engadget.com — These shelves will be able to track whether you debated the PSP over the DS lite, whether you wanted the high end version but opted for the low end because of price and what items were popular amongst consumers and which were not.
Sep 17, 2006 View in Crawl 4
hidebehindSep 18, 2006
I appreciate companies taking the passive approach to spying on us and mining information, but they need to learn that sometimes just asking users questions will result in what they wanted without the harmful effects of contaminating the trust pool.I for one will resort to producing my own goods (I can burn a DVD with any fresh bic pen. Please note, however, I did not consider any other pen brand when making that decision.)
d00fySep 18, 2006
Somewhere in the article: RFID zapper... just a coil rigged to a flash capacitor...<a class="user" href="http://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/wiki/RFID-Zapper(EN)">http://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/wiki/RFID-Zapper(EN)</a>First it started with pets, products, then livestock, currencyidentification papers, then it's people. All of which have already been achieved. Clearly livestock and people aren't mandatories yet.I'd be pissed off, but I can't, I just admire these guys too much. They're too smart for the average person.
ripbergeSep 18, 2006
Having worked extensively with UHF RFID for Wal-Mart and the U.S. Department of Defense, I would say that these shelves will not roll out en mass anytime soon.UHF RFID is very finicky and its hard to get accurate reads of tags when they're densely packed. Not to mention you'd be absolutely showering the store with radio and there are some valid health concerns over that. I think using data from POS machines wisely will let you figure out stockouts and buying correlations in a more reliable fashion for the foreseeable future.
thydzikSep 18, 2006
do they really need this though.a lot of this information can be deduced from the checkout databases. Even knowing what products where purchased by the same shopper.'how many tossed it in their carts, which items attracted little to no attention'the items that where bought, and not bought perhaps
r0ckySep 18, 2006
For anyone reading about RFID for the first time, Google for "Katherine Albrecht" or visit <a class="user" href="http://www.spychips.com">http://www.spychips.com</a> for some entertaining/interesting reading on the whole RFID hoohaa.
ripbergeSep 18, 2006
The primary goal of applying RFID by most of these retailers is to reduce volatility in their supply chain. Using them to price dynamically is not only ludicrous, but discriminatory. You would need an RFID chip on your body to identify you as a person when you walked up to a shelf to do this, not on the products.Most RFID tags are applied to cases and pallets. This story details an experiment of item level tagging in which RFID would be applied to product PACKAGING. If an RFID chip goes on the jeans it goes on the product tag, its NOT going to be sewn into your jeans.Btw. The SpyChips book is Luddite propaganda.