Are You Being Tracked?

It looks fairly innocuous, a metal-and-plastic square with wires coiled up like an angular snail, a lot like the anti-theft tag you'd find if you pried apart a book you'd just bought at a chain store. But it's a Radio Frequency Identification tag, RFID for short, and each one has a tiny antenna that can broadcast information about the product, or person, to which it is attached.

To the industry that makes and markets RFID, it's simply the next logical step from bar codes: providing a cheap, easy way to keep products on the shelves, consumers happy and companies making money.

But to many privacy-rights advocates, RFID tags could be the forerunner to nightmare scenarios in which RFID technology is the Trojan horse that brings Big Brother into your home, snooping through your medicine cabinets, fridge and underwear drawer to find out what you do, buy and believe, and, ultimately, what you are.

This small tag has, so far, largely flown under the radar of consumers and the mainstream press. But in early October, privacy-rights advocates Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre published a book, "Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID," that has RFID proponents on the defensive.

The book holds up plenty of evidence to back up the fears of people who otherwise might be written off as tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorists: IBM taking out a patent for a "person-tracking unit" that uses RFID tags to identify individuals, their movements and purchases in stores. Procter & Gamble and Wal-Mart collaborating on a test that put cameras on a store shelf in Oklahoma and watched customers pluck lipsticks off an RFID-enabled shelf. A Sutter County grade school's experimental program requiring students to wear RFID-enabled badges to track their on-campus movements, thanks to supplies donated by the InCom Corp. based 50 miles northwest of Sacramento.

And the federal government plans to put RFID tags in passports, prescription medications and perhaps driver's licenses and postage stamps. One day, the "Spychips" authors fear, the tiny tags could be on everything from candy bars to dollar bills, compromising both privacy and personal security.

"I think the industry is waiting until they've done adequate PR to where the public will really embrace it," Albrecht said. "They want to get the infrastructure in place [and] find ways to integrate this technology in a way that is not going to scare people. They envision these things in our homes and our refrigerators and in the doorway of our kids' bedrooms."

In the weeks after "Spychips"' release, RFID supporters retaliated with rebuttals calling the book at best a futuristic fairy tale and at worst a delusional pack of lies by fringe alarmists.

As much as the RFID industry (which researchers say will be a $4.2 billion-a-year business by 2011) might want to ignore the book and its authors, it can't afford to do so. One RFID company has even bought space on Google, eBay and Amazon so when consumers search for "Spychips," a link to a 24-page rebuttal pops up.

"We felt we had a responsibility to educate consumers," said Nicholas Chavez, president of RFID Ltd., who co-authored the rebuttal released November 4. "They may get first blanch at the consumers through the book," he said. "There's a big fear out there that people will go read 'Spychips' and then go out and tell 10 people."

"Spychips," he said, casts RFID in "this sinister, Orwellian light" and presupposes applications that aren't within the current capabilities of the technology. RFID was first envisioned in the 1940s, combining the existing disciplines of radio broadcast technology and radar to communicate via reflected power, according to a history by AIM Global, the Association for Automatic Identification and Mobility. It wasn't until the late 1970s that technical capabilities caught up with the vision and RFID began to be applied commercially.