Applied Digital Solutions, maker of VeriChip, a human implantable RFID chip, is trying to expand their market. When they first debuted the product, their leading application was for associating individuals with their medical records. Another often cited application was chipping children and memory-impared adults to get them home when lost.
Those applications are no longer discussed on the product's home page. Recently ADSX jumped on the transportation and homeland security bandwagon. Also, they tout the VeriChip for facility access control.
The latest target is commerce. They want to chip people to replace credit cards, according to articles in Wired and C|Net.
Reported in ZDNet UK by Graeme Wearden, "A global alliance of opponents to the rollout of radio frequency identification tagging systems are demanding that companies stop deploying them until crucial issues such as privacy are addressed."
This is another report on the CASPIAN and Privacy Rights Clearing House statement that came out of the RFID Privacy Workshop. Now more than 30 civil liberties groups have signed up!
You can also read the full position statement
The ITU mentioned the workshiop in its news log. All in all, a very nice, balanced treatment.
From PRNewswire:
The National Retail Federation and the California Retailers Association today promised to lend their expertise on both technical and policy issues as the California state Senate prepares to hold a hearing on radio frequency identification (RFID) technology this week.
"RFID has the potential to revolutionize the way retailers do business and the way consumers shop as much as the bar code did a generation ago, but it has to be done right," NRF Senior Vice President for Government Affairs Steve Pfister said. "NRF has done considerable research into both the technical and policy implications of RFID and stands ready to assist legislators in California or any other state as they work to understand this new technology."
From TechWeb News:
http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20031118S0004
In his article entitled "RFID Tags and the Question of Personal Privacy," Jack Germain of TechNewsWorld highlights RSA Laboratory's Blocker Tags.
"The ability of RFID-tagged products to track merchandise from inception to the point of sale and beyond has some privacy experts sounding an alarm. These privacy advocates worry about the prevalence of RFID tags eventually being used to track people unwittingly."
http://www.technewsworld.com/perl/story/32161.html
Wired chimes in with a report on our workshop.
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,61264,00.html
Information Week ran this story by Rick Whiting about our workshop:
Consumers must be given notice if radio-frequency identification chips are ever used on individual products and packaging, and they need to be better educated about the technology's benefits and potential for misuse. Privacy advocates and RFID backers appeared to agree on at least that much Saturday at a workshop on RFID and privacy involving several hundred representatives of RFID technology producers and users, privacy advocates, academics, and technologists. But the conference also showed that the two sides have a lot of work to do to find common ground.
First, a quick thank you to all of the speakers, volunteers, and participants that made yesterday's workshop a tremendous success.
Simson has been dilligently making the papers and powerpoint presentations available off the agenda page, and I have just finished adding the streaming video archive of the sessions there as well. So, if you couldn't make it to the workshop, want to recommend it to a friend or collegue, or need to review it yourself, you'll find what you need at:
http://www.rfidprivacy.org/agenda.php.
The free RealOne player is needed for viewing the Webcast archive, and can be downloaded from http://www.real.com.
The RFID Privacy Workshop at MIT will be webcast from this URL:
http://www.media.mit.edu/events/workshop-rfid.html
See you there!
The Chicago Sun Times reports that P&G and Wla-Mart did a secret test of RFID chips in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, where Max Factor Lipfinity lipstick containers were equippped with RFID chips. "The shelves and Webcam images were viewed 750 miles away by Procter & Gamble researchers in Cincinnati who could tell when lipsticks were removed from the shelves and could even watch consumers in action," the article says.
Katherine Albrecht has issued a press release in which she discusses this latest scandal. "It proves what we've been saying all along," says Katherine Albrecht, Founder and Director of Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (CASPIAN). "Wal-Mart, Procter & Gamble and others have experimented on shoppers with controversial spy chip technology and tried to cover it up. Consumers and members of the press should be upset to learn that they've been lied to."
From the NY Times:
Some consumer products companies will have to invest millions of dollars to comply with Wal-Mart's drive to have every carton and palette it receives carry a radio identification tag, according to a report to be released today by A. T. Kearney, a consulting firm.
"It's a big item that most of them have not budgeted for," said David Dannon, vice president for the consumer industries and retail products practice at Kearney, a Chicago-based subsidiary of Electronic Data Services.
[...]
"Some of our clients are saying we are going to drag this out as long as we can," Mr. Carey said. Still, getting on the wrong side of Wal-Mart is not widely viewed as an option.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/10/technology/10radio.html
WAL-MART, which earlier this year abruptly announced that it was dropping plans for a trial of consumer-level RFID tags, has detailed its plans for RFID over the next two years, according to this article in the RFID Journal.
Key points regarding the policy announcement:
Quoted in the article: “Wal-Mart is saying to CPG companies and RFID vendors, here’s the bar; see if you can meet and exceed this,” says Jonathan Loretto, global lead for RFID at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young. “It’s achievable. Whether it's achievable in the next 12 months, only time will tell.”
From internetnews.com:
Sun Microsystems Wednesday said it will open a testing center in Dallas next month to take advantage of Wal-Mart's concentrated interest in radio frequency identification tags (commonly referred to as RFID).
This week, Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart met with its top 100 suppliers to set standards on how the company will use the Electronic Product Code (EPC) compliant RFID. The retail giant has mandated the use of the tracking technology by all of its suppliers by 2005. The move is similar to Wal-Mart's precedence for bar coding in the 1980's.
Santa Clara, Calif.-based Sun's support for Wal-Mart's foray is an extension of the network computer maker's plans to offer hardware, software and services that enable enterprises to link into the Elecronic Product Code (EPN) Network.
http://www.internetnews.com/wireless/article.php/3105231
According to this article in ComputerWorld, the US Department of Defense has decided to go with the ISO RFID standard, and not the standard being put forth by EPC Global.
According to the article, "The military would like to support the EPC standard, said Maurice Stewart, deputy chief of the DOD's Automatic Identification Technology office. But the Pentagon has "embraced ISO standards, because that is the way we do business," Stewart said. He added that many of the DOD's suppliers have already adopted draft versions of the ISO 18000 RFID standards and that those specifications should provide trading partners with plug-and-play capabilities."
From ZDNet:
NEW YORK--The latest technology craze can be found hanging from a Prada shirt in downtown New York or tacked onto cases of Boston-based Gillette razors.
Small tags that use radio frequencies to gather information are turning up as a potential replacement to the UPC code that keeps tabs on consumer goods, and technology companies are betting they will emerge as the next hot thing.
But that may not happen any time soon, analysts say, because radio frequency identification tags still don't work that well.
The tags fall far below the 99 percent reliability rate of UPC tags because of the difficulty of transmitting clean radio signals. At 20 cents to 30 cents apiece, plus the cost of altering packaging lines to accommodate them, the tags are also too expensive for most companies to use.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103_2-5101130.html
From C|Net:
Wal-Mart Stores and its largest 100 merchandise suppliers plan to meet this week to plot the implementation of a new high-tech inventory-tracking system, a project expected to send ripples across the retail industry.
http://news.com.com/2100-1008_3-5101416.html