Scottish Startup Promotes Silent Tags

Morán contends that the Silent Tag system would protect personal privacy. "Silent tags can only be found if you have a relative certainty of the location of the tag [and if you know the tag's password]. Whereas with EPC [Electronic Product Code], you can just look for everything in the reader's range, so you could take a reader onto a subway every day and, over time, you might start to detect the same tags and eventually associate a single tag ID with a specific person—because it is attached to something they carry every day—and use that ID to identify the person."

Silent Tag technology has been tested in a laboratory setting, Morán says, and the company is actively engaging with partners to perform pilot projects within retail environments. Friendly Technologies, he adds, also hopes to develop a system by which retailers could offer customer a means of storing the tag privacy passwords assigned to their purchased items on RFID-enabled cell phones. Customers would then use their phones to identify their tagged purchases for various applications related to product registration, or participation in warranty programs—or merely to take inventory of items in their closets or cupboards.

In addition, Morán says he is heading a project that would create a wide-ranging consortium of technology and government partnerships to develop a system for expanding the deployment and impact of RFID systems throughout both industry and society. He has already received support from 24 government and industry partners, he indicates, including the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM), the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and Tagsys, that are interested in participating in the project, known as the Socially-acceptable, Affordable, Environmentally-friendly Internet of Things, or SAFE-IOT.

The group is seeking €9 million ($12.8 million) in funding from the European Commission to develop the framework by which the Silent Tag architecture would be implemented globally, using a decentralized architecture with open and common standards. Morán's ultimate goal, he says, is to create an Internet of things wherein "data follows objects as they move." An important element of this design, he notes, would be to have cheap, printable RFID tags that could be associated with multiple identities, for use by different supply chain partners, and fortified by the data security and privacy protections he is presently developing at Friendly Technologies.

Morán says he expects to learn in January 2010 whether the European Commission will approve the SAFE-IOT funding request. "If the EC does not fund SAFE-IOT, the partners have agreed to keep looking for funding possibilities," he states. "Most partners are willing to finance some R&D with internal resources, yet not at the scale made possible by the EC funding."