Trends
Chilling signals
by Mic Dover
The technology that will see groceries remain in the trolley at the supermarket checkout could also see people’s movements secretly tracked, thanks to a tiny chip implanted in their clothes.
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has been around for decades. The British, for example, used it in World War II to identify incoming aircraft as friend or foe. But in recent years someone came up with the idea of using it to identify goods, then putting the data on globally networked databases, announcing the arrival of the “Internet of Things”. Then someone else thought of putting the technology into people. Suddenly, an old technology had new life.
RFID uses tiny pieces of hardware called transponders, or “tags”, which are essentially microchips that feature an antenna. These tags transmit and receive radio signals to and from nearby scanners. Goods can be tracked along a whole supply chain, not just from factory to warehouse to shop, but also into your home and even into landfills.
It may sound like future talk, but RFID is already out there – in car immobilisers, toll roads, passports, library books, clothing, cows, even fish. There are over 10,000 RFID tags in every Airbus A380, the world’s largest passenger aircraft. But the most visible evidence of RFID in your life in the future will probably be at the supermarket.
German grocery giant Metro has successfully demonstrated the retail holy grail of checking out groceries without removing them from the supermarket trolley. Farewell, then, checkout staff. For manufacturers, their grail is also within reach – a “sell one, make one” supply chain. In another words, as sales of DVD players at global checkouts speed up or slow down, so would the synchronised production line in China or Vietnam. Virtual zero storage makes JIT (Just In Time) warehousing look tardy by comparison.
In Europe, early adopters like Tesco have staged some high-profile pilot projects. The supermarket chain tagged packs of Gillette Mach3 razor blades so that staff were automatically alerted to stock levels, sell-by dates and whether a product had been paid for when it left the shop. Then Benetton started sewing RFID tags into its clothing.
This was too much for privacy advocates such as Caspian (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering) and NoTags. Websites appeared that encouraged consumers to boycott Tesco, Gillette, Benetton and other RFID adopters. Retailers found themselves issuing reassuring press releases about privacy. Other companies put the brakes on RFID trials.
But concerns about nosy razor blades were nothing compared to worries about the RFID-tracking of humans. In California recently, a school decided to RFID-enable students’ ID cards, but didn’t bother to tell pupils or parents. Once the truth came out, parents complained, negative publicity snowballed and the project was canned.
A few days later, the University of California revealed that it is RFID-tagging cadavers in an effort to cut down on the theft of body parts for sale on the black market. Dissect me, Trade Me.
California has earned a reputation as the world’s laboratory for such experimentation, so it was no surprise that a Californian company, the Verichip Corporation, was the first to get paid to implant RFID tags into people. Verichip injected rice-grain-sized tags into the arms of the Mexican Attorney-General and various staff members – in order to control access to a new government facility in Mexico City.
More recently, a Glasgow bar has started encouraging customers to “get chipped”. Owner Brad Stevens boasted, “By the time you get to the bar, your tab is set up, your favourite drink is poured and the bar staff can greet you by name.”
Convenient, sure. But Chris McDermott, the director of NoTags, commented that “having the chip inserted under the skin is the same as having a barcode tattooed onto your forehead, only worse”.
On top of the privacy implications, the Scottish Government was also concerned that just waving your arm to buy another drink may cause some people to drink excessively. The bar’s name? Bar Soba.
But RFID can be good news, too. Since the mad cow disease and foot and mouth disasters, RFID-tracking of animals has been a major plank in the British Government’s strategy to track meat from “farm gate to dinner plate”. Today, over a million pets and farm animals worldwide have RFID tags in or on them, so Rover or Daisy can easily be tracked if they wander off.
And few could object to the Australian hospital that has introduced a non-invasive, RFID-based baby-tracking system in its maternity ward, in response to the kidnapping of a newborn in 2003, or to the launch of the “SurgiChip” in the US, an adhesive RFID tag that aims to prevent “wrong-site, wrong-procedure and wrong-patient surgery”.
Meanwhile, back at the supply chain, the US Department of Defense and retail behemoth Wal-Mart suddenly told hundreds of their suppliers late last year to begin RFID tagging, “or lose our business”. Companies worldwide sat up and took notice.
But is RFID really a threat to our privacy? Blair Stewart, New Zealand’s Assistant Privacy Commissioner, cites concerns raised by his counterparts in the European Union. They expect RFID technology to become one of the main bricks of a future “ambient intelligence environment”, a phrase that Stewart says he finds “somewhat chilling”.
“The technology in itself is neutral,’’ says Stewart. “It’s what people do with it that concerns me. Once you get beyond the checkout, what safeguards do we have that the tags are no longer active? Transparency is important, too – should goods explicitly state that they contain these tags?’’
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