applications

This page covers business, institutional and personal applications of RFID technology.

It covers -

• introduction
• traffic systems
• perimeter control
• supply chain management
• authentication
• livestock management
• personal identification
• materiel life-cycle control

     introduction

As the preceding page suggested, RFID technologies are neither inherently benign or subversive, unless you believe that they embody "the mark of the Beast". Their value (and threat) lies in how they are used, in particular

• what happens to information collections that incorporate data from RFIDs
• whether people are aware of (and consent to) data collection and use.

The salient attraction for may developers is the ease of data capture: entities can be readily identified in ways that minimise labour costs and integrate that information with other applications (eg billing systems).

     traffic systems

The RFID application with which most people are familiar is one of the oldest and simplest: traffic systems.

RFID-based road management systems operate on the basis of flat fees or congestion pricing. Those systems typically have two features -

• real time automated identification of vehicles
• automated billing, with the fee for use of the road being deducted from the user's bank account or added to a periodic bill

Singapore for example regulates traffic flow by using congestion pricing (fees or higher fees on particular roads during peak periods) and RFIDs. All vehicles in that nation carry active tags, communicating with readers dispersed across the island along all main routes. Vehicle by vehicle identification allows the government to automatically deduct payments from each user's account and, if there are insufficient funds, to issue a fine. As a single journey often involves transit past several readers it is in principle possible to get a broad idea of individual itineraries.

Australian commercial tollways (and some counterparts in the US) use a less sophisticated scheme, with travelers being able to lease an active tag that is generally left on the dashboard of the vehicle that they are using. The tag is identified by the road operator when it passes through a checkpoint onto the particular tolway, with a fee being debited from the user's credit card.

Several jurisdictions are trialling RFID-equipped smartcards for commuter rail, ferry and light rail networks. Typically commuters are billed when they pass through a barrier (or enter a vehicle) that is equipped with a reader of the relevant tag. Some cards embody a rechargeable electronic purse, with the consumer topping up the account.

     perimeter control

The RFID application with perhaps the highest profile in the ICT sector is, in practice, one of the simplest. Many organisations are using RFID-based cards (often called proximity cards) as a replacement for magnetic stripe cards or keypad entry controlling entry to compounds, buildings or individual rooms.

That application has attracted little consumer attention, in contrast to anxieties about use or potential misuse of tagging in supply chains (particularly at the retail link and beyond).

     supply chain management

Improved inventory management - including identifying what is in stock and minimising handling of items passing from manufacturer through wholesaler to the retailer or from a component supplier to an assembler - has the potential to significantly reduce costs, of particular interest for major retailers whose business is based on high volume sales with very low margins. Benefits include reduced labour costs and, more broadly, greater scope to move to just-in-time product acquisition and strengthen EDI between various actors.

As with barcodes, initial interest in supply chain tagging was at the category or consignment level (eg a shipping container, a pallet or a class of products). It was driven by leading actors - for example the US Defence Department, the major automobile manufacturers and dominant retailers retailers such as WalMart and Tesco - who could mandate deliveries must feature particular identifiers, had the resources to establish the necessary infrastructure, the capacity to integrate RFID data with their information systems and often were in the position to develop standards.

The focus is shifting beyond the consignment to identification of individual items, with the pace of change being determined - as highlighted on the preceding page of this profile - by factors such as the cost of tags and the perceived ROI from reengineering information systems to fully leverage the data. Some actors are adopting a 'wait & see' approach, in the expectation that the next generation of tags and systems integration will allow features such as

• dynamic pricing of items 'on the shelf'
• seamless payment schemes (eg the vision of money being sucked out of your account via a wireless payment card as you walk your shopping trolley through the gateway where the cashregister used to be).

At the moment it is likely that some early adopters - and potential adopters - are in a position to collect data but have difficulty making sense of it on a commercial basis (eg altering their product acquisition) or reducing particular costs beyond the warehouse.

Uptake has been bedevilled by mismanagement of RFID introduction by individual retailers in the US, Germany, France and UK (exacerbated by mischiefmaking by some activist groups and hype by RFID visionaries). As we note in the following page of this profile, that has led to vandalism, boycotts and calls for regulatory intervention.

Libraries are trialling tagging for security (eg replacing traditional 'tattletape' alarms) and for inventory management, increasingly with identification at the item level to assist handling of multiple copies of a particular title. That tagging is often based on a unique number rather than on the work's ISBN or ISSN, undermining claims that surveillance agencies will park a reader outside libraries to track consumption of subversive literature. (Tracking would, presumably, be available through old-fashioned access to the institution's database).

     authentication

RFIDs have also been promoted as a generic or item by item authentication mechanism, particularly for high value items such as pharmaceuticals subject to forgery. The expectation is that tagging would replace barcodes and hologram labels, with hospitals or other dispensaries able to quickly interrogate a secure global database to determine whether a particular consignment or container is what it purports to be.

Other claims for RFIDs as an anti-forgery mechanism are more problematical. Much media attention has been attracted by supposed current use of RFIDs in US and EU banknotes as an anti-counterfeiting tool or as a mechanism for pervasive surveillance. Skeptics about some conspiracist claims note that notes in many currencies already bear unique serial numbers or other identifiers: in principle the advantage of including a tag would be to speed up reading and logging of notes.

In practice the large number of notes in circulation, movement through different hands (and acceptace by people 'off the grid' without the ability to validate the tag), formidable data collection and data mining problems, and cheapness of alternate mechanisms for tracking malefactors means that fears about tagged notes appear unjustified.

     livestock management

Apart from traffic management systems, many people are most familiar with RFIDs as the basis of domestic pet registration schemes.

Some jurisdictions in Australia, for example, mandate subdermal 'chipping' of cats and dogs as part of pet registration schemes. The tags are inserted by veterinarians as a condition for licencing of the beasts, replacing detachable collars and tattoos that were not robust, easily identifiable and readily integrated with government/private databases. In practice performance has been limited by non-compliance (with estimates that upwards of 40% of Australia's seven million companion animals are unregistered) and implementation teething pains, with disagreement about standards and competing registries.

Polemicist John Gilmore - who apparently thinks that both information and moggies should always roam free - grizzled in 2004 that

The people we spoke with in the shelters were confused by our opposition to their "safe, sane, and humane" policy of RFID-tracking every animal that came within chip-gun range of them. When a cat is lost, they scan 'em like a bag of potato chips, pull 'em up in the database, and call their owner.

Identification and response - better to scan Rover and thereby reunite him with his family than euthanase him as an unowned and unwanted dog - have however attracted support from vets, government agencies and pet owners.

There is increasing interest in extending the same technology to management of other animals, particular in ways that 'add value'.

The US Department of Agriculture for example announced moves in 2004 towards "giving every cow in the United States its own unique identification number", with an official announcing "We want to allocate an individual identification, just like you and I have Social Security numbers". The primary rationale appears to be quarantine and contamination management, with claims that tagging can provide 'paddock to plate' identification.

That is problematical, given breaks in continuity and uneven data capture. In particular there are difficulties in identification through successive links in the supply chain from farm to consumer: a single tag (even less than a single ID number) cannot be used for the one animal in the field, for its carcase and individual slices of meat.

In Australia most projects have been less ambitious. The Australian Sheep Industry Co-operative Research Centre's Remote Individual Animal Management (RIAM) system uses RFIDs as the basis for remote automatic logging and weighing of sheep. Tagged sheep are automatically logged and weighed as they move through a race from one field to another or to feed or drink. It is envisaged that automatic gates will in future be linked to the walk-through scales, with underweight animals being separated from their healthier peers.

RIAM offers clear advantages over existing branding and ear-marking schemes.

     personal identification

The same technologies can be used for the identification (and thereby control) of humans through RFID tags parked under the skin - the subcutaneous or subdermal chip - an extension of notions of the 'body as data' that we have explored in our privacy guide and surveillance profile.

System vendors and researchers have proposed various schemes, some smelling of journalistic licence. These include

children - 'chipping' kids so that can be identified if they suffer an accident (something that presupposes large-scale and open health services or police databases) or stray beyond the bounds of particular reader-equipped zones (eg leave the schoolyard)

seniors - similarly tagging seniors suffering from Alzheimers ... the alarms sound when they wander past the readers at the building's exits

prisoners - keeping tabs on those incarcerated by the law rather than biology

supremos - mexican law enforcement officials and some wealthy investors have attracted attention over publicity regarding 'chipping' to allow them access to restricted facilities and facilitate identification of their corpses if kidnapped

In practice use of RFIDs as human identifiers has largely taken two forms.

The first is the 'wireless bracelet' (or handcuff), which alerts a network operator if the wearer moves out of contact with the network or instead enables the operator to locate the wearer. Uses have included restricting prisoners in home detention (remove the handcuff or leave the premises results in an automated alert being sent to custodial authorities). More benignly, tagged kids in the LegoLand theme park can be tracked by anxious - or merely ambitiously technophile - parents.

The second form is as supplementary verification in official documentation, with for example moves to incorporate tags in passports - either to indicate that the document is authentic or, more usefully, supply unique identification numbers tied to citizenship and watchlist databases. From a technical rather than policy perspective there is little difference between "giving every cow in the United States its own unique identification number" and having a unique RFID number for every person in the US, Netherlands or Australia.

     materiel life-cycle control

Other proponents of RFIDs have mooted use as an identifier for building material, consumer electronics and other items that might eventually be recycled. Singapore, for example, gained attention over trials in embedding tags in the fabric of buildings that are likely to be demolished in twenty years time.

It is unclear whether tagging of items for recycling - particularly those that will be in use for many years or where end-processing techniques mean that reduced sorting costs offer few benefits - is of particular value.

    next page  (issues and advocacy)