A silicon chip in your Viagra pack reports back to Pfizer on how much you took, and when. You fetch the last Coke from your chip-tagged fridge and your TV airs a Pepsi ad. Your phone company combs your trash for the chips you've cast off, selling the data it finds to marketers. And when you pick up pricey pasta at the supermarket, a screen on your shopping cart flashes an ad for a high-end sauce to go with it.
Science fiction? Not at all.
The plans to "spy-chip" your fridge belong to Procter & Gamble, which has a second patent pending to track consumers in-store. American telecommunications giant BellSouth has a patent pending on the garbage-picking. NCR is behind the shopping cart ads and also holds a patent on "automated monitoring of shoppers" at grocery stores. As for Viagra, like OxyContin, its manufacturers are already tagging bulk bottles at the pharmacy (packs of Diovan, an antihypertensive, are actually tagged individually).
Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID, is surveillance technology at its finest -- cheap, invisible, infallible, ubiquitous -- and privacy advocates abhor it. Silently, without even a bar code beep, RFID reads and records people's behaviour and inventories their possessions.
Benetton was the first large retailer to find out the hard way that not everyone likes being watched. In 2003, consumer outrage forced it to recall millions of garments it had embedded with microchips.
Tesco and Gillette were next: Later the same year, customers boycotted both companies when the British grocery chain showcased RFID "smart shelves" that flashed customers pictures of themselves reaching for razor blades.
All the same, a complete history of your movements could soon be recorded and sold to commercial and security interests. Privacy experts predict that RFID will replace the closed-circuit television surveillance currently used by governments in China, Europe and Canada, and businesses are heavily investing in the technology.
The tags aren't new -- billions have been sold since the early eighties -- but their proliferation is. Cumulative to 2005, 2.4 billion were sold. For 2006 alone, sales of 1.3 billion are forecast. By 2015, sales of 13 trillion are projected, with the greatest push in retail, electronics, health care and pharmaceuticals. A chip lasts 20 years, needs no batteries and costs just five cents (with cent-apiece chips coming).
So, how long before RFID actually comes home with you?
The sooner the better, says Mark Roberti of RFID Journal, the industry publication. For Mr. Roberti, the shopping-cart ad for tomato sauce is no different from a salesman at a boutique who shows you some Prada shoes to go with the Armani suit you're considering. RFID is your friend, he says from his Long Island home. He thinks companies are over-sensitive to consumer concerns about their privacy.
Consumer-privacy expert Katherine Albrecht disagrees. The boutique salesman forgets you, she says, but "the computer always remembers." The woman behind the Benetton recall, Ms. Albrecht has been called the Erin Brockovich of RFID. "Promoters have a lot more funding these days to make their case. Privacy advocates don't get as much press," she says from her office in New York. "RFID fans have considerable respect for the ethics of corporations, too. Often, they're paid by them."
Ms. Albrecht, founder of Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering, has briefed Canada's federal Privacy Commissioner. She has been invited back to brief Ontario Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian, too, as more and more RFID comes to Canada. Wal-Mart Canada would like to see all its merchandise tagged at supply point by 2007. And Canadian retailer Nygard tags garments in Toronto. RFID pill bottles are made in Ottawa.
We even have our own fledgling Canadian RFID Centre. David Wilkes of the Canadian Council of Grocery Distributors says Agriculture and Agrifood Canada, whose logo appears on the RFID Centre's website, contributed $485,000 for the centre's operations. The money was channelled through Mr. Wilkes's group for "evaluation of the feasibility, benefits and impacts" of RFID in Canada's food industry, Agriculture Canada's Chantale Courcy says, although she was unable to provide further details.
Elaine Smith of Food & Consumer Products Canada has said of the centre, "It's important . . . to address any consumer and privacy concerns." But the centre is really about shaping "consumer perception," she says in an interview. "As the future unfolds, consumers need to understand that there are no privacy concerns."
Meanwhile, the centre's press material says monitoring people, as well as products, is a chief use of RFID, in Canada and elsewhere.
In the United States, IBM may be sewing up this side of the business. It holds a patent to build RFID peepholes into the walls and ceilings of public places, washrooms included. These will surreptitiously identify passersby and look into purses, pockets and briefcases.
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