Scare Mongering BBC

[SAPBoy]

The supermarkets already track everything that people buy by getting you to sign up to their loyalty scheme. It's no different really. Of course it does mean that someone from Tescos can sit in the car park at Asda and track everything that's being bought.

[ASB]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programme...ne/4886598.stm

"While barcodes need to be manually scanned, RFID simply broadcasts its presence and data to electronic readers."
No mention of the fact that the RFID tag has no internal power of its own and will only broadcast if scanned within range

"But with remotely readable tags on everything from boots to beans"
Personally I would not call a reading range of a few cm's remotely readable.

AFAIK The only real advantage that RFID tags have over barcodes is that you do not need line of sight.

You can get internally powered RFID tags but they are currently expensive. They are called active. Normal tags are passive, taking power from the RF reader signal.

Most passive tags have a read range of about 1 metre, but there are quite a number with read ranges of about 5-10m. I believe that the improving reader technology can theoretically improve this massively.

Active tags can have a much larger range. One example of applications for active tags is child monitoring. Nurseries fit them to clothing to keep an eye on the little darlings.

Passive tags ultimately will provide huge cost benefits to retailers. Shopper wanders through reader lane, this sees all the ID's. Processes the transaction, customer inserts card in pay station. This will give a massive cost saving in staff. Zero staff intervention except for one monitoring the control console which is highlighting incidents which need intervention.

Of course when readers improve people might get mightily hacked off at being constantly monitored by asda as a result of the naff jumper they bought.

ISTR Germany recently passed some new laws which will stymie RFID there for a while at least.

[Churchill]

Not to mention all the rf crap that the readers emit: it's got to get enough energy into the tag to power it up so that it can transmit data back... and people worry about mobile phone masts... and tetra when you get a lot closer to an rfid reader.

What an ideal opportunity to recharge your iPod...

[wendigo100]

[url]"But with remotely readable tags on everything from boots to beans"

Personally I would not call a reading range of a few cm's remotely readable.

It wasn't long ago that 9600 bits/sec was the maximum reliable working capacity of copper telephone wires.

[Spacecadet]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programme...ne/4886598.stm

"While barcodes need to be manually scanned, RFID simply broadcasts its presence and data to electronic readers."
No mention of the fact that the RFID tag has no internal power of its own and will only broadcast if scanned within range

"But with remotely readable tags on everything from boots to beans"
Personally I would not call a reading range of a few cm's remotely readable.

AFAIK The only real advantage that RFID tags have over barcodes is that you do not need line of sight.