It's Time to Address Privacy

By Mark Roberti

Katherine Albrecht, founder of Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (CASPIAN), was quoted in a recent Globe and Mail article (see Who's Watching the Watchers?) as saying: "Promoters have a lot more funding these days to make their case. Privacy advocates don't get as much press."

In reality, vendors of radio frequency identification technologies have spent little or nothing on educating the public about RFID. And privacy advocates get all the press because stories about Big Brother spying on you sell more newspapers than stories about improved supply-chain efficiency.


From recent conversations I've had with end users and vendors, people feel there is a growing need to do more to explain what RFID is, how it is being used, what it can and can't do and so on. EPCglobal, the group commercializing Electronic Product Code technologies, and AIM Global, the association for automatic data capture companies, have been focused on educating legislators in the United States and Europe. They also provide information for the press, but I'm not sure either has the resources or the desire to make educating the public a high priority.

I believe it's time to create a nonprofit group that focuses on education. Any organization funded by the RFID industry will, no doubt, be considered a tool for misinforming the public. But I still think it would be worth creating a group to do the following:

• Promote and encourage companies using RFID in any consumer application to adhere to best practices that protect consumer privacy.
• Educate the public, legislators, journalists and privacy advocates about the potential privacy issues RFID raises, and the ways they can be addressed.
• Coordinate the work of various RFID industry bodies to ensure a unified approach to RFID labeling.

What I would like to see is an organization headed by someone who understands RFID systems and can intelligently address questions about read range, the potential for surreptitious reading of tags and so on.