Location, location, location -- part. 7
According to Ephraim Schwartz's latest column, Gillette is engaging in the world's biggest-yet experiment in location-based sensing:
Following a pilot program, Gillette announced its intention to buy 500,000,000 (that's not a typo — not half a million but half a billion) RFID tags, at 10 cents a piece and to tag every pallet and every carton coming out of its distribution centers. By the way, the company selling the tags to Gillette is Alien Technology, in Morgan Hill, Calif.
Imagine the benefits of tracking those pallets, and the cases on the pallets, from manufacturing to the point of sale. Gillette will be able to reduce losses from out-of-stock, stolen or lost products, and as the company understands the power of this tracking capability, it will increase revenues by leveraging inventory information into smarter marketing to the retailers. ...
RFID tags will allow a computer to identify any object, anywhere, automatically and — here's the scary part — will allow a product, in essence, to sense the real world on its own.
Two points. These sensors are only 10 cents a piece? At this rate, soon everything you wear, eat, drive and read will be plastered with these things -- and you won't be able to remove them because you won't even know where they are. I predict someone's going to invent personal RF-jamming devices that emit pseudorandom fuzzy noise to confuse the zillions of corporate sensors trying to track your whereabouts. At least I hope someone's working on those jammers -- because at this rate, we're going to need them soon.
Oh, yeah -- the second point? The name of the company who made the RFID tags is "Alien Technology". Love it.
(Update: There are some excellent informational updates in the comments to this item ... check them out! Chris Walsh notes that Gillette has said that, based on buying patterns they've observed in the past, anyone carrying more than three or four packs may be stealing them. Andrea notes that The Economist wrote a story about the Gillette experiment; the story also notes the freakish privacy implications of this, and reports that some makers of RFID tech are responding to it:
Its chip specifications include a “kill command” that can permanently disable the tag. The centre is working on a privacy policy, a draft of which gives the customer the option to kill tags at the checkout.
Posted by Clive Thompson at February 07, 2003 12:01 AM
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First time commenter long time reader...
I've read (forget where) that one of the ways they'll track losses is by how many pieces of product that someone is carrying. Gillette estimates that anyone carrying more than 3 or 4 packages of blades at a time is probably stealing them.
Posted by: Chris Walsh at February 7, 2003 1:25 PM
Yeah, that makes sense! Undoubtedly they have a pile of data about the typical purchases people make of their products. It's like the guys at Visa, who have a neural net predicting what my typical purchases will be, based on my spending habits. Every time I try and do something really weird -- like take a cash advance in a city I've never visited before -- their net kicks out a warning and denies any transactions.
The thing is, this works fine with credit cards, which -- for good or for ill -- know a whole lot about your spending habits. Gillette doesn't; theoretically, unless it buys tons of aggregated data about you (which, come to think of it, is not hard to do), it's only working with a much more limited data set: How many packs of Gillette Sensor razor heads is this guy walking around with? With such smaller data sets, the number of errors are likely to be high. They'll probably have to set their theft-warning-system at something like 15 packs, because any number smaller than that would produce too many errors.
Posted by: Clive at February 7, 2003 1:56 PM
The Economist did a story on this, too, which says more about privacy issues.
Posted by: andrea at February 10, 2003 1:33 AM
Oh, very cool! Thanks for pointing that out ... I'm going to post that as an update to this piece.
Posted by: Clive at February 10, 2003 1:49 AM
I've read (forget where) that one of the ways they'll track losses is by how many pieces of product that someone is carrying. Gillette estimates that anyone carrying more than 3 or 4 packages of blades at a time is probably stealing them.
Posted by: medikamente at January 4, 2004 4:49 PM
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First time commenter long time reader...
I've read (forget where) that one of the ways they'll track losses is by how many pieces of product that someone is carrying. Gillette estimates that anyone carrying more than 3 or 4 packages of blades at a time is probably stealing them.
Posted by: Chris Walsh at February 7, 2003 1:25 PM
Yeah, that makes sense! Undoubtedly they have a pile of data about the typical purchases people make of their products. It's like the guys at Visa, who have a neural net predicting what my typical purchases will be, based on my spending habits. Every time I try and do something really weird -- like take a cash advance in a city I've never visited before -- their net kicks out a warning and denies any transactions.
The thing is, this works fine with credit cards, which -- for good or for ill -- know a whole lot about your spending habits. Gillette doesn't; theoretically, unless it buys tons of aggregated data about you (which, come to think of it, is not hard to do), it's only working with a much more limited data set: How many packs of Gillette Sensor razor heads is this guy walking around with? With such smaller data sets, the number of errors are likely to be high. They'll probably have to set their theft-warning-system at something like 15 packs, because any number smaller than that would produce too many errors.
Posted by: Clive at February 7, 2003 1:56 PM
The Economist did a story on this, too, which says more about privacy issues.
Posted by: andrea at February 10, 2003 1:33 AM
Oh, very cool! Thanks for pointing that out ... I'm going to post that as an update to this piece.
Posted by: Clive at February 10, 2003 1:49 AM
I've read (forget where) that one of the ways they'll track losses is by how many pieces of product that someone is carrying. Gillette estimates that anyone carrying more than 3 or 4 packages of blades at a time is probably stealing them.
Posted by: medikamente at January 4, 2004 4:49 PM