Wal-Mart and P&G accused of secret RFID testing [priv]

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

---

Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2003 01:58:34 -0600
From: Andrew Edelstein <andrew () pure-chaos com>
To: declan () well com
Subject: [Fwd: [priv] [Fwd: Scandal: Wal-Mart, P&G Involved in Secret RFID
 Testing]]




FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

November 10, 2003

*Scandal: Wal-Mart, P&G Involved in Secret RFID Testing *
/American consumers used as guinea pigs for controversial technology/

Wal-Mart and Procter & Gamble conducted a secret RFID trial involving
Oklahoma consumers earlier this year, the Chicago Sun Times revealed on
Sunday. Customers who purchased P&G's Lipfinity brand lipstick at the
Broken Arrow Wal-Mart store between late March and mid-July unknowingly
left the store with live RFID tracking devices embedded in the
packaging. Wal-Mart had previously denied any consumer-level RFID
testing in the United States.

"It proves what we've been saying all along," says Katherine Albrecht,
Founder and Director of Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion
and Numbering (CASPIAN). "Wal-Mart, Procter & Gamble and others have
experimented on shoppers with controversial spy chip technology and
tried to cover it up. Consumers and members of the press should be upset
to learn that they've been lied to."

The Sun Times also reported that a live video camera trained on the
shelf allowed Procter & Gamble employees, sometimes hundreds of miles
away, to observe the Lipfinity display and consumers interacting with it.

"This trial is a perfect illustration of how easy it is to set up a
secret RFID infrastructure and use it to spy on people," says Albrecht.
"The RFID industry has been paying lip service to privacy concerns,
calling for notice, choice and control. But companies like P&G, Wal-Mart
and Gillette have already violated all three tenets when they thought
nobody was looking. This is exactly why we oppose item-level RFID
tagging and have called for mandatory labeling legislation."

The Lipfinity tests were conducted while Wal-Mart and Procter & Gamble
were sponsors of the MIT Auto-ID Center, a consortium of over 100
corporations and government agencies founded in 1999. Auto-ID Center
activities were supervised by a Board of Overseers, which included both
Wal-Mart and Procter & Gamble, along with the Uniform Code Council
(UCC), the standards body that oversees the bar code. The UCC (along
with EAN International) took over commercial functions from the Auto-ID
center on November 1 of this year.

"Given the players, the Wal-Mart Lipfinity trial probably isn't an
isolated incident," says CASPIAN spokeswoman Liz McIntyre. "UCC and
Auto-ID Center documents suggest that other products, including Huggies
baby wipes, Pantene shampoo, Caress soap, Purina Dog Chow and Right
Guard deodorant were also slated for live RFID field trials. Coca Cola,
Kraft, Kodak and Johnson & Johnson products are also implicated.
However, it may be difficult for consumers to learn the extent of those
trials in the current climate of secrecy and denials."

(Links to documentation provided below.)

Disclosure of the Broken Arrow trial is only the latest scandal to hit
the privacy plagued RFID industry. Early this year, CASPIAN called for a
worldwide boycott of Italian clothing manufacturer Benetton when the
company announced plans to equip women's undergarments with live RFID
tracking tags (see http://www.boycottbenetton.org). This summer, CASPIAN
uncovered an RFID-enabled Gillette "smart shelf" in a Brockton,
Massachusetts Wal-Mart and helped disclose Gillette's scheme to secretly
photograph consumers picking up Mach3 razor blades in UK Tesco stores
(see http://www.boycottgillette.com/spychips.html). The group also
revealed confidential industry plans to "pacify" consumers and
"neutralize opposition" in the hope that consumers will be "apathetic"
and "resign themselves to the inevitability" of RFID product tagging
(see: http://www.nocards.org/press/pressrelease07-07-03_1.shtml).

CASPIAN encourages consumers to contact Wal-Mart, P&G and the UCC to
voice their opinion about the use of RFID spy chips in consumer
products. Contact information for these companies is provided on the
group's RFID website at http://www.spychips.com.

For links to documents implicating other consumer products in item-level
tagging trials, see:

"/The EPC Network, RFID and data/" at
http://www.autoid.org/SC31/clr/200305_3822_UConnect%20I4.pdf
mirrored at: http://www.cryptome.org/rfid/ucc-rfid.pdf

"/EPC Field Test/" at http://cryptome.org/rfid/field_test_nov02.pdf

"/Lessons Learned in the Real World/" (note, for example, pages 25 & 26)
at http://cryptome.org/rfid/rfid-field-test.pdf

Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (CASPIAN)
is a grass-roots consumer group fighting retail surveillance schemes
since 1999. With members in all 50 U.S. states and over 20 nations
across the globe, CASPIAN seeks to educate consumers about marketing
strategies that invade their privacy and to encourage privacy-conscious
shopping habits across the retail spectrum.

The Chicago Sun Times article is online at:
http://www.suntimes.com/output/business/cst-nws-spy09.html
<http://www.suntimes.com/output/business/cst-nws-spy09.html.>


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==========================================================

For CASPIAN's overview of RFID product identification and tracking
technology, please see:  http://www.stoprfid.org/rfid_overview.htm
<http://www.BoycottGillette.com/aboutrfid.html>



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