RFID: New Method to Track From Cattle, Oil Shipments to Criminals

A person can fill up their gas tank at a station without the attendant's help. No need to say the kind of gas needed and no need to count out notes. All it takes is one particular credit card and a chip attached to the vehicle.S-OIL, a local refinery, launched a pilot service based on automatic identification technology at one of its gas stations in Seoul in April.It began to provide the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) service at the station in western Seoul. S-OIL said it is the first time that a local refiner has used the identification technology in service stations.The automatic identification sytsem uses special devices called RFID tags to store and retrieve data.A tag, using radio waves, can be applied to a product, animal, or person for the purpose of identification. Some tags are readable even from several meters away and beyond the line of sight of the reader.Most RFID tags comprise of two parts. One is an integrated circuit used to store and process information, as well as modulate a signal, and the other is an antenna for receiving and transmitting the signal.In a more advanced form, chipless tags make it possible to discretely identify tags, without an integrated circuit, thus allowing data to be printed directly onto various objects at a lower cost.The RFID service adopted by S-Oil is composed of three systems: wireless payment and point accumulation, customer management and mixed-gasoline alarm.Through a device attached to customers' vehicles, the wireless payment and point accumulation system automatically reads the vehicle and customer information, and supports wireless payment and bonus point accumulation.The customer management system provides customized services meeting specific needs of customers while the mixed-gasoline alarm system prevents putting an inappropriate type of fuel into vehicles.The same technology is set to be available in a completely different field.Korea Post, the nation's postal service, is planning to introduce the technology for grouping mail and keeping track of it. Last month, it released a tender for 600 RFID reader machines as well as 40,000 tags to be used at its branches including post offices and logistics centers.The advanced technology is undergoing trials in Finland. Finn-ID, a Finnish IT company, developed a new system to monitor speed and accuracy of mail delivery using RFID tag-embedded envelopes. The identification technology has a prospective commercial future.Its Asia-Pacific market will grow over $850 million by 2014 with asset management and documentation tracking spearheading it, Frost & Sullivan, a market research firm, predicted in a recent report.The RFID inlay market in the region has already surpassed $150 million last year, up about 150 percent from 2004.The introduction of RFID services is on a constant hike in various industries such as airlines, and energy and mining but also there will be a flurry of niche application markets to be developed as in DVD rentals and sports businesses, it said.Niche Markets EmergingThe technology ― an advance from barcodes ― is muscling its way into more diverse areas, as well as public policies.The city of Busan is now considering a new 7th-day-no-driving system using the identification device, where vehicles are monitored through the RFID chips attached to them. Gyeonggi Province is also putting forward the same policy and is now establishing a management system using RFID, aiming to be launched in October.Elsewhere, lawmakers are planning a new regulation forcing child sex offenders to wear electronic bracelets. The anti sex crime bill passed the National Assembly in May and will be enacted in September. The Ministry of Justice, in collaboration with Samsung SDS consortium, plans to complete the 8-billion won project of locating sex criminals with the commencement of the act.Growing concerns on foods, triggered by the recent U.S. beef row, is drawing attention to the field of food tracking, a technique of tracing food items via electric tags and barcodes. For example, the tags are required to identify a cow's herd of origin and this is used for tracing when a packing plant uses the carcass. The Ministry of Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries will start a tracking system for all kinds of seafood from August. Especially from December, all hanwoo, an indigenous breed of cattle, will be required to have tags containing information in their ears. "No cattle without tags will be slaughtered in the future,'' the ministry said.Life Enhancer or Big Brother?Outside the country, the use of RFIDs is raising more controversy and even product boycotts by advocates of consumer privacy.Since the owner of an item could not necessarily be aware of the presence of the data and the tag can be read at a distance without the knowledge of the individual, it becomes possible to gather sensitive information about an individual without their consent. If a tagged item is paid for by credit card or in conjunction with use of a loyalty card, then it would be possible to indirectly deduce the identity of the purchaser by reading the tag. Most concerns arise over the fact that RFID tags attached to products remain functional even after the products are purchased and taken home, so they could be used for surveillance and other unintended purposes, which are not related to supply chain inventories.