheap 'motes'. BP monitors many kinds of systems, which they own, lease and/or control. Often geographically dispersed. So they have rich examples of application. Impressive. For more examples search for 'Smart Dust' in the search bar to the left.

Tagging Passports

The idea of placing smart tags in passports has been around for some time, the EEC plans to implement it in 2005, and the US is in the process of planning for it as well. Unclear if global standards have been agreed to. The issue that has come up are the privacy implications for reading passive tags at a distance. Could a group of people passing through a portal have their passports read from their pockets or purses? Could something like a metallicized sleeve prevent reading? Fundamentally, what value does read at a distance, versus a simple optical scan provide? Another issue is the actual data held on the passport itself, will it contain details, or just an encrypted ID number for lookup? This Wired article discusses the key issue of read distance for passive chips. Also comments from a number of privacy groups. Bruce Schneier sees it darkly. Roy Want, principal engineer at Intel Research is quoted regards the difficulty of reading at a distance. Want's group has come up with a number of leading edge ideas which I follow. See an interview regards their current work on ubiquitous computing. Worth following.

RFID implants approved by FDA

The The New York Times reports that VeriChip, an implantable RFID microchip manufactured by Applied Digital, has won approval to "market implantable chips that would provide easy access to individual medical records."

The approval, which the company announced yesterday, is expected to bring to public attention a simmering debate over a technology that has evoked Orwellian overtones for privacy advocates and fueled fears of widespread tracking of people with implanted radio frequency tags, even though that ability does not yet exist....

In Applied Digital's vision, patients implanted with the chips could receive more effective care because doctors, other emergency-room personnel and ambulance crews equipped with Applied's handheld radio scanners would be able to read a unique 16-digit number on the chip.

The chip does not contain any records, but with the number, the care provider would be able to retrieve medical information about blood type, drug histories and other critical data stored in computers.

There has been a very few uses of implanted RFID microtags-- a couple clubs have offered them as a way for patrons to jump cues, and a few people have had implants for security-- but the medical applications market, should it take off, be pretty substantial.

The question, of course, is how consumers will respond to the technology. The very things that make RFID attractive among manufacturers and retailers-- its small size, unobtrusiveness, and potential in tracking and tracing applications-- seem to be exactly the same things that creep people out. With smart design, it would be possible to deal with some of those concerns when putting RFID tags in consumer products; but body implants may turn out to be another matter.

Projection Virtually Reveals Tagged Contents

Brought up at the GeoWeb conference, here is an interesting idea from Mitsubishi at the recent SiGGraph conference ... note the idea of augmenting reality . A projector, say a hand-held device, detects tags in a box, then projects a picture of the contents of the box on its outside. A UPS person I talked to said this would be a important application for them. Below more articles and technical information. Of course the idea requires tagging to be common.
....

Projector lights radio tags, August 11/18/04, By Kimberly Patch, TRN Virtual reality puts you in a computer-generated world. Augmented reality allows for a mix of virtual reality and the real world by placing computer-generated objects in a real-world setting. Researchers from Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs have brought dynamic, computer-generated labels into the physical world with a combination of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and portable projectors.

Their Radio Frequency Identity and Geometry (RFIG) system consists of a hand-held projector that shines dynamic images onto physical objects of the user's preference, and radio frequency identification tags augmented with photosensors, which identify objects for the projector. Radio frequency identification tags contain tiny, inexpensive chips that are read using radio waves. Photosensors detect light intensity. The system can be used to find and track inventory, guide robots or precision handling systems on assembly lines, locate small instruments and track movement of items in health care settings, keep track of objects in homes, offices and libraries, and enable games to integrate real and virtual objects, said Ramesh Raskar, a research scientist at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs.

See also Mitsubishi press release.

The Software for RFID

The October issue of ACM Queue has an excellent high-level article 'Integrating RFID' by Sanjay Sarma, researcher at MIT and now part of Oat Systems, maker of tag middleware. We often discuss tags and readers, whose fundamentals at least have been established, but the challenge regarding the basic architecture of software required to read all those tags is just starting to be addressed. Here Sarma talks about the underlying issues, and his knowledge, as one of the cofounders of the AutoID consortium, is considerable. The article is not yet posted online in ACM Queue, though they usually post within a few weeks after print publication. I will update this post with the link and provide more commentary when they do.

New York Times on RFID

A short article (by New York Times standards, anyway) on companies that are starting to position themselves to help manufacturers and retailers deal with RFID and other sensor-generated information:

I.B.M plans to announce today that it will invest $250 million over the next five years and employ 1,000 people in a new business unit to support products and services related to sensor networks. The new unit will also focus on helping businesses exploit sensor networks by, for example, setting up computer systems that use sensor data to quickly identify supply shortages and automatically adjust delivery schedules.

I.B.M.'s goal, analysts said, is to persuade businesses to view radio tagging - one of the hottest growth areas for mobile sensor technology - as just one element of a new wave of information technology outside of data centers that must be integrated to be exploited.

Intel's Tom Gibbs on Tags

Here is another paper by my correspondent Tom Gibbs, Director of Global Strategy, Intel ... he writes on tagging technologies and their promise ... Download the PDF. In particular this emphasizes supply chain applications, and Intel's vision of the future of tagging. See his previous paper posted.

Consumers and RFID: a framework

I almost hesitate to post on this, because I'd like to keep it for myself. But: Rajat Paharia, who works in the Software Experiences group at IDEO, has published a framework for thinking about consumer reaction to RFID. The title of the post sums it all up: No choice, no privacy, no benefit, no way.

Wal-Mart CIO Interviewed on RFID

Linda Dillman, Wal-Mart CIO, is interviewed in InformationWeek regards their progress and position on RFID tags. I was glad to see this. There have been some mis-statements in the press and some specifics are played out here.