What's New In Science

Imagine a world where employers could track the length of lunch breaks or find out what employees really do after calling in sick.

With Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), they can, and some UW computer scientists are wondering how this might affect everyday life.

The team of researchers created the RFID Ecosystem inside the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science and Engineering. They placed 33 RFID readers on floors two through six of the building, and placed RFID tags on their bags, computers, ID badges and personal belongings, said Evan Welbourne, a computer science and engineering graduate student who installed the RFID reader system.

"What we wanted to do was create a future world that isn't quite here for everybody, and say, 'What if the world was full of RFID tags?'" said Gaetano Borriello, a professor of computer science and engineering who worked on the project.

RFID is similar to a barcode, but because the RFID tag uses a tiny computer chip and radio antenna to store and transmit information, it can hold much more information than a traditional barcode, Borriello said. Companies like Gillette and Wal-Mart use this tagging system to track the flow of goods between stores, Welbourne said.

Now, however, RFID is becoming part of consumer products.

"So the question is: Why would a consumer want to use an RFID tag?" Boriello said. To create useful applications for RFID, they developed programs that take low-level data. For instance, RFID tag 133 was detected by reader 12 at 12:05 p.m., and that was translated into more meaningful data, like "John went on lunch break," said Magda Balazinska, assistant professor of computer science and engineering. The researchers envision using RFID tagging to find misplaced personal belongings, Balazinska added.

The group recently gained approval from the UW's Human Subjects Division to expand its experiment. By summer, an additional 50-100 CSE students and professors will be able to track their own activities, through an application the group is developing called the Personal Digital Store, Welbourne said.

"Nowadays, you have a calendar of things you're going to do, but what about the other way [HTML_REMOVED] a calendar of things that you did?" said Travis Kriplean, a computer science and engineering graduate student working on the project. "So you can imagine the system might be able to fill in the calendar as you do the things [HTML_REMOVED] you can look back on the calendar and see what actually happened."

Some privacy issues have already surfaced in the experiment, Balazinska said.

"It's easy to see privacy concerns by violating our own privacy," Balazinska said. "We'll be working in groups, and we need to find people in this project, and then you look at the system to find someone. On one hand it's neat, but at the same time that could really be abused."

The group has set up their own network so that people can only see their own RFID data or the RFID data of people who were in their presence at the time. All the group members can delete their own data.

"You can see your own history or who you might have seen when you were walking around," Kriplean said. "However, I wouldn't be able to see where you were unless I was with you."

New Zealand and U.S. passports use RFID, hospitals in Europe tag medical equipment with RFID and some of their staff is already wearing RFID badges, said Robert Spies, a senior and computer science major working on the project. Despite RFID's proliferation, there is little public agreement on who owns the data, who can access it and how it can be used.

The UW plans to embed RFID cards into Husky cards as part of the One Regional Card for All (ORCA) program, according to the UW Web site.

"There's not even a question of whether this technology will be deployed. It's here, and people are using it," Balazinska said. "The question is: Can we propose good privacy models by deploying it faster?"

Reach columnist Tia Ghose at news@thedaily.washington.edu.