Walmart to Push RFID 497
bravehamster writes "According to this article over at MSNBC, Walmart is going to push its suppliers to start using RFID to track inventory by 2005. The article goes on to mention how it was Walmart who helped jumpstart widespread adoption of barcodes. The report also points out some of the barriers in the way of RFID acceptance, but never once mentions consumer privacy concerns. Guess that kind of stuff just isn't important anymore."
Re:the biggest concerns (Score:4, Interesting)
2 questions... (Score:5, Interesting)
Supply line efficiency vs. privacy (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't think this will be done, however. What is more likely is some sort of software "de-activation" that will make consumers happy but will not necessarily be a true solution, in that it will be, at least theoretically, possible to re-activate the device.
New way to advertise (Score:4, Interesting)
Mark this post. With RFID tags, this will happen. Just not right away, admittedly.
RFID abuse is almost certain (Score:3, Interesting)
RFID tags in merchandise are only half of the equation-- the marketers need a way to attach that data to a specific person-- like if some state gets the bright idea to embed an RFID tag in its driver's licenses. Or if a credit card company puts one in your VISA or MasterCard. Then...
Bingo. Joe Blow walks through a doorway, and and any still-active RFID tags on his person are collected by the RFID tag reader built unobtrusively into the door frame. Some computer in the back room duly records that Joe Blow has a NJ driver's license, wears Lee Jeans, Hanes boxers, Reebok sneakers, and chews Big Red.
Walmart often bullies suppliers, this is no diff. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Waaa waaaa "privacy concerns" (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, yes... If you don't count that fact that stores keep track of every item you ever purchase, then no, there was no loss of privacy at all.
I think the idea was that people could track what you purchased after you left the store, which is a bit more insidious.
Maybe you're just being sarcastic. If so, it's too subtle for me.
Re:What consumer privacy concerns? Answer: Choice (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Recent conversation (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe I'm not paranoid enough. High tech crooks cruising a neighbourhood with souped up RFID sensors, scoping out homes to rob. Now there's a thought. The ultimate target is a home that reads plenty of consumer electronics and jewelry tags, but no toothbrushes or combs. Guess they're on vacation. In fact, I like the idea so much that I'd like to be the first to coin the phrase waRFIDing to describe it.
Re:the biggest concerns (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't recall anyone with a cadilliac or other high end luxury car, or other passive anti theft car with the RFID tag in the key, concerned about privacy.
I don't recall any dolphins or sharks complaining about the RFID tag on their fins.
I'll complain when they try and tag my children at birth...
Do the IDs tell what the product is? (Score:3, Interesting)
- pregnancy tests
- sex toys, porn and lubricant
- medication for embarassing illnesses
- guns
Any other suggestions?Re:Waaa waaaa "privacy concerns" (Score:1, Interesting)
1. Can be scanned from a short distance.
2. Virtually unlimit ID pool, every one ever made can be uniquly identified.
3. Not tide to a scanner, any one with an RFID scanner can track them. Even the bad guys.
4. Once everything has a tag installed, congress can be lobbied to make removing them illegal, or embedded in drivers licenses, etc.
5. Airports, bus stations, side walks, grocery stores can be equipped with scanners. Since eveything you wear, your shoes, your wallet, your watch, that clean pair of socks, has a chip in it you leave a trail where ever you go.
Cool trick: Bought a soda at the corner store? The store scanned your sunglasses when you came in and scanned your sun glasses and the soda when you left. Now you throw out that soda, and it leaves evidence you where present.
Another cool trick: You give 5$ to a friend for a six pack of beer. He doesn't get scanned and associated with the 5$ bill, and uses it to buy drugs. The cops nab the drug dealer with the 5$ bill and start back tracking where it's been. You're the last person scanned with it, they start asking questions....
With a large enough cloud of RFID scanners one could, in theory, track hundreds of people moving through a busy street in Manhattan. By grouping clouds of RFID tags together you could track the individual exchanges of goods between people in near realtime on a mass scale. It would make for a really cool web page.
RFID tags are cheap, they're not indistructable nodes, but any given person could have several on his personage with out even knowing it. It's a beatifully redundant system, that only gets stronger as more products embedd the tags.
It's great for tracking products, but the civil uses are way, way cooler. Once it's in place it will make tracking by GPS seem silly and arcane, and impractical.
Re:the biggest concerns (safeway angle) (Score:1, Interesting)
the thing is that they don't need to tag you, they just need to tag your clothing, the currency you bring in your wallet, your photo id.... etc
now, all that is required is some sort of global database where they have a picture of you walking through the door, buying a [insert embarassing article here] and form letter blackmail.
no, i think it's the fact that the issue i bring up is that if your purchases retain the rfid function upon leaving the store, they become useful to the entity that decides to listen and track them: wal-mart's clothing aisle that insists that this pair of pants will match that shirt your wearing...
it's worse than the safeway club card because you knowingly give the club card to the entity; in this case, it may be against your will.
Re:privacy? (Score:2, Interesting)
1. Your credit card info is attached in their DB to all products you have purchased. SO when you enter a store (and you wear RFID tags) they can tell all your buyer history.
2. People from *outside* your house will be able to tell *EVERYTHING* that is inside. Magic of wireless... Technology freaks will drive around the neighborhoods with RFID readers to detect a 70" TV, or any other expensive stuff interesting to rob.
Cool use of RFIDs (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What consumer privacy concerns? Answer: Choice (Score:3, Interesting)
Uh..How?
I'm as big as a privacy buff as the next guy, but how the hell are the amassing a database about you simply by virtue of RFIDs?!
Like I mention below, the uproar with Benetton's plan was that the RFID was embedded in the CLOTHING. So that when you came BACK to the store, they could, ostensibly, compile a profile of your Benetton purchases by surrepitiously scanning your clothes as you came back in.
I'm going to assume, unless someone can demonstrate otherwise, that Walmart is interested in putting the RFIDs on the PACKAGING. On the long shot that the RFID *is* in the product itself, who cares? How often are you coming back to Walmart, with, say, the TV or the twizzlers you just bought there? And as for clothes...well, really, if you're dressing yourself at Walmart, you're on you're own, buddy.
But seriously, Walmart, unlike Benetton, doesn't sell high-ticket item clothes, and probably isn't interested in profiling their typical customers clothes buying habits, really. I doubt Walmart socks will have RFIDs embedded. Probably only the packages will.
Re:the biggest concerns (Score:5, Interesting)
Detection from afar (Score:5, Interesting)
About drive-by scanning: I believe that you need an antenna that's the
square of the distance to read a tag. That's why there's a little plate reader
or handheld at the checkout and those walkthrus at the door are huge.
To read it from 5 feet, you need 25 sq feet of antenna.
The other thing is that the tag itself won't be zapped or deactivated.
Each will hold a key that IDs the product (all 10oz cans of peaches from
DelMonte will have that same key, like a barcode, probably that same UPC
number) and it will also have a key that's unique to the tag itself.
It won't be zapped, it will just change the status record of that item from
"stocked" to "sold" (or "missing from inventory but not sold").
Shoplift a sweater, and even if you get it out of the store, if you wear it
to the store a year later, you could get pinged.
As much as I hate the idea, you can't blame them for implementing it.
It opens up a huge world of possibilities and won't cost them that much.
With Wal-Mart's clout, it will be up to the vendor to eat the cost of the tag,
WM just has to implement the system and specs the tag. No doubt the tag
supplier will be a WM subsidiary.
Don't want to put in the tag in your product Mr. Vendor?
Sorry, we'll find someone else that will.
Re:gun control (Score:2, Interesting)
Not saying its a good idea, but I just wonder if its floating out there
So what happens when criminals become savvy enough to scan houses/cars/people for guns? This would only create a situation of mandated gun registration for legal gun owners, and leave the criminals with their non-tagged guns
Re:the biggest concerns (Score:5, Interesting)
Now imagine that each one of these RFIDs has a unique number, and somewhere along the line you become attached to one of these tags, now all of your purchasing history is associated with YOU, and not an aggregate. And the wonderful thing is, YOU HAVE NO CHOICE. To most people this is no problem, to me, it is. I try my damndest to stay out of all forms of database, with mixed results, and with these tags, I CAN'T. My purchasing history will follow me.
Disturbing.. (Score:1, Interesting)
Personally, I wouldn't mind reading in the news about reports of technological malice - bogus RFID tags being generated, RFID interference, RFID scanners being rendered useless, etc... If (when) Walmart goes through with this, they should at least not be able to enjoy it.
Re:the biggest concerns (Score:2, Interesting)
The REAL consumer issue I see here is the additional cost of RFID tagging. Barcodes cost little (when you consider the registration costs of a barcode/SKU) and the ink it costs to print spread across millions of units produced. In effect its less than a penny of your purchase. But these, even at positive estimates, will be about 5 cents a piece once they are implemented in mass quantities. This price will inevitably be passed to consumers, but probably phased in over time and hid as an inflation cost. The problem is most time cost increased are passed on in this mannor, the price is jacked up a little bit more because the stores can get away with it. A 5 cent increase of time eventually becomes a 6 cent increase. That may sound little, but think about every unique itme you buy. If you buy 100 items a month (typical grocery buying habbits), you contributed 1 more dollar. Multiply that by customers coming through a store and you see tens of thousands of dollars of additional revenue artifically created because of RFID implementation. This profit increases the larger the store is and the more individual products sold. This is why you see stores like Walmart, Target, Best Buy, etc. buying into this plan.
Re:Walmart = sleaze (Score:4, Interesting)
So don't be offended by the search- or shop elsewhere! People who are outraged by privacy/security issues are ok, but when people feel entitled to privacy AND deep discounts, that seems too much to me.
Simple question.... (Score:1, Interesting)
Counterpoint? Count-counterpoint? Oh cr*p. (Score:3, Interesting)
At first I thought the solution would be to pay with cold, hard cash, but alas, RFID tags embedded in the paper currency are likely inevitable (if not already advertised). (OT: Who says the govt won't mandate stores to track in the interest of "reviving the economy"? Oops, sorry for the small rant there).
Re:Walmart = sleaze (Score:2, Interesting)
The interesting part? What set off the alarm was my keyring! After a little experimentation at the local corner store/video rental owned by a friend, I learned that if my 2 car keys are angled together in *just* the right way, it sets off the doorpost anti-theft alarm. These things work by detecting a resonant circuit, and I guess the angle + cuttings of the keys matches the frequency of these things.
The best part - I can now do this at will! Much fun can be had this way...
I for one welcome our RFID masters (Score:4, Interesting)
Imagine never losing anything again ever. That's a serious possibility of a world in which RFID tags are ubiqutous.
Yes there are potential privacy issues, but there are always privacy issues with any convenience technology. We get around them on a case by case basis as usual (e.g snail-mail: porno subscriptions arrive in brown paper wrapping).
How is the RFID worry any worse than TCP-IP, which passes through many unsecure places on the way to its destination? It's not, we've just already got a good handle on TCP-IP security, but noone's thought of similar ways to handle RFID.
They will, and the problems will be solved, as they always are. The sky isn't falling, it never does.
Re:2 questions... (Score:4, Interesting)
The bigger problem is that Walmart tries something like this:
Joe Blow buys a pair of shoes.
He pays for them with something other than cash that has his name and address.
Walmart now sells access to their records to other stores.
Stores with RFID readers embedded in the floor of the entrance can tell who you are when you walk in. Now they know who you are, your shopping habits, etc.
The above example could be a good thing if we could only trust companies to protect our privacy (which, IMO, we can't) by allowing companies to give us personalized shopping.
When Walmart does something everyone notices and reacts. Many have learned that you can't compete with them but you can make money by servicing areas that they have decided not to persue. I suspect that most companies will quitly embrace Wally Worlds actions concerning this.
Frequency Range? Consumers with RFID readers? (Score:4, Interesting)
Secondly if something I purchase is going to be sending an ID to readers that I don't specifically authorize, I'd like to get my own reader so I know with certainty that I've located and disabled the RFID on or in the product, since my own reader stops picking up a response/reply from the RFID.
Anyone know where consumers can purchase RFID readers?
So... What countermeasures...? (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a BIG problem with leaving the tags active and able to respond outside of said store environment. So, with that in mind (and maybe this should be turned into an 'Ask Slashdot' question):
What countermeasures are available to kill the tags, but not harm the item they're attached to, once you leave the store environment? Some ideas that come immediately to my mind are:
(1) Stuff your purchase into a microwave oven for a few seconds. That should effectively fry the tag. Unfortunately, this may not be practical for clothing containing metal buttons, zippers, or snaps.
(2) Build or buy a small EMP device designed expressly to destroy the tag's functionality. Could have varying degrees of difficulty, depending on one's skill with electronics, or the availability of such devices at the commercial level.
(3) Other ideas...?
this neo-luddite crap again? (Score:3, Interesting)
Do you know why you have a grocery store just up the road from you that's stocked with plenty of good food of different varieties at all times of year? Do you know why the average working adult in your town can afford an automobile? Do you know why you have a computer with which to post on
It's because we have an economy that's not afraid to put people out of work to improve efficiency. People can find new jobs. They might have to move or learn new skills, but that's life in the industrialized world. If you don't like it, there are some pre-industrialized countries you can go to where you'll earn a steady, miniscule pay for the same job all your life.
Take the example of the United States. Since the end of the depression, unemployment and inflation have remained relatively stable and low. But the standard of living has increased tremendously for the average white male. (It's increased even more dramatically for other people, but that's also partly because they learned to fight for their civil rights.) Yes, the short-term unemployment people experience can be very painful. That's why we have (or should have) unemployment benefits and other forms of a social welfare system to help the unemployed find new jobs.
So don't complain about automated checkout counters putting people out of work. When they do find their next jobs, they'll be able to spend less of their income on food.