DEMO

Tag-Scan-Privacy-Match

Contact: Jaap-Henk Hoepman, TNO jaap-henk.hoepman@tno.nl Introduction Increasingly, products for sale in shops are being tagged by RFID tags. These tags contain a unique product- or item number, which can be read out wirelessly over a short distance by an RFID reader. Their function in shops and supermarkets is similar to the ubiquitous paper barcode, except that RFID tags can also be read out if the tag is not in plain sight of the reader. This means these tags can also be read out surreptitiously when walking around the store, or afterwards when the items are in your shopping bag and you are walking on the street. This also holds true for payment cards and travel passes (e.g. the OV chipcard in the Netherlands) that people carry with them. This has raised concerns about the impact for RFID technology on the privacy in our society [Rathenau]. That is why there are currently several initiatives [ISO] that try to inform consumers about the presence and use of RFID tags in the items that they buy or the cards they carry with them. The aim is to allow producers and shop owners to inform the consumer about what information they will collect, what they will do with it, and with whom they will share it. It is up to the consumer to decide whether to go ahead and buy the item, or not to buy the item after all. Consumers in these initiatives are informed through signs or logos in the shop or on the items themselves. These approaches fail in two respects. First of all, the amount of information that can be communicated through a few logos is quite small, making it hard for the consumer to make an informed decision. Moreover, the number of logos producers are willing to put on an item is very small (hardly ever more than 1), meaning that current efforts do not go much further than informing the consumer about the mere presence of an RFID tag, without telling him much more. Secondly, the information is static. Once the logo is on the item, it cannot change. This either forces the producer to stick to the privacy policy (which is very inflexible) or to change the policy without being able to inform the consumer (which is bad for customer relations). Goal Goal of the project is to develop a demonstrator of a different way to inform consumers about the RFID tags on the items they buy or the tags that surround them in their environment. Main idea is to use a mobile phone to display information about RFID tags in the vicinity. In particular, the setup of the demonstrator is as shown in the following figure, and operates as follows. A consumer sets his privacy preferences in a profile stored on his mobile phone. If he holds the phone close to a product in a shop containing an RFID tag, the phone will read the tag number from the tag. It will then query (over the Internet, either through GPRS, UMTS or WiFi) the backoffice to retrieve the privacy policy corresponding to the tag number. It will then match the tag policy with the consumer policy, and present the result of the match to the consumer on the display of the mobile phone in an intuitive and appealing manner. Project documents Project partners Supported by
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