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You have heard of RFID tags, right? The technology that is in most ID cards so that administration or security knows whether staff are in the building or not? Well they are being put into far more than ID cards these days.

They are going into the clothing of most retail stores and even behind the labels on some tin cans. The situation is sure to mushroom.

They are the new generation of bar codes, but unlike bar codes, they can talk back and they can be so small that you do not even know that you are wearing one. I say ‘wearing one’ because at the moment they are mostly being put into garments, but the day is not far away when they will be under every label of every tin of food that you purchase.

Some stores have even gone that far already. Look next time you visit the supermarket. Is the check-out clerk scanning a bar code or just scanning ’something’? If there is no bar code to scan, they are searching for the RFID tag.

However, if you had a bar code on your new shirt, you would remove it before wearing it, but an RFID tag is so tiny and so well hidden, that you may never find it.

Why would that matter, you may be asking yourself? Well, we are told that it does not matter; that people who do worry are just being paranoid, but others perceive it as the thin edge of the wedge.

You see, in a city, you are never that far from an RFID reader, so really, if you walk past one, your shirt could be crying out: ‘He bought me from Wal-Mart’. It could also be saying: ‘I only cost 4.99′.

If you do not see that as a problem, all well and good, but what if you are strolling down the high street and a loud speaker from a shop shouts at you: ‘People who buy their shirts from Wal-Mart normally like Wimpey Burgers!’.

You might think that that is a coincidence or you may have forgotten that you purchased that shirt from Wal-Mart, but the tag sewn into your shirt will never forget and it will inform every RFID reader that asks it. Is that fair? You have now become a walking advertisement.

Of course, RFID tags were not brought in for this reason. They are used ostensibly to help trace merchandise from manufacturer to consumer – point out. They are very useful for tracing stock in a warehouse, but the fact is that these live beacons of their provenance are not turned off at the point of sale. If they were, perhaps there would not be such a hoo-hah being raised about them.

Is there a reason to be concerned about these tags? Probably not, but then that does not mean that there never will be. What if you were on holiday somewhere and there was a smart bomb linked to an RFID scanner concealed waiting for an American and your shirt was screaming out: ‘I am a shirt. I was bought for 4.99 at Wal-Mart, store ID 0001, New York, USA’?

Owen Jones, the author of this piece writes on several topics, but is currently involved with the best RFID printer. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at Active RFID Management.

RFID is an acronym for ‘Radio Frequency Identification’. It involves the use of an article normally made of plastic or metal to identify an item in a similar way to bar codes identify items. In fact, they are used in a very similar way to bar codes and, at least for the immediate future, are normally used in conjunction with bar codes.

However, RFID tags are a great deal more adaptable than a piece of paper with a few black stripes on it. RFID tags can be and are being sewn into clothing and fitted under the skins of animals and humans for ease of tracking. Many of the goods you buy in supermarkets these days have RFID tags concealed in them, but do not try looking for them because they can be minuscule. They can also be under the labels of those tins of beans on your shelf.

An RFID tag is used to be able to follow an item from manufacturer to consumer, but especially when it is in the warehouse or supermarket waiting to be sold. A tag reader will be able to transmit the tag’s information back to a computer to warn management that something is near its sell-by-date, for instance.

Tags in livestock permit the slaughterhouse to be able to track the animal back to a farm and hand this information on to the butcher. An RFID tag under your dog’s skin or your car’s bonnet will permit it to be found if lost or stolen.

There are basically two types of RFID tags: the passive kind and the active sort and there is a hybrid as well. The passive tag is similar to a bar code. It carries the same information and then more besides. Similar to a bar code, it can do nothing on its own, but when it is read it will disclose its data. These tag readers give the tag enough power to be able to send the information back to it.

The active tags have a battery and a transmitter built into them, so that they can actively transmit the data all the time and the hybrids will only broadcast when ’switched on’ by a tag reader.

There is still some disagreement about how far away a tag reader can read a tag. In the case of a passive tag, it depends on the power that the reader can supply over a long distance. Most are designed to work over only a few inches or feet, but more high-capacity ones could be built. Active and hybrid tags actively broadcast, so they can be read from 100 metres (300 feet) or more.

These tags have been around for a very long time in one form or another, but certainly since the Second World War, when they were used to identify home-coming British planes to save them from the RADAR-directed anti-aircraft guns.

The concern as far as many organizations are concerned, is that technology has advanced so much that the tags can be almost invisible and the readers could be anywhere, which evokes concerns for personal privacy.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece writes on several topics, but is now concerned with the best RFID printer. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at Active RFID Management.

As you perhaps already know, RFID is an acronym for ‘Radio Frequency Identification’ – it is the thing that makes ID tags work – but you probably only started hearing about it over the last couple of years. So, how much do you know about RFID? In this piece of writing, I want to take a short look at the history of this seemingly new invention, which has entered almost every facet of a city-dweller’s life and that of many livestock farmers as well.

The start of it all was in 1915, say some, when the British come up with a system called IFF, which is short for ‘Identification: Friend or Foe’. Whoever invented it, the first known installation of the IFF transponder was into the FuG German aircraft in 1940 in the course of the Second World War.

However, IFF does not identify enemy aircraft, it can only identify friendly aircraft. All others have to be treated with suspicion. The same type of technology is still in use in military and civilian aircraft today. The British managed to decode the FuG’s signals and reply properly, giving them a false positive, which gave them the advantage in a dog fight.

At the end of the war and the beginning of the Cold War, Leon Theremin invented a device for the Soviet Union which retransmitted incident radio waves and other audio details. It is not true RFID, but it is accredited with being a forerunner of RFID, because it was a passive device which was activated by an outside source.

In 1948, Harry Stockman wrote a paper entitiled: “Communication by Means of Reflected Power”, in which he stated: “… considerable research and development work has to be done before the remaining basic problems in reflected-power communication are solved, and before the field of useful applications is explored”.

This was true. The problems were essentially threefold: the devices needed a lot of power to work effectively; they were too big for use in anything but large items like aircraft and they were extremely costly. However, people could already envisage uses for the technology when these three problems had been surmounted.

(In 2009, researchers at Bristol University stuck RFID devices to live ants to track their behaviour).

The first modern predecessor of the RFID device was something that Mario Cardullo demonstrated to the New York Port Authority in 1971. It was a passive transponder which transmitted information employing power supplied by an external source. It’s proposed use was to identify ships to the Port Authority for the intention of collecting toll fees.

Steven Depp, Alfred Koelle, and Robert Freyman demonstrated a system in 1974 which employed RFID tags. This has become the foundation of the system which is now extensively used all around the world to collect toll fees on motorways and in car parks.

Charles Walton was granted the first patent to use the acronym RFID in 1983.

The largest user of RFID tags is the US Department of Defense and after that the civil aviation industry, although the manufacturing industry is catching up fast with RFID tags being utilized to track goods from manufacture to point-of-sale.

Owen Jones, the author of this article writes on several topics, but is now concerned with the best RFID printer. If you would like to know more, please go to our website at Active RFID Management.