Privacy probe on RFID tags

Privacy issues surrounding the controversial chips designed to wirelessly monitor everything from clothing to currency are set to be debated by both UK politicians and US lawmakers.

In the UK a motion for debate on the regulation of radio frequency identification (RFID) devices has been submitted for when the government returns from its summer recess next month.

Now in the US, California senator Debra Bowen, who is also at the forefront of an anti-spam legislation movement, is spearheading a hearing in Sacramento later this month that will focus on the emerging RFID tagging technology.

Stores such as Tesco and Wal-Mart have already begun testing RFID tags, which proponents hail 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. Katherine Albrecht, the head of Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (Caspian), a fierce critic of RFID technology, said: "If you are walking around emanating an electric cloud of these devices wherever you go, you have no more privacy. Every door way you walk through could be scanning you." Albrecht is scheduled to testify at Bowen's hearing, as is Beth Givens, director of the Privacy Rights Clearing House, a non-profit consumer advocacy group in San Diego. 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.

She said: "It's troubling that MIT and other developers of RFID appear to have left privacy to the last minute." Also expected to speak at the hearing are Dan Mullen, head of the trade group Association for Automatic Identification and Data Capture Technologies, 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, 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, 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.

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.

Alorie Gilbert writes for CNET News.com