The Power of Simple Logic and a Balanced View

This is a link a good weekend read if you're in the RFID industry. It's by freelance writer Sally Bacchetta who is, among other things, an award-winning pharmaceutical sales trainer. It's a long piece, but worth reading for its clarity, balance, and sweeping overview of the privacy debate brewing over RFID's real and imaginable implementations.

Perhaps this one brief excerpt will intrigue you enough to scan the full length presentation:

Katherine Albrecht founded the consumer advocacy group CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering)... warns that “smart tags” — dubbed “spy chips” — increase retailer profits at the expense of consumer privacy... RFID provides a continuous feed of our activities as we peek, poke, squeeze and shake tagged items throughout the store. Advocacy groups consider this electronic play-by-play a treasure for corporate marketing and a tragedy for consumer privacy... However, shopping in any public venue is not private. It’s public. The decision to be in a public space includes a tacit acknowledgement that one can be seen by others. That’s the difference between the public world and the private world.

RFID does enable retailers to surveil consumers and link them with their purchasing histories. As disconcerting as that may be, it is neither new nor unique to RFID. Anyone who uses credit cards agrees to forfeit some degree of privacy for the privilege of buying now and paying later. Credit card companies collect and retain your name, address, telephone and Social Security numbers. This personal information is used to track the date, time, location, items and price of every purchase made with the card?... Don’t use credit cards? Unless you pay with cash, someone is monitoring you too.