July 13, 2006
RFID Contactless Payment: Too Much Information?
Despite a savings from RFID-enabled inventory control and claims last year of high success rates, retailer Tesco has been having problems with their RFID trials. The foremost of this has been from customer concerns, as well as getting agreement with suppliers on who'll pay for RFID tagging of product.
Wal-Mart has had similar problems with suppliers and, like Tesco, has delayed deadlines for RFID implementation in someof their stores, or rolling back projects altogether, despite trying to throw down ultimatums about RFID use.
Other problems are more technical, and include UHF (Ultra High Frequency) interference between other RFID readers, even from a distance of a few kilometers. Much of these technical problems come from the lack of a single RFID standard, as well as different regulations about radio frequency use from each country's government, sometimes their military.
On
the consumer side, American grocery chain Piggly Wiggly has had
problems with acceptance of their biometric scanners. While some biometric scanners have been combined with RFID,
Piggly Wiggly's are not. But similar to RFID concerns, some people feel
that biometric scanners, with or without RFID, just require too much
information that a retailer simply does not need from the consumer.
From the consumer point of view, why should they care if RFID or biometrics makes a retailer's life easier if it gives the consumer little benefit and violates their privacy? In their eyes, a fingerprint scan in the hands of the wrong person definitely constitutes that. So does someone intercepting info from their RFID smartcard. If a government's employees cannot even keep important laptops full of data out of the hands of thieves, they feel, what's to say that a retailer's employees won't steal information, or facilitate, the theft of data collected with RFID and/or biometrics?
To get around these problems, besides technical issues and government regulations, consumers concerns have to be addressed with incontrovertible evidence that RFID-based payment systems are secure. The perception is that this critical issue has not been dealt with yet, even from the point of view of technology-savvy people.
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