2013年02月07日
It's Mine: crime prevention now cheap as (micro) chips 【wired.co.uk】
"It's a dog's life" has long been a phrase for hardship, but Alan MacFadyen believes your prized possessions are envious. MacFadyen is co-founder of new UK crime prevention company It's Mine Technology and he claims the common practice of microchipping now has the potential to turn the tables on petty crime.
It's Mine means this in a remarkably literal sense. It is taking the latest revision of tiny rice-size 8mm x 1.4mm pet microchips and shipping them with an applicator that allows them to be fitted into clothing, bags, briefcases, laptops, phones, tablets -- just about anything. The chips have a unique ID which customers register on Immobilise.com (the national mobile property register used by the police) and each chip has a 20-year lifespan. A tamper proof label is supplied with every chip as a deterrent to potential thieves and a cue to police officers.
This seemingly oddball idea has actually been a long time in the making. "More than 10 years ago I was a consult to Orange's Futurescape team which looked at technology up to 10 years out," says MacFadyen. "We looked at chipping then, but the technology wasn't there. Chips were 3-4x the size which made them obvious and risked damaging items. They were also too expensive."
Price is what It's Mine hopes will at last take the original vision mainstream. Whereas microchipping costs up to £30 per pet, It's Mine ships a chip and applicator for £12.99 with a subsequent additional chips costing £11.99.
But does it work? Certainly in pets the results are very strong, with the Dogs Trust reporting in 2011 that microchips were responsible for 32 percent of all owners' reunions with their lost animals. By contrast the current outlook for reuniting owners with their possessions is bleak. Transport for London (TfL) says on average one in four items found on the network is restored to its owner and the National Bike Registry points out that while 48 percent of all stolen bicycles are recovered only five percent are successfully returned.
Other perks? MacFadyen says if chipping became ubiquitous it would make thieves think twice because the chips are extremely hard to find, difficult to remove without damaging an item and would greatly impact the black market where a fear of chips in items would weaken demand. There is an upside to law enforcement too with officers easily able to prove items are stolen after an arrest and use their origin to better track crime patterns.
Paul Ekblom, professor of Design Against Crime at Central Saint Martins College and a former crime researcher for the Home Office, says the logic behind chipping is sound. "The product is an interesting and encouraging one because of the quality of the thinking and development process behind it," he explains. "It has been designed with close attention to the theories underlying crime science and the psychology of consumers and criminals. [There is] an interest in using research evidence and in generating further hard evidence of effectiveness and cost effectiveness, which is quite unusual for commercial products."
That said Ekblom argues crime prevention works best when people simply get the message that they must be more conscientious in their daily behaviour; something he says is a direct consequence of our relatively recent obsession with portable gadgets. "Undoubtedly there is now a steady movement towards property protection," he says "although it has taken a long time for manufacturers and service providers to admit [their role in] the problem and that their products have been 'complicit with crime' by being too easy to steal."
For It's Mine the battle will be in attaining wide acceptance, but the company is off to a good start. In its first full month's trading it has chipped £20m worth of instruments at the Royal College of Music, secured discounts for customers who chip items insured by Lark and New Moon insurance companies and agreed a deal to pre-chip all Jobeeny designer handbags. In addition to chips, It's Mine is also offering product lines in personal GPS trackers plus bracelets and key rings which alert you to separation from a paired Bluetooth device.
"The task of crime prevention can never stand still because we're in an arms race with adaptive offenders run against a backdrop of social and technological change," concludes Ekblom. "The only strategic response to keeping crime under control in the long run is to give designers… the capacity to out-innovate the criminals, and the manufacturers and organisations who may inadvertently or recklessly generate crime opportunities the motivation to make their products secure."
As it turns out diversifying use of pet microchips appears a surprisingly good place to start.
Correction: Article previously stated a bag of ten chips costed £11.99. A single additional chip costs £11.99, while a bag of ten costs £67.99
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/05/crime-preventing-microchips
投稿者 unicon : 2013年02月07日 11:37