Privacy Nonsense Sweeps the Internet

This patent played a big role in Albrecht's book, Spychips, and was central to the article she wrote for Scientific American. It's important to her, because it's the only real "evidence" she can cite that retailers want to employ radio frequency identification to track consumers. The problem is, IBM is not a retailer, and no retailer has ever deployed the system (I doubt IBM ever built it, in fact). The simple truth is, we all know retailers want to know more about what people want to buy so that they can sell it to them. We also have nine years of proof, since the IBM patent was filed, that Wal-Mart and other retailers will not use RFID to infringe on privacy, because they don't want to lose customers.

Yam wrote: "...the fact is, it can play Big Brother if it wants to." Yeah, and it can also go out of business, when customers decide they don't like shopping with Big Brother watching. Maybe this never occurred to Yam, but customers can choose where they spend their money. I can tell you with absolute certainty that Wal-Mart is painfully aware of this fact.

If Scientific American were adhering to scientific principals, it would point out that Albrecht's theory that this technology will be abused by retailers has thus far been disproven. Nine years after IBM patented a way to do it, there is not a single instance in her 300-page book, her six-page Scientific American article or anywhere else of a retailer ever using RFID to capture data on consumers without their knowledge. Moreover, Wal-Mart is requiring tags to be placed on labels, hangtags and exterior packaging that will be removed and discarded by consumers. And it has no readers at the point of sale, so it can't link RFID tags to personally identifiable information.

My theory, from the day this issue came up, was that retailers would respect customers' privacy because they would want to keep them as customers. I also wrote, in 2004, that "it's clear that the capitalist system forces technology to evolve in ways that benefit consumers." And I offered the Internet as an example (see Faith in the System, Part II). With the new privacy features built into new chips from Impinj and NXP Semiconductors, I believe my theory is holding up pretty well.

I'd write an article for Scientific American, but they don't seem to be interested in science these days.

Mark Roberti is the founder and editor of RFID Journal. If you would like to comment on this article, click on the link below. To read more of Mark's opinions, visit the RFID Journal Blog or the Editor's Note archive.