Building User Confidence in RFID Technology for Mobile and Retail Environments

RFID technology has made great advancements in supply chain since last 4 years but its use in retail (aka post point of sale) domain has been marred with controversies due to privacy issues. These issues arise because passive tags respond to any interrogating reader. In future, mobile RFID readers will be as ubiquitous as cell phones. Some of them would be embedded in cell phones. This will further exacerbate privacy issues and will slow down this technology\´s deployment in the retail domain. The work in this paper aims to instill consumer confidence by protecting them from "competitive marketing" and "preference" threats by presenting a scalable architecture to prevent unauthorized reading of RFID tags in retail and mobile environments. The architecture restricts the readers in these environments to read only "approved" tags. The paper mulls formation of a central regulatory entity to certify readers and to monitor their behavior upon deployment.