Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Lawmakers to probe RFID technology

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 11 Aug 2003 15:23:31 -0400

Lawmakers to probe RFID technology

By Alorie Gilbert 
Staff Writer
CNET News.com

August 11, 2003

Lawmakers in California have scheduled a hearing for later this month to discuss
privacy issues surrounding a controversial technology designed to wirelessly
monitor everything from clothing to currency. 

Sen. Debra Bowen, a California legislator recently on the forefront of an antispam
legislation movement, is spearheading the Aug. 18 hearing, which will focus on an
emerging area of technology known as radio frequency identification (RFID), a
representative for Bowen has confirmed. The hearing, which is open to the public,
will take place at the state capitol in Sacramento. 

Retailers and manufacturers in the United States and Europe, including Wal-Mart
Stores, have begun testing RFID systems, which use millions of special sensors to
automatically detect the movement of merchandise in stores and monitor inventory
in warehouses. 

Proponents hail the technology as the next-generation bar code, allowing merchants
and manufacturers to operate more efficiently and cut down on theft. 

Privacy activists worry, however, that the unchecked use of RFID could end up
trampling consumer privacy by allowing retailers to gather unprecedented amounts
of information about activity in their stores and link it to customer information
databases. They also worry about the possibility of companies and would-be thieves
being able to track people's personal belongings, embedded with tiny RFID
microchips, after they are purchased. 

"If you are walking around emanating an electric cloud of these devices wherever
you go, you have no more privacy," said Katherine Albrecht, the head of Consumers
Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (http://www.nocards.com/), a
fierce critic of RFID technology. 

"Every door way you walk through could be scanning you," she added. 

Albrecht is scheduled to testify at Bowen's hearing, as is Beth Givens, director
of the Privacy Rights Clearing House, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group in San
Diego. (http://www.privacyrights.org/index.htm)

Givens said retailers should be required to notify consumers about merchandise
containing RFID chips and that they should not only disable, but destroy, the
chips at the checkout counter. 

"It's troubling that MIT and other developers of RFID appear to have left privacy
to the last minute," Givens said. 

Also expected to speak at the hearing are Dan Mullen, head of the trade group
Association for Automatic Identification and Data Capture Technologies
(http://www.aimglobal.org/) , and Greg Pottie, an electrical engineering professor
at the University of California at Los Angeles. Pottie is involved in the Center
for Embedded Networked Sensing, (http://www.cens.ucla.edu/index.html) a program
out of UCLA funded by the National Science Foundation. 

Bowen's office has also invited key members of MIT's Auto-ID Center
(http://www.autoidcenter.org/index.asp), a research group that has been on the
forefront of RFID development, to participate in the hearing. The group has yet to
accept or decline the invitation, Bowen's office said. 

Bowen has yet to propose any bills pertaining to RFID and doesn't plan to make
legislation a focus at the hearing, said Bowen's representative. Rather, the
hearing should mark the "beginning of a discussion of this issue among policy
makers," the representative said. 

Policy makers in Britain are also starting to ponder the privacy implications of
RFID. A member of Britain's Parliament has submitted a motion for debate on the
regulation of RFID devices when the government returns from its summer recess next
month. 

Tesco, a U.K.-based supermarket chain, has begun selling Gillette razors with RFID
chips embedded in them in a trial run of the technology at its Cambridge store,
according to reports. Wal-Mart had undertaken a similar test in a Boston-area
store, but recently decided to cancel the test. Italian clothier Benetton is also
studying how it wants to use hundreds of RFID chips it has recently purchased. 

Bowen, who is the chair of the legislative subcommittee on new technologies, has
been an outspoken advocate of consumer privacy, helping to draft and introduce
bills that would regulate face recognition technology, consumer data collected by
cable and satellite television companies, and shopper loyalty cards used in
grocery chains. The RFID hearing will be the subcommittee's first hearing since
being formed about a year ago, Bowen's office said. 

 http://news.com.com/2100-1039-5062009.html

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