According to survey study by Synergistics Research Corp., fingerprint scanning gets the thumbs up as a security measure. The study of 1,000 consumers 18 or older indicates that 75% are more concerned with security issues than five years previous. Also, 40% of those surveyed selected fingerprint scanning as the method they were most comfortable with, with retinal scanning, signature verification and voice recognition being the other biometric choices.

Given these four choices, it’s actually not surprising that fingerprint scanning was selected, despite the stigma attached. While experts believe that voice biometrics is accurate, I’m guessing that consumers - or at least those surveyed - are not convinced of that. And we’ve all heard stories of signature forgery and impressionists. Retinal scanning probably has even more of a stigma because it still feels like something out of science fiction - as does palm vein scanning, which was not one of the choices. It’s also far more expensive than these other biometric techniques.

This is a summary of recent RFID and biometrics news.

RFID Posters
RFID in Japan has pictures of RFID posters deployed at a Japanese subway station. Information from the posters are transferred to cell phones when activated by an RFID-enabled rider ticket.

Thwart Exam Cheaters
RFID is being employed by a student exam board, Edexcel, in the UK to stop cheating. This will be accomplished by tagging packets of exams. Since authentic exam packets will have tags, it becomes more difficult to produce fakes, which are often sold to students.

Sirit Gets Transponder Contract
Sirit Inc., an RFID technology vendor based in Canada, has received a year-long contract worth nearly US$5M from BATA (Bay Area Toll Authority) in California, for toll road transponders. An additional contract of $1.6M might also be granted afterwards.

Toll roads are just one type of RFID traffic application.

At CES Mobileedge announced the release of several new RFID-blocking wallets aimed at those who use one of the increasingly popular contactless credit cards or other RFID enabled cards.

There are 2 versions, one wallet is to be used to hold credit cards while the other is made to hold and shield RFID enabled passports. Mobileedge will sell the wallets for $30 each.

[via Gizmodo]

A brief news bulletin on important RFID happenings since the first day of the New Year.

Bank of America will carry out a test to gauge public interest in its new endeavor where customers will be able to make payments using keychain fobs that will contain RFID inlays. The fobs will be issued by Oberthur Card Systems and will work as companion devices to the credit cards and debit cards that the bank issues. Texas Instruments will provide the RFID inlays for the fobs.

The U.S. Army Corp of Engineers has awarded a $10 million contract to Digital Angel for providing low-frequency RFID tags. The tags will be used for tracking the migration routes of fish, the water levels and also to monitor the movements of endangered salmon.

Precision Systems, an Israel-based company which supplies RTLS equipment has been bought by Paralec, which is a Rocky Hill N.J. - based manufacturer of conductive inks for RFID tags. The acquisition gives Paralec a foothold in the field of asset tracking and logistics. The iLocate RTLS by Precision Systems makes use of 433 MHz bidirectional active tags for seeking out assets.

The VeriMed system which enables accessing patients’ records with the help of VeriChip RFID tags carried by patients has been declared a success by the VeriChip Corporation.

QinetiQ and Crown Holdings, Inc. have come together in a development program that will hopefully lead to the adaptation of the Omni-ID™ integrated Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology by QinetiQ in the metal packaging industry. This has implications for the tracking of objects at the single item level using UHF tags.

RFID tagging on metal is not easy because of issues such as signal reflection and detuning in the presence of metal and liquids. The Omni-ID™ tags, which measure less than 1 mm in thickness, will be placed directly on the metal substrate with the help of Omni-ID™ packaging technology. The success of these tags will be decided by their success in gathering and focusing RF energy to and fro from chip to reader. The tags will also cost less as they will not require the large dipole that comes with UHF tags; instead they will have a short built-in antenna.

The development of tags for metal substrates will soon see the metals themselves acting as the antenna. This will lead to simplified production procedures and cheaper costs. At present, the tags are being marketed to high-end products such as perfumes and confectionary items. Later, the company hopes to extend its tags for use at item-level across metal packaging and aqueous product applications.

Nortel has plans in the offing for providing municipalities to use RFID along with their existing Wi-Fi infrastructure already in place. This will help municipal governments to track the movement of their assets and in RTLS. The equipment provided by Nortel will enable wireless Internet service providers to build wireless broadband networks with the help of Wi-Fi and WiMAX technology. Nortel is working in conjunction with companies like Blue Vector Systems to develop a platform to offer enhanced services that will make use of RFID.

Municipalities are huge entities in their own right with several movable and immovable assets that need tracking. Apart from innumerable vehicles, municipal governments need to account for expensive scientific equipment and various other knick-knacks in their offices, buildings, and schools. These items can be fitted with RFID tags that will transmit their information to GPS receivers.

In a very interesting trial being held in Japan, the famous shopping neighborhood of Ginza is being blanketed by 10,000 RFID tags to see if they help in giving location-related information to visitors to that area. The exercise is being carried out under the Tokyo Ubiquitous Network Project and participants will be handed out prototype readers developed especially for the project.

The system will hopefully provide information to shoppers visiting this busy area in at least four languages – Korean, Chinese, English, and Japanese. The trial is scheduled to begin on Jan 21 and run till March.

A new study released by ChainLink Research has thrown up an interesting fact regarding RFID adoption. Most companies will add RFID to their setups in order to benefit from the technology and not necessarily to meet customer mandates.

This is a bit of a surprise because customers in this case include giants like the U.S DoD and Wal-Mart. All RFID-related activity is not necessarily related to customer mandates or the EPC technology. The study found that many companies were interested in working with active RFID tags and the passive 13.56 MHz tags.

The vale of this effort by ChainLink lies in the fact that it gathered details from the entire cross section of industry and covered an impressive 275 manufacturers. More than 180 companies were already using RFID and of these 41% were doing so for process improvements. Another interesting fact thrown up by the research is that smaller companies are treading the unknown RFID waters bravely and doing so more for the sake of improving processes than meeting mandates. Of the companies with less than $25m in annual revenue, an unbelievable 63% are implementing RFID to benefit from the technology.

The study also highlights the companies’ desires to keep the system functioning to themselves. Most of the RFID systems being implemented were closed-loop. At the manufacturer’s end, RFID finds maximum application at outbound shipping; distribution and logistics; manufacturing/plant floor; receiving and inbound materials; and asset/capital equipment tracking.

The report mentions that companies turning to RFID for process improvements are much more likely to return a positive ROI than those that do it for compliance. The main causes that hinder RFID adoption include high technology cost, lack of clarity on the potential uses of RFID, misconceptions regarding the maturity of the technology and insufficient in-house expertise to design and manage RFID.

Topping this out, the ChainLink report projected the amount of money spent on RFID in 2007 to be twice that spent in 2005.

Herding, which is a Germany-based company manufacturing industrial air-filtering systems, has announced that they expect to get an ROI on its RFID investments in 2007, 3 years after the company implemented RFID in 2004. With RFID, the company has replaced the pen-and-paper methods used for returning refitted air filters to the owners. The company uses 40,000 RFID tags each year in its production and return-handling process.

[commentary] Consumerist writes [via LifeHacker] about a bank who threw out a customer for refusing to supply a fingerprint. WTF?! Seems Bank of America’s rules state that thumbprints must be given if a consumer wants to cash a cheque and they are not a BoA customer. Even if the cheque is issued from a BoA customer account.

More evidence that we’ve entered a world of madness, when regular identification isn’t enough, and we all have to be treated like criminals by the right-wing powers that be. These are the people that have ushered in Big Brother, and sneer at anyone who suggests that that is the case. So not only should you take it, you should shut your face about it already.

The worst part is that “junior” employees often buy into this crap, possibly for fear of their jobs. Or they’ve been brainwashed into believing that everyone is a potential T-word. In this case the consumer, referred to only as Tycho, was subjected to the threat of being escorted out by a security guard for disagreeing with the manager. This stuff sickens me. I’ve experienced similar behaviour towards me since late 2001. Tycho was summarily ignored by everyone in the bank, despite being extremely polite.

Good luck to all of us living in a world where you can’t even cash a cheque without someone “tagging” you. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, most of this Big Brother push isn’t because powerful want to control us all per se but because there is so much money in tagging everyone and everything that the only way to get at least the stupid to buy into it all is to create a fear society, thus justifying a surveillance society. Don’t get me started on who is responsible for this disgusting environment we live in today. Just learn to distinguish between legitimate and bogus applications of RFID and biometric identification.