RFID wireless tags face hurdles

Privacy concerns and high costs may delay the widespread adoption of RFID technology

I’m at a GoCordless.com seminar in London on RFID wireless tags, and I’m warming to the Clark-Kent-without-the-tie presenter, Neil Salton. He used to be with Plantronics, and exposes my ignorance. I learn that a tag contains not just an ID number, but also space for up to 1MB of data.

In Australia, RFID helps to track pallets and lorries via displays that give rates of trailer utilisation and warn when food in transit is likely to perish. At Marks & Spencer, RFID has aided the stock control of upmarket items and of clothes with complex sizings. And at one of Germany’s many Max Planck Institutes, a library uses RFID to read five tagged books at a time, and has saved 85 percent of the labour it used to need at the checkout.

The examples are impressive, less so Gartner’s forecast that spending on RFID will be $3bn worldwide in 2010, which strikes me as being a bit on the low side.

Meanwhile, tracking your favourite office chair with a powered, active tag will add an extra $10 to its price – and unpowered, passive tags will have to be sold in billions for them to slip in price from 25 to five cents each.

Recently, Gerd Wolfram, IT chief at Germany’s massive Metro retailers, told the Financial Times that tags wouldn’t move beyond pallets and cases to every individual item in its 2,300 stores “for a good 15 years”. He added that unit prices would need to drop to ¤0.01 for tags to beatbarcodes.

Sadly, however, cost isn’t the only problem facing RFID. As Salton notes, the tags on M&S garments tell shoppers to remove them once they’ve been bought. The reason? M&S fears its customers’ fear of surveillance.

I don’t wish to be alarmist about the impact of these fears, but they are growing. The savings brought by RFID are not in question: at the scale of Wal-Mart, Salton reports, economies of between three and five percent across all partners in the US retailer’s whole supply chain have been achieved. But when a European Commission “working document” on RFID tagging is published in September, we can expect fears about privacy and security to multiply.

There will be a nod to what EU information society commissioner Viviane Reding rightly called “a new wave of productivity gains across a wide range of sectors”. But as Reding also made clear, it’s felt that other “decisions of principle” on security and privacy must be made urgently, “before things go too far”.

Reding wants to know what information RFID will gather, how long it will be kept, who will have access to it, how it will be secured from theft, negligence and abuse, and how accuracy will be ensured. And, Reding asks, when should law enforcement agencies be able to use RFID information, and what safeguards should apply? Finally, the commissioner wants to ensure that when personal information is collected, the individuals concerned can see it, and can eventually correct it or suppress it.

Wow. All this, and you and I have barely seen an RFID tag.

Who said that lawmakers never manage to catch up with technological innovations?