Don’t Look Now, But More High-Tech Tracking Is Near
October 10, 2003
by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor
A consortium of retailers and consumer goods companies were planning to unveil the replacement for the ubiquitous bar code next week. The upgrade will use a controversial new high-tech radio technology that critics say will significantly expand the powers of retailers to track the whereabouts of their goods and the people who buy them.
The Auto-ID Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) planned to release the Electronic Product Code (EPC) Network at a meeting of the center’s sponsors in Chicago as this issue of Gun Week went to press.
With the EPC, retailers and suppliers will track not only product codes related to both sales and inventories—something bar codes already do—but serial numbers for each individual item. Some of the tags can also send out signals when perishables reach their expiration dates. That’s the good part of the system.
Now for some bad news: In addition, the group will demonstrate radio frequency identification (RFID) tags that can be embedded in product labels. These RFID tags can broadcast information about products, including their location, when exposed to a radio signal. With a quick scan, a retailer can take a complete, accurate inventory of its shelves, helping to cut costs. But critics of the technology say RFID tags would enable massive privacy violations by retailers, governments and crooks.
Protesters from consumer groups and privacy advocates plan demonstrations in Chicago at McCormick Place, where the technology was scheduled to be unveiled.
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The Auto-ID Center will not publish its plan for protecting consumers, however. A draft proposal recommends that retailers disable the RFID tags at checkout, but only when shoppers ask them to do so, said Kevin Ashton, a Procter & Gamble brand manager and the center’s director.
The Auto-ID Center also will advise retailers to alert shoppers to the presence of chips in the products they buy, and permit shoppers to opt out of attempts to combine their purchase histories with their customer loyalty card information.
“Our goal is simply to make the supply chain more efficient,” said Ashton. “Beyond the shelf, we don’t see any need to track the items.”
But retailers testing RFID tags in their stores in the US and Europe are not disabling RFID tags, according to the technology’s opponents.
“We’re not aware of any cases in which the chips are being killed at checkout,” said Katherine Albrecht, director of the anti-RFID group CASPIAN. Wal-Mart pulled RFID-tagged items off the shelves of its store in Brockton, MA, over the summer, but many other retailers are continuing to test the technology, according to Wired News.
Albrecht and a lawyer from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have testified about privacy and RFID tags before California state senators, and their cause has caught the interest of a handful of legislators in other states and the US Congress. The activists say new laws may be needed to prevent organizations from tracking individuals through the radio signals emanating from the things they purchase.
In Germany, consumers have little to worry about, according to Metro, the country’s largest retail chain. “We are very conservative about privacy issues here, perhaps more so than in the United States,” said Metro spokesman Albrecht von Truchsess. Metro is testing RFID tags and readers with pallets and shipping containers at one of its warehouses. The retailer is also selling RFID-tagged bottles of Pantene shampoo at its Future Store in Rheinberg, north of Dusselorf.
Metro will only collect purchasing information from RFID cards from customers who opt in, asking to be included in a program that notifies them of specials on products they frequently purchase. And Metro is working with IBM in Germany to develop a device to disable the tags as shoppers leave the store.
Wal-Mart Rules
Long before consumers face serious threats to their privacy from RFID tags, however, Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, will force its suppliers to tag their warehouse pallets and containers with RFID tags. The retailer’s largest 100 suppliers will have until 2005 to comply; the other 12,000 suppliers will be expected to follow by 2006, said a Wal-Mart representative.
Suppliers are furious, said an analyst who works with many of the companies. Having already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the making of the EPC standard, the suppliers will now have to pay for the development and deployment of RFID tags to satisfy Wal-Mart’s mandate within two years. “The word ‘extortion’ has come up more than once,” said Gartner Group analyst, Jeff Woods.
Suppliers may eventually save money by automating some of their inventory tasks, and by keeping better track of their returnable assets—the pallets and containers. But the benefits to consumers are less clear, while the risks to their privacy are just coming into the picture.
“Every privacy-invading technology starts small,” said EFF senior attorney Lee Tien. “RFID started small, too, but it will be buoyed by the release of EPC and other announcements.” “That’s why you can’t make privacy policies based on what the technology looks like today,” he said.
GPS Tracking Warrants
If that news isn’t enough to concern you, consider that police agencies have the ability to track an individual via global positioning systenms (GPS). While GPS may have a lot of benefits as in the North Star system for cars, it also allows tracking exactly where a car’s driver goes.
That’s why it is not surprising that the Washington state Supreme Court recently ruled that police cannot attach a GPS tracker to a suspect’s vehicle without a warrant.
The court, in the first such ruling in the nation, however, refused to overturn the murder conviction of William Bradley Jackson, who unknowingly led police to the shallow grave of his 9-year-old daughter in 1999. Spokane County deputies had a warrant for the GPS tracking device used in that case, although prosecutors argued they did not need one.
“Use of GPS tracking devices is a particularly intrusive method of surveillance, making it possible to acquire an enormous amount of personal information about the citizen under circumstances where the individual is unaware that every single vehicle trip taken and the duration of every single stop may be recorded by the government,” Justice Barbara Madsen wrote in the unanimous decision, reported by The Boston Globe.
She raised the prospect of citizens being tracked to “the strip club, the opera, the baseball game, the ‘wrong’ side of town, the family planning clinic, the labor rally.”
The closely watched case had evoked worries about police using the satellite-tracking devices like Big Brother to watch citizens’ every move.
Doug Honig, a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Washington state, said, that attaching a GPS device to a car is “the equivalent of placing an invisible police officer in a person’s back seat. Our state constitution has very strong protections for privacy. Some other states also have very strong protections for privacy. This will be a strong precedent for them to look at and for any law enforcement agency around the country.”
Spokane County Deputy Prosecutor Kevin Korsmo said he was satisfied that Jackson’s conviction had been upheld, but he said the court had expanded privacy rights for criminal suspects.
In the Jackson case, the murder defendant had sought to have the warrant thrown out, arguing it was based on the slimmest of premises: If he was guilty, he might return to the scene of the crime.
Prosecutors contended the warrant was proper and that they did not even need a warrant; they contended that the GPS was equivalent to tailing Jackson in an unmarked car.
The high court agreed the warrant was valid, but it rejected the comparison between the GPS device and tailing a suspect.
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