Should a customer be able to remove or disable a product's tag?

Two requirements that pull apart

On one side, a product passport has to stay available for at least the expected lifetime of the product, which the availability page covers, and its carrier has to be where the act for the group says, which the carrier page covers. A carrier a customer removes is a carrier that is no longer there.

On the other, a tag answers whoever brings a phone to it and returns whatever it holds. That is unremarkable on a washing machine and different on a coat, because one of them goes out into the street with its owner. The tracking page and the public tags page set out what that does and does not amount to.

Neither side is a slogan. A product designer has to answer both, and the answer is made in the housing or the seam rather than in the firmware.

There is no off switch

Erasing a tag empties it and leaves a working tag anyone can rewrite. Locking freezes what is there. Neither produces a tag that does nothing, and there is no kill command to rely on across chips: breaking the antenna is the method that always works, as the disabling page concludes.

So a product that lets a customer disable its tag is a product with a tag the customer can cut, tear or take out. That is a mechanical requirement, with a location, a tool and a line on the drawing.

A moulded in tag is the opposite decision, taken at the tooling stage and not reversible afterwards. Both are legitimate; what is not legitimate is arriving at one of them by default.

What the tag actually reveals

A model level identifier is the same on every unit. It says what the product is, which is what the label already says, and it distinguishes nothing about the person carrying it.

An item level identifier is unique, so two readings of the same value are the same object. That is the point of it for a warranty or a recall and it is also what makes it worth a second thought on a wearable item. The level page takes that decision, and the act for the group usually takes it first.

What the tag holds matters as much as what it identifies. A tag carrying an address and an identifier leaves the data behind an access controlled service, which the access page describes; a tag carrying the data itself has published it to every phone that passes, which is the argument the storage page makes for its own reasons.

The choices a designer has

A permanent carrier, built in, for anything that has to outlive the first owner. That is the passport case and it means the tag is part of the product.

A removable carrier, a hangtag or a sewn patch with a marked cut line, for anything that does not. The customer keeps the product and loses the tag, which is an honest trade as long as what is lost is stated.

A permanent carrier that reveals little: a model level identifier and an address, with everything specific behind it. This is the combination that satisfies most of both requirements at once, and it costs nothing to choose at design time.

And whichever is chosen, say so where the tap lands. A page that states what the tag holds and what the visit records is the part a customer can actually check, which the disclosure page sets out.