Les étiquettes RFID mettront fin au courrier perdu[en] 

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips are small and relatively low-cost circuits capable of communicating with a fixed or portable device, the reader. They are currently used in different sectors ranging from transport (luggage retrieval) to healthcare (for safer and more efficient management of patients' profiles) See our Links Dossier for further information.

A key obstacle to their massive deployment is privacy. Regulators and industry have still to agree on common rules and standards to ensure the safe treatment of personal data when RFID chips are involved.

For this reason in March 2007, the European Commission adopted a communication  announcing further actions to address privacy-related concerns arising from the development of RFID chips.

The first move was to issue a draft recommendation defining the guidelines to be followed to avoid abuses or misuses of private information collected through RFID devices in February 2008. After the conclusion of a public consultation on the topic, the Commission is now expected to translate the draft document into an official set of guidelines (see EurActiv 13/03/08). 

Without the right technology "you run a big risk that things get lost," underlined Florent Frederix from the European Commission, speaking at a conference in Brussels on 18 June.

Indeed, all EU member states are requested to abolish lingering national monopolies on postal services (see our Links Dossier) by December 2012 at the latest. While the intention is to open the market to new entrants and make mail deliveries more efficient across Europe, there is also a risk that, with an increased number of actors involved in the process, items may get lost. 

Innovations that can ensure the safe management of items are therefore needed and the Commission is looking at RFID as the "right" technology to do this. 

Radio Frequency Identification chips have been already deployed by postal companies in around 50 countries across the world to measure the quality of their services.

The tags are attached to sample items. Their delivery process is monitored and is used to assess the efficiency of a postal service. But "as costs drop and tags become smaller, RFID could be used for item-level tracking," explained Akhilesh Mathur of the Universal Postal Union (UPU), the UN body specialised in postal services.

Item-level tracking implies a massive deployment of RFID, potentially involving all the items sent. This would result in a close-to-zero risk of failed delivery.

To make this possible, RFID chips would have to be cheap, tiny, easily available and based on common standards. High-tech companies, like Hitachi or Motorola, are currently working to make chips more affordable and functional. The size has already decreased so much that now experts do not talk of chips, but of "smart dust".

But interoperability remains a key concern. At the beginning of the year, the European Commission launched a two-year project called GRIFS to build a global RFID standards forum. All stakeholders agree on the need of talking and finding common grounds. 

Common standards would indeed pave the way for a broader application of RFID technologies for end-users and not just service providers. Radio Frequency Identification tags could then become a day-to-day technology used for making payments through mobile phones or to check the origin of food purchased in a supermarket. The final stage would be the so-called 'Internet of Things', where active RFID could make objects communicate between themselves to automatically address daily needs.

Florent Frederix, nicknamed the European Commission's Mr. RFID, said: "We dramatically underestimate the power of future technology progress." "As chips become smaller each day, up to smart dust, we expect RFID to move from the current stage of identification to a final stage of making objects act," he added, speaking at a conference on the GRIFS project in Brussels.

Akhilesh Mathur of the Universal Postal Union (UPU) underlined: "RFID have very significant operational implications for postal services. That is why we are strongly interested. But global standards are essential."

The European standardisation bodies involved in RFID, in particular ETSI and CEN, agreed. "The reasons why we did not see a massive take off of RFID are in the lack of trust in technology, mainly for security reasons, and in non interoperability," said Patrick Guillemin  of ETSI. 

"We proposed several projects on RFID but their progress is stuck for the lack of collaboration with the European Commission," underlined John Ketchell of CEN  in a more targeted observation.

The need for more interoperability has also been underlined by GS1, the private standardisation body  that is behind the bar code, the technology that might be replaced by RFID. "There was a lot of hype on RFID at the beginning of 2000, but now things are really going ahead," commented Henri Barthel, GRIFS (Global RFID Interoperability Forum for Standards) project coordinator at GS1.