No doubt about it, RFID is hot these days.  While the price of passive RFID is still considered expensive (10 cents or so) for low cost applications like tagging Captain Crunch, moderately priced goods can be tagged now and creative applications are starting to appear.

Unfortunately, RFID is being oversold like magic dust.  For example, primary benefits of RFID to stores like Wal-Mart are supposed to be reduction in labor and theft related costs.  But it doesn't take a genius to see that reducing bodycount at stores and increasing reliance on automated systems will reduce eyeballs and increase complacency which will result in increase of both small and large scale theft leaving people to wonder where has all the RFID tagged stuff has disappeared to several months later.

RFID technology is simple enough to be easily worked around by cloaking RF signals with cheap home-made RF shields and/or switching RFID tags.  Attempt to prevent such gimicks will increase cost.  Yet, I have yet to see serious discussions about these issues.  I doubt Wal-Mart has considered them either.  While I don't mind Wal-Mart volunteering to be the guinea-pig, I don't think their customers do.

I hope to see some more reasonable analysis of RFID benefits and problems than all the hype out there now.  If you know of any, please send me the link.