Sorry for the lack of postings lately. It's not that the press has been quiet about RFID over the past couple of weeks. In fact, I've been kept quite busy keeping up with all of the clippings. However, it has been more of the same: product and services announcements, coverage of missed deadlines, discussions of ROI, and yes, some angst over privacy issues we've covered before. Nothing I felt worthy of reporting here.
However, I found this article in the Boston Globe by Hiawatha Brey to be a refreshingly engaging yet succinct take on the privacy debate. He may be trivializing privacy concerns by equating them with annoyances, yet the word feels right.
Privacy concerns aside, as RFID use increases so will the annoyances. Speedpass is a remarkably well done implementation of an RFID system. It's right there on your keychain, so if you've got your car, you've got a way to pay for the gas. The system's signage and feedback are simple and straightforward. But then a valet swaps your Speedpass with one that's he's previously stolen (and has since been deactivated) and you've got headaches. It happens.
Toll transponders save tremendous amounts of time at the entrance and exits from the freeways, but my boss is constantly griping about the Massachusetts implementation. He routinely has large fines appear on his bill because the antifraud safeguards within the system are overly simplistic. From what I have read, he is not alone.
As RFID use spreads, minor glitches, analogous to cell phone static and dropped calls, will be an inevitable part of the experience. And there will be gross failures with these systems such as those examplified above. As Hiawatha asks, will the benefits be worth it? He thinks so, and so do I.
Posted by holtzman at April 12, 2004 07:50 AM> Consumers could even have their own RFID
> readers built into cellphones. Point it at a
> circular saw at the Home Depot. Your phone
> could not only display the price, but
> automatically log onto a Consumer Reports-type
> Internet service and display product reviews
> and prices at competing retailers.
Which doesn't require RFID readers, but merely bar code scanners, since the thing (on the front end) that's needed is identity unique to the class of item, not the per-unit uniqueness that EPC RFID will deliver.
But this has been tried before, to the tune of half a billion dollars worth of VC and corporate money, from Barpoint, IQorder, DigitalConvergence (the :CueCat people) and Airclic, and you still haven't got people doing it.
I do think that the underlying calculus is changing, though, partly in the decreasing technology costs (bar code scanners and RFID readers are still expensive adjuncts to cell phones, but you can get them, and demand will make that cheaper), and partly because the information economics of the *back* end (DigitalConvergence had to spend lots and lots of money to create a corpus of product information to map UPCs to) is going to change dramatically.