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March 18, 2004
RFID's and Democratic Capitalism
This is fantastic news. I was thinking that this would take at least 5 or more years before we would see any substantial power shift of RFID's towards the customer, but according to this article, the power of RFID could soon become widely available to you and me, thanks to Phillips.
To understand why this is a very good thing for democracy and greater prosperity for the world generally, please read my posts over the last 18 months, specifically these:
Participatory Capitalism and The Coming Leisure Society.
From the story:
They aim to do this by putting an RFID reader in every mobile phone, so that users could look at the contents of a tag simply by holding their phone up against it.
Once the code is extracted, the phone would look it up on the Web and display the information it had retrieved on the screen.
Imagine. You go into Marks and Sparks and hold your mobile phone against a pack of knickers you fancy (make sure you are in the appropriate aisle at this point).
The phone reads the tag and sends the code back to www.cheapskate.com, say, which runs a quick comparison search.
Back comes a message that the selfsame garments are on sale in BHS round the corner at half the price.
When I first heard of RFID's and their potential dark side I was a bit disturbed. A 'Minority Report' world is not what I want to be a part of. Of course there are lots of ways to subvert RFID's from tracking you, with something as simple as underground product swapping, or junkyard diving. There are however some major benefits to customers and to capitalism generally that RFID's would make possible.
The first of these, would be that every EPC # could be cross-indexed with decentralized online p2p databases that match each EPC# with a corruptions index. By having your own RFID reader in the form of a PDA or cell phone as Phillips is now proposing, we could match our purchasing habits to those companies who most adhere to our own ethical values. This could be made easy by constantly updated web-of-trust system that matches your values closest to those you trust.
RFID readers in the hands of the people will empower customer choice, creating a decentralized bottoms-up defined marketplace. I think such a transparent participatory market is long overdue, and I can't see how this would be possible without wide-scale use of RFID's.
Well, I'm not nearly as optimistic about RFID as you are. Even if what you envision actually occurs (which I think is a pretty large if), I still can't see how that good would outweigh the bad.
Even so, it is nice that, at least, there are some ways it can be useful for real people.
John,
The advantagesof RFID's are so great, that convincing companies to not adopt them will be almost impossible. RFID's are the natural progression of technology. I can't imagine technology moving forward without some kind of wireless unique identifier being implemented as the the advantages are so great. But like any technology it can be used for good or evil.
I am in 100% agreement with you that RFID's could be used in all sorts of nefarious and unscrupulous ways, and it DOES make me uncomfortable. So, the best approach is to leverage this technology as much as possible towards democratic means, and as I have shown in this post, such leverage could tip the power away from the corporation, the sameway the internet is leveling the playing field for communication.
Posted by: Paul Hughes at March 22, 2004 06:30 PMOh, I agree with you almost entirely. Where I'm not quite as optimistic is when it comes to tipping the balance of power. Although now that I think of it, it's just a matter of time scale.
The internet is a pretty good example. It has tipped the balance of power as you say, although I see every sign that the scale will be tipping back in the near future.
However, perhaps not as far. That's what I mean by time scales. Tomorrow's internet will not be as advantageous to the individual as today's internet, so it's a short term loss. However, information technologies of the past have clearly led, in the long run, to an increasing empowerment of people, even if sometimes it seems to go backwards.
Wow. Well, I guess that was a very wordy way of saying that I agree with you after all.
Posted by: John Fenderson at March 23, 2004 02:27 AMI have been quite wary of RFID tech but this made me consider the advantages:
Paul wrote:
The first of these, would be that every EPC # could be cross-indexed with decentralized online p2p databases that match each EPC# with a corruptions index. By having your own RFID reader in the form of a PDA or cell phone as Phillips is now proposing, we could match our purchasing habits to those companies who most adhere to our own ethical values.
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Very interestingn concept. If the web has shown us anything, it's that technology will always be co-opted by the people just as it is by governments and corporations. As IT enables the Monolith so too does it enable the individual.