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Experts' Q & A about RFID privacy

The February 2006 issue of RFID Product News has an excellent debate among RFID critics and advocates in their February issue. "Debate" is not quite the right word: the magazine's managing editor Eric Van Osten, asked each expert the same set of questions about RFID's impact on personal privacy and their written responses were compiled.

"Private Eyes are Watching You" is too long to reproduce here, but visit the magazine's website to read it online. Note that the online version is longer than the published version. Here is the article's introduction:

"Since RFID's beginnings in the 1940s, RFID applications have grown to include personnel security, toll systems, animal identification, container tracking, and much more. As mandates from the DoD [US Department of Defense] and powerful mass market retailers escalate and RFID tags infiltrate supply chains all over the world, benefits are being realized in ways never before imagined.

"But not everybody is a fan. Consumer privacy groups have sprung up in retaliation of RFID because of its perceived potential to allow the government, marketers, or other unscrupulous organizations or individuals to track and profile people unwillingly. The argument is that when item-level tagging takes off, everyone's every possession could be recorded in a database and tracked for the rest of its life (from manufacturer to trash dump). This kind of tracking allows for the possibility that consumers themselves could be tracked in association with what they buy, wear, carry, and interact with every day.

"In the fall of 2005, Katherine Albrecht, Founder and Director of Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (CASPIAN, www.spychips.com) and Liz McIntyre, CASPIAN's Communication Director, released the book Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID. The book climbed to the top of the nonfiction bestseller charts and launched a wave of disapproval from supporters of the RFID industry. Nicholas Chavez, President of RFID Ltd., was one of several vocal critics. His rebuttal to the book is outlined, chapter by chapter, in The Original Spychips Rebuttal (www.packagedrfid.com/spychips_rebuttal.pdf).

"Albrecht spoke at the Truth in Technologies forum in Long Island, NY, around the same time as the book's release. Also speaking about policy issues was Elliot Maxwell (www.emaxwell.net), a consultant to private and public sector clients on strategic issues involving the intersection of business, technology, and public policy in the Internet and electronic commerce domains, and a Fellow at Johns Hopkins University. Maxwell agreed that RFID raises a number of concerns but argued that the potential benefits far outweigh the potential problems. He stressed that the application of the principles underlying fair information practices, the development of new technological features aimed at increasing customer choices, and the provision of consumer education were preferable to trying to limit the technology. Moreover, many important social benefits, such as improved tracking of toxic materials or new home health care applications, would be lost if all tags were required to be deactivated.

"RFID Product News asked these vocal experts - CASPIAN's Albrecht and McIntyre, RFID Ltd.'s Chavez, and Elliot Maxwell - to answer a few questions about the subject of privacy..."