Spychips review

Wendy M Grossman ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 28 Jun 2006

Katherine Albrecht is probably the world's expert on supermarket loyalty cards. Her research in that area recently earned her a PhD from Harvard, and her interest in RFID grew directly out of that work. Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID is the result of a lot of digging by Albrecht and her writing and campaigning partner, former bank examiner Liz McIntyre, into the future as planned by companies such as NCR and IBM -- a world in which everything is tagged and every move we make is a trackable marketing opportunity.

Put an RFID chip in a loyalty card, for example, and you, the retailer, have a way of tracking your customers around the store. Put RFID tags in all the merchandise and/or its packaging, and you have a way of tracking which customers look at which items, and of checking them out of the store as their shopping card passes a reader. Burglars: drive-by readings taken from the rubbish in front of the house might help pinpoint who's worth robbing. And so on.

Some of these scenarios -- such as the refrigerator that automatically reorders when you use up the last Coke -- are recognisable from talks and writings of Nicholas Negroponte, director of the Media Lab at MIT, where the Auto-ID Center -- the home of RFID research -- is also located. But where researchers and retailers stress to consumers the convenience of not having to make your own shopping lists, the confidential internal documents Albrecht and McIntyre unearthed (via a Google search!) stress increased sales and better demographic targeting.

The supermarket that tracks your loyalty card as you move around the store, for example, can do differential pricing, offering discounts to the most profitable customers while charging extra to drive away the least profitable ones (Amazon.com tried this once, and got hammered by its customers). And, of course, an RFID-tagged product would behave like those magic purses in fantasy fiction, squealing loudly if you tried to take it out of the shop without paying.

One of the authors' biggest concerns, however, is the potential for abuse by government if RFID is widely deployed -- too much power, they argue. In a second version of this book (which we haven't seen), aimed at Christians, they even consider RFID in the light of the Book of Revelations.

McIntyre and Albrecht -- whose conference talks are remarkably polite, calm, and reasonable -- go on to debunk many industry claims that RFID chips will be harmless. These are not just 'improved barcodes'. Killing the chips after purchase will not stop in-store customer tracking, and consumers will not be able to tell whether the chips are really dead or merely resting. There is, as yet, no device on the market that a consumer could use to verifiably kill a tag. Albrecht and McIntyre advise against the method they tried -- frying the chip in a microwave: three seconds to FIRE!

But Albrecht and McIntyre are not journalists writing about this year's news; they are campaigners (their organisation is known as CASPIAN). So the book ends with a call to action. Boycott products that embed RFID. Refuse to patronise stores that deploy it. Lobby legislators to demand labelling legislation and consumer protection. Protest.

And take a good look at the rocks in your back yard. There's this outfit in North Dakota making RFID-chipped rocks to detect footprints…

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