http://www.channel4.com/news/2003/07/week_4/28_chips.html
Chips with everything
Technology
Published: 27-Jul-2003
By: David Rowan
Microchip trackers, no bigger than a grain of sand, are set to become the latest weapon in the battle of the high street.
The so-called Smart Tags can be fitted into virtually everything we buy, and send out a radio signal picked up by internet-linked computers.
The technology could already be on its way to a supermarket near you. But there are fears that the retailers' dream is a Big Brother nightmare.
At Prada's showcase New York store, you have to steel yourself to look at the prices.
But the price tags here are smarter than you'd think: they send out signals that are picked up all over the store, leaving a snapshot as individual items are detected, and, in the changing rooms, triggering video images of whatever you're trying on.
This is the place to go if you do need that $3,000 dress. But unlike most stores, almost everything in this one has a chip attached.
The chips are the size of a grain of sand - but it they're not switched off after you've left the store, you leave a trail wherever you go.
This trail can be picked up by anyone with the right scanner, which can identify an item by its unique signal.
Companies from Coca Cola to Marks & Spencer are introducing these tiny chips.
Tiny trackers
Prada removes them at the cash-desk, but firms such as Benetton have discussed embedding them with their antennae inside the clothes themselves. So somewhere, a database could be tracking your progress.
At MIT in Boston, the Auto-ID Centre is building the global information network that will put this technology - known as radio frequency identification, or RFID - into everything.
The Centre's sponsors - from Walmart and Unilever to government departments - see huge commercial benefits in tracking products in real time through a vast computer network. The man who speaks for these corporations aims for nothing less than to change the world.
Kevin Ashton told us: “One day, and not this decade, it's not impossible that everything in the global supply chain, almost every manufactured object, could contain a tiny wireless computer.
“So the computers that we use to manage this supply chain will know where everything is, all the time.”
Internet of things
He's calling it the 'internet of things' - with scanners everywhere linked to databases following trillions of items.
As these smart tags get cheaper and more universal - and Gillette's just ordered half a billion of them - the MIT visionaries say we'll all benefit if firms know when and where goods are needed.
Ashton adds: “We'll see lower prices, fresher food, it will be easier to buy the things we want to buy, and maybe, 15 years hence, we won't need to stand in line at the checkout.
The question is whether consumers are ready for their personal items to be monitored, and that data logged over the internet.
When Benetton said in March that it would put the tags in sweaters, a boycott put its plans on hold. Privacy campaigners say RFID lays you open to permanent surveillance.
Big Brother?
Katherine Albrecht said: This technology has the potential to track people from the time they get up in the morning to the time they go to bed.
Reader devices have been fabricated into floor tiles, carpeting, doorways. They're very easily hidden. As you enter a doorway, you will be emanating an electronic cloud. Everything from your earrings to what's in your briefcase would be sending out information that would be picked up by the doorway.
The Auto-ID Centre's own confidential research, obtained by Channel 4 News, suggests that 78 per cent of consumers oppose these smart tags. So behind closed doors, it's fighting back. We've learned that its PR agency urged a "proactive approach on privacy" - "neutralising opposition" by creating a new advisory body of "credible experts and potentially adversarial advocates".
Minority Report
It's a futuristic vision straight out of the film Minority Report. Already your personal information is being stored each time you make a phone-call or credit-card purchase. Computers can then cross-reference hundreds of databases to predict your behaviour.
But these chips are a marketing man's dream - one that's fast becoming reality.
Judd Ferrer, of location-based marketing firm, Insitu, said: “What this chip can offer to the marketing world is the ability to track consumer behaviour from the store to the home, and if they've got the ability to put RFID into appliances, the ability to understand what's going on at the home and then taking it back to the store.
Imagine what this could one day mean:
Talking adverts in Times Square….
Budweiser – “Hi David - feeling thirsty today?”
Swatch Wink – “Oh, David...”
Cup Noodle – “Mmm, chicken flavour, David, your favourite...”
Moving Strap – “Don't forget your wife's birthday... “
Samsung – “Catch this special offer, David...”
When all this information the scanners have picked up about you is out there on the internet, who knows how it will be used - not just to sell you things, but to know where you've been, and what you've been doing.
At Tesco, the future has already arrived. It's taking part in government-funded trials that use RFID tags in Gillette razors and DVDs to track them through the store.
Automatic re-ordering
Readers built into the shelves monitor each item - so if it's sold, the computer automatically orders another.
And if one leaves the store unpaid for, the system can trigger security cameras. There are no warnings that these DVDs have tags attached.
Greg Sage, Tesco spokesman, says: “The tag itself is tiny so you wouldn't see it, but when customers come to ask our staff, they can see the benefits immediately, because it's much quicker for them and it means they can get on with their shopping with the minimum of hassle.
From next week, this store will be scanning the tags at the checkout too. If a DVD's unique number could be matched to, say, my loyalty card, who knows what it could reveal about me? And it doesn't end there.
Tesco doesn't disable its tags when you leave the store - so scanners can pick up their electronic trail, as we found out when we visited a firm which programmes this technology.
Single identifying number
Forty miles away, our DVD of The Matrix bought in Tesco was still signalling its tag's unique number.
At MIT, they're advising corporations to keep all this data anonymous, and to give you the chance to have tags 'killed' at the checkout.
Because once the trail's out there, the police, and maybe your boss, could access it to know where you are at any time. And what if hackers accessed your records too? Today, the system's unregulated - but soon it may be too late.
Richard Allan MP(Lib Dem technology spokesman) said: “People being able to track your movements may seem like a theoretical risk, but in reality, do we want where we were at any particular point of the day to be known to everyone?
“The idea that one not only has CCTV cameras watching over you but your own clothes watching over you and sending off data that could be jumbled up and spat out to your detriment is one that's of serious concern to me.”
Twenty years after barcodes took over, the smart tag is on the edge of a far more pervasive revolution. The one question that isn't being asked is whether you want it.
Chips with everything
Technology
Published: 27-Jul-2003
By: David Rowan
Microchip trackers, no bigger than a grain of sand, are set to become the latest weapon in the battle of the high street.
The so-called Smart Tags can be fitted into virtually everything we buy, and send out a radio signal picked up by internet-linked computers.
The technology could already be on its way to a supermarket near you. But there are fears that the retailers' dream is a Big Brother nightmare.
At Prada's showcase New York store, you have to steel yourself to look at the prices.
But the price tags here are smarter than you'd think: they send out signals that are picked up all over the store, leaving a snapshot as individual items are detected, and, in the changing rooms, triggering video images of whatever you're trying on.
This is the place to go if you do need that $3,000 dress. But unlike most stores, almost everything in this one has a chip attached.
The chips are the size of a grain of sand - but it they're not switched off after you've left the store, you leave a trail wherever you go.
This trail can be picked up by anyone with the right scanner, which can identify an item by its unique signal.
Companies from Coca Cola to Marks & Spencer are introducing these tiny chips.
Tiny trackers
Prada removes them at the cash-desk, but firms such as Benetton have discussed embedding them with their antennae inside the clothes themselves. So somewhere, a database could be tracking your progress.
At MIT in Boston, the Auto-ID Centre is building the global information network that will put this technology - known as radio frequency identification, or RFID - into everything.
The Centre's sponsors - from Walmart and Unilever to government departments - see huge commercial benefits in tracking products in real time through a vast computer network. The man who speaks for these corporations aims for nothing less than to change the world.
Kevin Ashton told us: “One day, and not this decade, it's not impossible that everything in the global supply chain, almost every manufactured object, could contain a tiny wireless computer.
“So the computers that we use to manage this supply chain will know where everything is, all the time.”
Internet of things
He's calling it the 'internet of things' - with scanners everywhere linked to databases following trillions of items.
As these smart tags get cheaper and more universal - and Gillette's just ordered half a billion of them - the MIT visionaries say we'll all benefit if firms know when and where goods are needed.
Ashton adds: “We'll see lower prices, fresher food, it will be easier to buy the things we want to buy, and maybe, 15 years hence, we won't need to stand in line at the checkout.
The question is whether consumers are ready for their personal items to be monitored, and that data logged over the internet.
When Benetton said in March that it would put the tags in sweaters, a boycott put its plans on hold. Privacy campaigners say RFID lays you open to permanent surveillance.
Big Brother?
Katherine Albrecht said: This technology has the potential to track people from the time they get up in the morning to the time they go to bed.
Reader devices have been fabricated into floor tiles, carpeting, doorways. They're very easily hidden. As you enter a doorway, you will be emanating an electronic cloud. Everything from your earrings to what's in your briefcase would be sending out information that would be picked up by the doorway.
The Auto-ID Centre's own confidential research, obtained by Channel 4 News, suggests that 78 per cent of consumers oppose these smart tags. So behind closed doors, it's fighting back. We've learned that its PR agency urged a "proactive approach on privacy" - "neutralising opposition" by creating a new advisory body of "credible experts and potentially adversarial advocates".
Minority Report
It's a futuristic vision straight out of the film Minority Report. Already your personal information is being stored each time you make a phone-call or credit-card purchase. Computers can then cross-reference hundreds of databases to predict your behaviour.
But these chips are a marketing man's dream - one that's fast becoming reality.
Judd Ferrer, of location-based marketing firm, Insitu, said: “What this chip can offer to the marketing world is the ability to track consumer behaviour from the store to the home, and if they've got the ability to put RFID into appliances, the ability to understand what's going on at the home and then taking it back to the store.
Imagine what this could one day mean:
Talking adverts in Times Square….
Budweiser – “Hi David - feeling thirsty today?”
Swatch Wink – “Oh, David...”
Cup Noodle – “Mmm, chicken flavour, David, your favourite...”
Moving Strap – “Don't forget your wife's birthday... “
Samsung – “Catch this special offer, David...”
When all this information the scanners have picked up about you is out there on the internet, who knows how it will be used - not just to sell you things, but to know where you've been, and what you've been doing.
At Tesco, the future has already arrived. It's taking part in government-funded trials that use RFID tags in Gillette razors and DVDs to track them through the store.
Automatic re-ordering
Readers built into the shelves monitor each item - so if it's sold, the computer automatically orders another.
And if one leaves the store unpaid for, the system can trigger security cameras. There are no warnings that these DVDs have tags attached.
Greg Sage, Tesco spokesman, says: “The tag itself is tiny so you wouldn't see it, but when customers come to ask our staff, they can see the benefits immediately, because it's much quicker for them and it means they can get on with their shopping with the minimum of hassle.
From next week, this store will be scanning the tags at the checkout too. If a DVD's unique number could be matched to, say, my loyalty card, who knows what it could reveal about me? And it doesn't end there.
Tesco doesn't disable its tags when you leave the store - so scanners can pick up their electronic trail, as we found out when we visited a firm which programmes this technology.
Single identifying number
Forty miles away, our DVD of The Matrix bought in Tesco was still signalling its tag's unique number.
At MIT, they're advising corporations to keep all this data anonymous, and to give you the chance to have tags 'killed' at the checkout.
Because once the trail's out there, the police, and maybe your boss, could access it to know where you are at any time. And what if hackers accessed your records too? Today, the system's unregulated - but soon it may be too late.
Richard Allan MP(Lib Dem technology spokesman) said: “People being able to track your movements may seem like a theoretical risk, but in reality, do we want where we were at any particular point of the day to be known to everyone?
“The idea that one not only has CCTV cameras watching over you but your own clothes watching over you and sending off data that could be jumbled up and spat out to your detriment is one that's of serious concern to me.”
Twenty years after barcodes took over, the smart tag is on the edge of a far more pervasive revolution. The one question that isn't being asked is whether you want it.
