Cards embedded with RFID chips are widely used as electronic cash, e.g. Octopus Card in Hong Kong and the Netherlands to pay fares in mass transit systems and/or retails. In August 2004, the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction (ODRH) approved a $415,000 contract to trial the tracking technology with Alanco Technologies. Inmates will wear "wristwatch-sized" transmitters that can detect if prisoners have been trying to remove them and send an alert to prison computers. This project is not the first such rollout of tracking chips in US prisons. Facilities in Michigan, California, and Illinois already employ the technology.

Potential uses
RFID tags are often envisioned as a replacement for UPC or EAN bar codes, having a number of important advantages over the older bar-code technology. RFID codes are long enough that every RFID tag may have a unique code, while UPC codes are limited to a single code for all instances of a particular product. The uniqueness of RFID tags means that a product may be individually tracked as it moves from location to location, finally ending up in the consumer's hands. This may help companies to combat theft and other forms of product loss. It has also been proposed to use RFID for point-of-sale store checkout to replace the cashier with an automatic system, with the option of erasing all RFID tags at checkout and paying by credit card or inserting money into a payment machine. This has to a limited extent already been implemented at some stores.

An organization called EPCglobal is working on a proposed international standard for the use of RFID and the Electronic Product Code (EPC) in the identification of any item in the supply chain for companies in any industry, anywhere in the world. The organization's board of governors includes representatives from EAN International, Uniform Code Council, The Gillette Company, Procter & Gamble, Wal-Mart, Hewlett-Packard, Johnson & Johnson, and Auto-ID Labs.

In July 2004, the Federal Drug Administration issued a ruling that essentially begins a final review process that will determine whether hospitals can use RFID systems to identify patients and/or permit relevant hospital staff to access medical records. Many somewhat far-fetched uses, such as allowing a refrigerator to track the expiration dates of the food it contains, have also been proposed, but few have moved beyond the prototype stage.

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