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RFID is the future.  It is if you listen to Ericsson’s vice-president of systems architecture, Håkan Djuphammar.  Mr. Djuphammar expects every new cell phone to contain RFID chips by next year and these phones will usher in a whole new ecosystem of creative uses of the technology.  Could RFID be a win-win for everyone?

RFID - what is it good for?

From the RFID Wiki:

Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is the use of an object (typically referred to as an RFID tag) applied to or incorporated into a product, animal, or person for the purpose of identification and tracking using radio waves. Some tags can be read from several meters away and beyond the line of sight of the reader.

Case study

One customer Ericsson is working with is an electric company with hundreds of unmanned stations that have a combined total of 15,000 access keys.  The customer is not exactly sure where all those keys are and who has them.  The solution Ericsson provided is RFID locks and enabled phones allowing the phones to act as a key and unlock these stations based on the workers proximity.  Even cooler, these RFID codes can be set to allow temporary access by specific RFID enabled phones allowing the company to control who can get where.

Winning concepts?

“All sorts of things will be enabled by [RFID] — a small piece of technology, but with an ecosystem around it that opens up tremendous opportunities for innovation,” Djuphammar added.  The Ericsson executive went on to outline things like traffic information by monitoring all the RFID information via highways.  This info could be sold to GPS operators and then sold to consumers as an advanced service.  Another concept included credit card fraud: by tying the phone to the proximity of the credit card, card issuers suggest the chance of fraud is reduced.

Privacy?

No doubt by now you are curious how much privacy you’ll be giving up.  Will you have a choice to get a mobile without RFID?  Or will non-RFID phones from 2009 run up in price on eBay and become a form of currency in the future?  Should we be worried?

InformationWeek’s senior vice president Bob Evans, says we are paranoid.  “In a world jammed with surveillance cameras, cell phone cameras and imminent smart-grid brains that will scold you for using more electricity than some bureaucrat thinks you should, this paranoia over RFID goes beyond silly to absurd,” Evans wrote on the company’s blog.

Privacyrights.org says this, “Used improperly, RFID has the potential to jeopardize consumer privacy, reduce or eliminate purchasing anonymity, and threaten civil liberties.”

Technology boon or privacy bust?  The answer, as usual, probably lies somewhere in between.

Source: [ZDNet]