University of Washington students experience using RFID tags to track people and belongings
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In March of this year, a group of students in Washington State will apply RFID tags to their clothing and all items. RFID readers will be installed in the school’s 6-story computer science Paul Allen building. The trajectories of students and the objects they interact with will be monitored and registered. In addition, the students will also test a “finding friend” application “RFIDer”, which allows them to monitor the location of their friends at any time.
Use RFID tags to track all your products
This project is called RFID Ecosystem. Researchers will distribute RFID tags to 50 volunteer participants and let them place them on themselves or on all items. The location of the tag will be recorded every 5 minutes, and the data will be stored in the database and sent to the web page. A total of 200 antennas were installed in the Paul Allen building.
A total of 200 antennas were installed in the Paul Allen building
“Our goal is to understand what benefits we can get from this technology and how we will protect the privacy of these people,” University Associate Professor Magda Balazinska said in a statement. “We are worried that these technologies will be adopted too quickly. We are now studying whether these technologies will infringe personal privacy in a controlled environment, so that the public and policy makers can understand the problems we face.”
The benefits of this system may come from two tools independently developed by students: one is to record a person’s activities in Google Calendar, and the other is to “find friends”.
The first tool is to record their activities in their web calendar, such as going to work, meeting or eating lunch.
When a friend is not in a specific location, the second tool will send an instant alert to the participant’s mailbox or mobile phone. This feature can be connected to Twitter and can be turned off at any time.
“We have to observe how a group of people use these tools, whether they find them useful, and how to adapt to them.” Balazinska said.
According to the university, the cost of each label is 20 cents.
Initially, people labeling sounded abnormal and shocking, Oxer said, but as this type of news increased, people seemed to gradually adapt. Recent surveys indicate that more than 10% of RFID due items involve personnel labeling. Oxer believes that if this trend continues, the result will be very dangerous.
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