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they think they are going to get the convenience; sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. In those days of the Irish troubles, (people in the U.K.) craved a higher sense of security and they permitted all these cameras to be put up.
There does seem to be a lot of passion when RFID comes up.
Ferguson: But it's funny. A lot of these discussions get very holy and people pace back and forth and give their speeches, but they keep stepping over this dead horse in the middle of the room. It turns out that most of us are living some aspect of our life slightly outside the law. Maybe I drive a little bit over the speed limit. There are people who take aggressive positions on their taxes. There are lots of people who do something that by the letter of the law is not legal, and frankly, they don't want to get caught. We can turn this into a very, very holy speech on privacy instead of discussing whether maybe we shouldn't speed or maybe the speed limits should be higher.
And in some cases it's just people not understanding, I hear a lot of concerns about RFID where people worry about being scanned and someone getting all their personal details. No, they will get a 91-bit number. Now all they have to do is hack into 17 different databases to find out anything about you.
People are afraid someone will drive by their house and scan everything in it. No, if they had a scanner powerful enough to do that, your fear should be being cooked in your own home.
When we get enough sensors planted out there in the world, what are they going to do? A lot of people like Dust Networks and Crossbow are employing them to reduce energy consumption in buildings.
Ferguson: We've described it as creating a virtual double. If I get enough feeds from enough different directions, I can start to construct virtual versions of every physical and real object on the planet, and with those I will actually have more information and control than I have if I confront the object itself.
So, for example, if you confront a printer, you can figure out right away whether it has paper or toner and whether or not it's working. But if you stayed at your desk, and there was a virtual double, you could have had those two facts, plus you could see that some idiot sent a 5,000 slide PowerPoint to that printer.
What other novel applications for this sort of thing do you see out there?
Ferguson: One shopping mall has a billboard that's listening to the leakage off FM antennas of the cars driving by. From that it can determine what people are tuned to. Now, there is a privacy issue, but I don't know who the hell they are. I just know that at this moment in time, people who can see this billboard are listening to Montovani or that people who can see this billboard are listening to rap.
The billboard then changes its message based on who's receiving the message. Why would I try to sell ocean cruises to kids, or skateboards to older people? The benefit to the driver is they actually see something that's applicable to them. The benefit to the advertiser is that they get their message to the right people. And the guys selling the space can charge more because it is a particularized message to a particularized segment.
Did you work on that project?
Ferguson: No, we didn't. The frustrating thing about a lot of the stuff we work on is that we can't get clearances to talk about it.
How quickly will the sensor world evolve?
Ferguson: I think with this particular vision, we got out in front of ourselves a little bit. We're still working out some of the physical issues with RFID and reading through liquids and metals and things like that. Aside from that, there is a missing underlying infrastructure. We can put devices everywhere, but then you have to be able to provision them, know when they're sick, know how to fix them. You'll see lots of it within the next five years, but things will only really take off, at least in their full flower, once you can assume the infrastructure is there.
We have a vineyard up north and the idea is to optimize the output. If we can report on the microclimate of a vineyard, we can start to optimize how each portion of the vineyard is utilized. We can measure sunlight, we can measure leaf moisture, soil moisture, temperature. After the sensors started gathering data, I think they (the people running the project) told me that something like two thirds of the data coming in was these things saying, "I'm out of battery. I'm broken. I've lost contact."
I recall being at an Accenture event five years ago and one of the consultants showed me an experimental videoconferencing system, and the consultant said that one of the problems they had is that people in tests said they didn't like getting incoming video calls.
Ferguson: We have a much more casual system here. We have a video tunnel set up (between Chicago and Palo Alto, Calif.), so researchers can see each other walking by like they would in a hall. They'll stop and just have a face-to-face conversation, so it's a different paradigm. And of course we built a prototype for that, but when you saw things, the cost of doing that would have been crazy.
See more CNET content tagged:
Accenture Ltd., RFID, facial recognition, lab, sensor
"And in some cases it's just people not understanding, I hear a lot of concerns about RFID where people worry about being scanned and someone getting all their personal details. No, they will get a 91-bit number. Now all they have to do is hack into 17 different databases to find out anything about you."
The last two sentances. He revealed that people (presumably ALL people) have a 91-bit number to identify them. I don't know about you, but it's the very fact that I have ANY unique number transmitting from my body at all which raises privacy concerns. I'm not so concerned with whether or not the scanner knows my name and address.
It forces me to ask the question: Why do you want to track people? We've never before tracked people, other than the exceptional cases such as prison inmates who have to wear a trackable ankle unit and such. THAT'S the troubling question that RFID advocates never seem to answer. What "good" reason can you give to monitor all people all the time? I can think of lots of bad reasons, but no good ones.
This next statement says it all for me:
"We've described it as creating a virtual double. If I get enough feeds from enough different directions, I can start to construct virtual versions of every physical and real object on the planet, and with those I will actually have more information and control than I have if I confront the object itself."
notably, I WILL HAVE MORE INFORMATION AND CONTROL.
Although the context of this paragraph refered to "objects", as if he were thinking of devices and "things", (not people,) I belive the real motivations come out. Tracking people gives control. Simple.
If RFID (and any other form of tracking technology) were limited to just supply and inventory management, I wouldn't care. But RFID advocates seem to dream about tracking people and don't care about tracking products. As such, I think the "Big Brother" monikers are appropriate.
"And in some cases it's just people not understanding, I hear a lot of concerns about RFID where people worry about being scanned and someone getting all their personal details. No, they will get a 91-bit number. Now all they have to do is hack into 17 different databases to find out anything about you."
The last two sentances. He revealed that people (presumably ALL people) have a 91-bit number to identify them. I don't know about you, but it's the very fact that I have ANY unique number transmitting from my body at all which raises privacy concerns. I'm not so concerned with whether or not the scanner knows my name and address.
It forces me to ask the question: Why do you want to track people? We've never before tracked people, other than the exceptional cases such as prison inmates who have to wear a trackable ankle unit and such. THAT'S the troubling question that RFID advocates never seem to answer. What "good" reason can you give to monitor all people all the time? I can think of lots of bad reasons, but no good ones.
This next statement says it all for me:
"We've described it as creating a virtual double. If I get enough feeds from enough different directions, I can start to construct virtual versions of every physical and real object on the planet, and with those I will actually have more information and control than I have if I confront the object itself."
notably, I WILL HAVE MORE INFORMATION AND CONTROL.
Although the context of this paragraph refered to "objects", as if he were thinking of devices and "things", (not people,) I belive the real motivations come out. Tracking people gives control. Simple.
If RFID (and any other form of tracking technology) were limited to just supply and inventory management, I wouldn't care. But RFID advocates seem to dream about tracking people and don't care about tracking products. As such, I think the "Big Brother" monikers are appropriate.
RFID will have to be a "friend" to consumers, and to business, institutions, and others, meaning truly great customer service, or help when needed and wanted, or whatever. OTHERWISE RFID will be a FOE TO PRIVACY, AND IT'S GREAT UTILITARIAN POTENTIAL WILL BE GONE.
Barry DENNIS
NETWEB/Omni
Marketing, PR, ADVERTISING
RFID will have to be a "friend" to consumers, and to business, institutions, and others, meaning truly great customer service, or help when needed and wanted, or whatever. OTHERWISE RFID will be a FOE TO PRIVACY, AND IT'S GREAT UTILITARIAN POTENTIAL WILL BE GONE.
Barry DENNIS
NETWEB/Omni
Marketing, PR, ADVERTISING
- Talking medicine cabinet?
- by blaketx August 15, 2005 10:40 AM PDT
- This is just like the medicine cabinet in George Lucas' THX-1138. Every time it was opened it asked "What's wrong?" It also made sure that the owner took the drugs that were required by law in the movie. I guess that is where we are headed and we're better off flushing those drugs and let RFID track them down the sewerline.
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