Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Whole Foods RFID price tag security

A brand new Whole Foods opened up right next to our house so I had to check it out on opening day. What a nightmare of triple parked Prius', scooters and other granola eating eco-hipsters transportation devices. I'm not an anti-hippy but my love for red meat, beer and Marlboro lights is not so popular with that crowd. Anyways throughout the dozens of free yummy samples I happened to notice new digital price tags under the food. Well they are not connected to any physical wires and looks to be powered off watch batteries, must be RFID! A little bit of googleing confirmed my theory and we are off to the races.



Potential security issues:

Price modification (Choice Ribeye steak for $2/pound)
Customer product tracking
Store pricing denial of service (eggs and toilet paper now $99, maybe too believable at whole foods)
Price change sniffers (publish sale items on rss feed, hide behind the cantaloupe)

I would like to hear your ideas, thoughts, comments on this change which will likely ripple down to other big box grocers in the future.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Good evening Greg,

I'm a graduate student at Texas State University working on a typography project involving a cultural comparison between American and German price tags in grocery stores. I am seeking permission to use your image listed in this post for my project. This project is not for profit or publication. I would greatly appreciate permission to do so. Thanks and have a great evening.

Hoyt
ch1162@txstate.edu