According to rfidbuzz.com, a blog and sounding board, RFID users were worried about clauses insisting that tags be disabled or removed at the point of sale. “Retailers demanded changes to the bill,” the Web site says, and the bill expired before changes were made.

Massachusetts may soon be facing a similar situation. In 2004, State Senator Jarrett Barrios sponsored legislation comparable to that rejected in Utah. The bill, SB-181, says that consumers have a right to know about RFID and to have their tags removed before leaving a store. It also says that consumers must give a retailer permission to track their purchasing and buying habits.

The bill received a 90-day extension earlier this month, but Barrios’s office is not certain that it will be approved. “We’re still fighting for it to be reviewed favorably,” says Dalie Jiminez, director of special programs for Barrios. “But for most people, [RFID] hasn’t hit home yet.”

The opinion of Terry Laine, spokesman for the US Energy and Commerce Committee, reflects this sentiment. Though one of its committees held an information session in July 2004 to examine the potential uses and abuses of RFID, it has not yet proposed any legislation. “We have a pretty robust privacy agenda, but I don’t think that RFID is an issue that at this point has caused a lot of concern,” Laine told the Phoenix.

Trojan horse
Americans are generally unconcerned about RFID because they don’t know about it yet. And the industry wants to keep it that way.

ADVERTISEMENT

Albrecht recalls attending an RFID conference last year where she proposed a Right to Know Act. “I have legislation that is not trying to kill this technology,” she told an audience of RFID manufacturers. “All you have to do is identify that you’re using tags.”

Yet instead of expressing relief that the bill would not limit the technology, Albrecht says, the crowd grew irritable. “You know as well as I do, if you tell the public [about RFID], then they won’t let you do it,” she recalls a man saying.

Albrecht says that the industry is trying to use a Trojan Horse to implement RFID, so that the technology will arrive in our midst before we have a chance to react. “By the time consumers become aware of this technology, there will be nothing they can do about it,” Albrecht says.

Herb Markwardt, RFID project leader for Tyson Foods, reinforced this idea during a presentation at last month’s RFID conference. “If you want the technology to become ubiquitous, you must get it to the consumer in a form they think they can’t live without,” he said.

Harrop points out that consumers have often responded in such a way. Cell phones and credit cards are currently tracking our movements and purchases, yet “I’ve never heard of privacy groups ever giving a damn about it,” he says.

Albrecht, meanwhile, maintains that the RFID industry has good reason to keep quiet about its plans. She points to a 2001 IBM patent application that outlines the company’s intention to track people in public places.

In the patent, IBM explains how it will identify people using the RFID tags that a person is already bearing — in a package they’re carrying, say, or embedded in a garment or a shoe. Once IBM has determined a person’s identity, it will track him or her around a store and record his or her shopping habits. This information will be used to “provide targeted advertising to the person as the person roams.”

The patent also suggests that this same tracking method can be carried out in public spaces. Readers can be placed in “shopping malls, airports, train stations, bus stations, elevators, trains, airplanes, restrooms, sports arenas, libraries, theaters, museums, etc.,” it says.

Patents are frequently written to cover all potential uses of a technology, so it does not necessarily indicate that IBM is planning to track people. Still, the patent undermines frequent industry assertions that the technology will not — and even cannot — be used to track individuals.

In fact, Wal-Mart, Gillette, and Proctor & Gamble have already been caught surreptitiously spying on consumers. In 2003, a Wal-Mart in Brockton was found to have installed a “smart shelf” that held RFID-tagged razors. When a package was removed from the shelf, the tag in the box triggered a hidden camera that snapped the customer’s picture. That same year, a similar scheme occurred in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, with packages of Lipfinity Lipstick.

These stories have validated many privacy advocates’ concerns and hastened them to further action. In July 2004, Steinhardt told members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce that RFID, along with computers, GPS, biometrics, and sensors, is “feeding what can be described as a surveillance monster that is growing silently in our midst.”