Subject: [NEXTEL-1] PR plan riles foes of RFID, Privacy debate over chips heat up

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2003 01:14:12 -0400

Once the Advocate groups get on it, they are like a PitBull
They won't let go until its dead.
=============================================

PR plan riles foes of RFID, Privacy
debate over chips heat up.
By Chris Gaither, Globe Staff, 7/8/2003

SAN FRANCISCO -- Consumer advocates suspicious
that microchips embedded in supermarket items will
invade people's privacy found something that made
 them more suspicious: a confidential PR strategy on
 a trade group's website with the goal of shifting the
public policy debate away from consumers' privacy concerns.
The Auto-ID Center, a research group affiliated
with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
that promotes the radio-tag technology,
yesterday said the documents were not
confidential -- just mislabeled.

In addition, the group said it takes privacy
concerns seriously and has no intention of
creating a technology that would let companies
monitor people after their products leave the
store.

Regardless, the documents outlined the efforts
by the industry springing up around radio
frequency identification, or RFID, tags to
''pacify'' the public's worries about potential
misuse of the emerging technology before
those privacy concerns stunt its adoption.

According to the Auto-ID Center documents, which were found on its website, the
center's officials and public relations advisers Fleishman-Hillard stressed that
''privacy is the key issue'' and coached retailers and high-tech companies working
with the tags to refer to them as ''improved barcodes.''

Major retailers like Wal-Mart Stores Inc. are heralding the tags as an easier and
more efficient way to track products through the supply chain. Stores are building
the tiny tags into the pallets and containers that pass through warehouses. The
tags beam small bursts of identifying data to sensors, which feed them to
computers that track their whereabouts.

Within a few years, retailers expect to start putting the tags on products
themselves, everything from clothing to razor blades.
Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering, a New Hampshire
group known as CASPIAN, fears that corporations and governments will one day be
able to use data collected by radio tags to track consumers' activities and
purchases.

Seventy-eight percent of consumers polled in an Internet-based survey expressed
concerns about having their privacy invaded by the use of the tags, with many
saying that they did not believe reassurances that their privacy could be
guaranteed and tags could be turned off after leaving the store, according to a
November 2001 strategy briefing prepared by Fleishman-Hillard. It was one of the
items CASPIAN found on the website.

''Message Development,'' a June 2002 presentation by Auto-ID Center's European
associate director, Helen Duce, was marked confidential ''For Auto-ID Centre
Sponsors Only.''

Among the strategies: ''Assess consumer reaction if press develop scare stories
and develop best messages to pacify.''
The documents included sensitive data, such as a complete list of tests of the
tags at stores like Home Depot in Boston, and financial data. The Auto-ID Center
had received $1.86 million in funding from sponsoring firms and had spent or made
a commitment to spend $1.27 million by November 2002, according to minutes from a
Board of Overseers meeting.
Katherine Albrecht, the founder of CASPIAN, has campaigned against the Auto-ID
Center, which is setting technical standards and coordinating the efforts of major
retailers and high-tech companies to bring the new technology into the
marketplace. While poking around the Auto-ID Center website, Albrecht said, she
recently found 68 documents marked ''confidential'' simply by typing the word
confidential into the site's search engine.

''Obviously, security is not a first priority for them,'' she said. ''If they
can't protect the security of their own sponsors, how can we expect them to
protect the security of consumers?''

Shortly after Albrecht issued a news release about the documents yesterday
morning, many of them began disappearing from the Auto-ID Center website until
only 13 remained.

Cryptome, which archives pages from other websites, archived all the Auto-ID
Center documents at
http://cryptome.org/

rfid-docs.htm. But many began returning to the Auto-ID Center site in the
afternoon. Kevin Ashton, Auto-ID Center's executive director, said most of the
documents were removed so they could be relabeled. Those documents were
confidential at one point, he said, but the center makes information public a few
months after it presents the information to its sponsoring companies. Only
documents with phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and personal data about members
will remain off the site, he said. By last night, 58 had been returned.

''There are plenty of people at MIT who know how to do online security,'' he said.
''We don't have anything to hide, and we're very open with what we do.''

Harry Forbes, an analyst who has tracked radio frequency identification technology
for ARC Advisory Group, a Dedham consulting firm, said lofty predictions made by
the Auto-ID Center about the pervasiveness of the tags have helped stoke the fears
of privacy advocates. The center in recent months has reined in many of those
futuristic predictions and focused more narrowly on the technology's use in supply
chains, he said. But tag proponents have only about five years -- when the
technology reaches store shelves -- to get their message straight about privacy.

''It's not going to threaten anybody if they're tracking pallets going in and out
of Wal-Mart,'' he said.

''When it gets down to individual items you buy or wear, then it becomes a
concern.''

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/189/business/PR_plan_riles_foes_of_product_tracking+.shtml

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