Raising an RFID ruckus

RFID at work Privacy first What to ask your RFID suppliers

It was a rough summer for radio frequency identification, the heir to the venerable bar code.

In July, privacy advocates crowed when Wal-Mart and Gillette canceled a planned trial of "smart shelves," which inform the supply chain when (and with what) they need to be restocked. "On June 6, I walked around and wiggled the smart shelf [in a Brockton, Mass., Wal-Mart, where the test was about to launch]. The next day, it was gone," proudly reports Katherine Albrecht, executive director of one of those groups - Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (CASPIAN).

A month later, CASPIAN called for a boycott of Gillette, darkly dubbing the RFID transceivers embedded in razor-blade packaging "Gillette spy chips." A Gillette spokesman dismisses the boycott, saying the company has no intention of tracking individual customers and their purchases.

Gillette also denies that the privacy groups had any influence on the decision to cancel the smart-shelf trial, as does Wal-Mart. They say the companies opted instead to focus their attention farther up the supply chain, at the palette and case levels. Clearly, though, groups such as CASPIAN have had a sobering effect on these companies and other businesses working to improve supply-chain management through RFID. And few industry watchers doubt that privacy-group pressure will force companies to examine the consumer-privacy ramifications of the technology and establish a code of conduct. Public protest also may slow RFID adoption by cautious companies.

However, not all the summer buzz around RFID was negative. While CASPIAN was making headlines with its Gillette boycott, Texas Instruments announced it had developed a tiny (22 mm circumference) RFID chip sturdy enough to survive the dry-cleaning process. And despite the smart-shelf volte-face (whatever its cause), Wal-Mart instructed top supply-chain partners to be RFID-ready at the case and pallet level (as opposed to the individual-item level) by January 2005.

RFID at work

That's a lot of excitement for a technology that was born during World War II and has been around in pretty much its present form for a decade. RFID transfers data wirelessly between a minuscule transceiver and a transponder, or "tag," that can be attached to just about anything - an item in a store, a shipping container, even livestock. Without human intervention, the tag and transponder can trigger actions, such as reordering from a supplier. Already, RFID is used in airport luggage-routing systems and highway toll collections.

For years, RFID's potential for dramatic supply-chain improvements has been clear. Because it rides radio waves, RFID doesn't require line-of-sight scanning as bar codes do (high-frequency RFID systems boast transmission ranges up to 90 feet). The great promise of RFID is to offer more granular, accurate information on product availability and to automate processes that are performed manually today.