RFID Production to Increase 25 fold by 2010 179
Luke PiWalker writes "The number of RFID tags produced worldwide is expected to increase more than 25 fold between 2005 and 2010, reaching 33 billion, according to market research company In-Stat. Total production of RFID tags in 2005 reached more than 1.3 billion, according to a recent report. RFID production will vary widely by industry segment for several years -- for example, RFID has been used in automotive keys since 1991, with 150 million units now in use, a quantity that greatly exceeded other segments until recently, according to In-Stat. "By far the biggest RFID segment in coming years will be supply chain management," said Allen Nogee, In-Stat analyst, in a statement. "This segment will account for the largest number of tags/labels from 2005 through 2010." RFID has obvious privacy flaws, why is the world pointed in the direction of RFID?"
Privacy fatigue (Score:2, Informative)
Yeah, because that crate of 300 rubber chickens from Shanghai really needs "privacy" as it makes its way from Dock 42 in Seattle to some anonymous Wal-Mart stockroom in Piedmont, Arizona.
The annoying thing is that when they come for me, there will be plenty of people left to speak up for me, but nobody will be listening. Quit crying "wolf" over every meme that exits the blogosphere, fer Pete's sake.
RFID in the supply chain (Score:5, Informative)
fold? am I the only geek on /.? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Which RFID company to invest in... (Score:4, Informative)
Impinj http://www.impinj.com/ [impinj.com]
Intermec http://www.intermec.com/ [intermec.com]
Re:RFID and the Average Person (Score:5, Informative)
I work as the IT manager for the largest RFID company in the world. We are *the* supplier of RFID tags and devices to the DoD. With the tags and devices available from my company and others; Matrics, Alien etc.. you needent worry. These tags are too expensive, or also too big and too weak to be of concern to people. (Expensive being the primary gating item to ubiquity)
However - i would remind people that a cell phone is far more an unknown and exploitable device than the current commercially advertised and known RFID tags.
RFID is a phenomenon that has been known about for a long time. (as are cell phones which were first proofed in the 40s) and falls into two categories; Active or Passive. Active tags have a battery which powers the antennae - passive tags merely respond to RF waves that pass through them and "reply" with a unique signature.
Passive tags hold very little data, usually just an ID - or serial number (around 1K-ish - historically). Active tags have memory (256/512K ish) and can hold real data, such as the manifest of a shipping container.
The data still needs to be read and dealt with in a meaningful way. Passive IDs need to be correlated to a backend DB which equates the ID with some meaningful data, such as a record of what that ID actually represents.
Active tags are a bit more flexible in that they can provide info which does not necessarily require access to a backed DB in order to understand what the tag is identifying, or what that container holds.
My company only produces Active tags. These tags are large, expensive and meant for tracking THINGS. Containers specifically - or large cost items, such as a vehicle(parts). Our tags are used on shipping containers and trucks, and pose no threat to personal privacy, unless you dont want people (yourself) to know what you placed inside some container which is being shipped from one port to the next.
Active tags, backed by batteries, arent just capable of greater range, they are capable of TELLING the reader system about events that occur. For example - we have some tags which have sensors on them. Light, temp. humidity, shock etc. These sensors can be set to alert if they go off or above threshold. This is important when you are concerned about the viability/integrity of the property the tag is "watching". Some medications spoil if exposed to certain temperatures for extended periods of time. The sensor tag can monitor temp then alert if it gets too high for too long. Some munitions automatically ARM themselves if they receive a certain amount of shock. so the tags would warn if a munition is armed, important to know if your going to be moving a box of explosives via crane or forklift.
Active tags cost between 60 and 85 dollars per tag. Are roughly 4" long and 1" high and 1.5" wide. Active tags run at 433 megahertz and 123 kilohertz (the two frequencies are used for two different functions: reading data from the tag (433) or sending commands to the tag (123)).
There are some new active tags which are smaller, and run on 802.11 (wifi) frequencies, but there are a great number of challenges in that freq. range.
Passive tags are a losing proposition for most companies as the manufacturing cost is greater than what the tag can be sold for. Before tags can be ubiquitous in products - they need to be throw-away cheap. some person I dont know said that the magic number for passive tags was
There is a lot of supporting infrastructure required to do anything of interest with RFID - its not just that you deploy a bunch of tags and all of a sudden you c
Reaction not to FUD, but to an existing threat (Score:1, Informative)
There are two glass encapsulated RFID tags pictured above. One is intended for human flesh, the other for the scruff of your pet's neck. Which is which?
Answer: The chip pictured at the top is VeriChip's VeriMed chip that former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson would like to see implanted in all Americans. Directly below the human chip is the animal chip marketed by Schering-Plough under the "Home Again" brand name.
There's no visible difference between the chips. They look the same, and they're both manufactured by subsidiaries of VeriChip's parent company Applied Digital Solutions. The whitish substance on the end of the chips is an anti-migration coating called "biobond" that encourages tissue growth so the chip doesn't move around inside of the animial--human, feline, or canine.
There is a technical difference between the chips that you wouldn't see with the naked eye. The pet chip contains a 9-digit number while the human chip contains a 16-digit number. I asked VeriChip spokesman John Procter why the human version contained 16-digits. His reply: "flexibility." He said the company wanted to ensure there would be enough unique numbers available for all the people it envisions chipping. Yikes!
Note: The VeriChip corporation tries to ease consumer fears by referring to the chip as being "about the size of a grain of rice." The rice in the photo above is long-grain rice--the longest grain I could find in my pantry. As you can see, the VeriChip is much larger.
Re:No. No, it's not. (Score:3, Informative)
I belive that IPv6 address space contains enough unique IPs to have something like a million per square metre of the earth's surface. IPv6 is going to be implemented.
It's simply a question of scaling. Consider the RFID tag to be like a unique IP. Can you locate that ID amid distruibuted databases? Potentially yes.
Marketers want this. The lust for it. If you tag it, they will find a way to grok it.