Everything is watching YOU

We're well on our way to a world where every product has a tiny radio transmitter embedded in it. Privacy activists are not happy, but big corporations are licking their lips.

By Farhad Manjoo

Jul 24, 2003 | In the mid-1990s, David Brock and Sanjay Sarma, engineers at MIT, became preoccupied with a problem that has long vexed robotic scientists -- how do you get a computer to understand what's happening in the physical world around it?

The standard approach is to have the machine emulate human beings; you build a robot with "eyes," with the crude ability to marshal rays of light into a "mental image" of its surroundings. But that is an enormously complex task, one that researchers have been working for decades to perfect, and Brock and Sarma wondered whether it might be possible to give the robot a little help. Instead of having the machine look around and guess what it could see, what if objects in the room simply identified themselves to the robot? Why couldn't a book carry some sort of electronic marker to alert the robot that there was a copy of Tolstoy nearby? Why couldn't a can of Coke "know" that it was a can of Coke, or a bar of soap know that it gets slippery when wet? "That way," says Sarma, "the robot could just ask the item what it was and then look up a database to see how to pick it up."

Life would certainly be much easier for robots if every item in the world -- every book, every can of Coke, every bar of soap, every shirt, every shoe, every CD and DVD, everything you can think of, even pets and cattle -- carried an electronic tag with a unique identifier. But it turns out that a world of electronically identifiable items would be beneficial to more than just machines. Many large retail firms -- including Wal-Mart, Procter & Gamble, and Gillette -- have embraced this vision; they say that it will do nothing less than revolutionize retail sales, and they're spending a lot of money to make the idea a reality.

But even as computer scientists wax lyrical over the prospects of a network where everything is broadcasting to everything else, and companies salivate at the chance to have total inventory control, privacy-concerned consumers are looking with alarm at a technology that promises levels of surveillance unprecedented in human history. It's bad enough, for some people, that a grocery store can assemble a database of your habits from everything that you've rung up on your credit card in the last year. But in a world where every product is embedded with identifying technology, the possibility would exist for companies to know what you're doing, in real time, in almost every aspect of life.

That world is on its way. In 1999, with the participation of several corporations, Brock and Sarma set up the Auto-ID Center, an MIT consortium whose goal is to create an inexpensive, industry-standard product-tagging system using a technology called radio frequency identification, or RFID. By 2006, Wal-Mart plans to use the center's RFID technology to track all shipments moving through its supply chain, the path from factory to store warehouse. Many firms, including the Gap and the U.K. supermarket chain Tesco, have tested systems that can track items as they move within individual stores, alerting employees if products are misplaced or are being stolen. Proponents of the technology say that RFID offers many benefits to consumers as well. Tagged items could enable quite extraordinary new consumer devices; you'd have smart shopping carts to calculate the nutritional value of the food you buy and to automatically check you out of a store, or smart washing machines to alert you if you're washing whites with colors.

But are such benefits worth the price? For the past couple of years, a small band of activists has been mounting a vociferous campaign against radio tags -- they worry that tagged products will show up on store shelves without our knowledge, that we'll be tracked through stores and in the world without our consent, and that, in the worst case, brave-new-world-type scenarios will become an everyday reality. Katherine Albrecht, the head of a group called Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (CASPIAN) and RFID's loudest critic, often warns of the possibility of RFID getting into the hands of a dictatorial regime. What would a Saddam Hussein do with RFID?

Albrecht is tenacious, and her work has caused some embarrassment for the Auto-ID Center. She recently discovered an article in Smart Labels Analyst magazine, a subscription-only trade publication, that described an alarming RFID setup at a Tesco store in Cambridge, England. According to the Smart Labels Analyst article (which Albrecht read to Salon over the phone), a surveillance camera trained on Gillette razors was activated each time a customer removed a package of tagged razors from an RFID "smart shelf"; the system was apparently taking pictures of each razor-blade buyer (or browser) to prevent theft of the Gillette Mach 3 blades, the world's most-stolen retail product. Albrecht first alerted the (London) Guardian to the camera-enabled-shelf story; the newspaper reported the news on July 19, and within a few hours the story made its way to many blogs and discussion sites like Slashdot, where hundreds of readers railed against RFID.

For Albrecht, the Cambridge Tesco incident highlights the main concern of people fighting RFID -- we won't know where these tagged products are, they say, and we won't know how they're being used.

Proponents of tagging say that the fears are easily assuaged. Kevin Ashton, the executive director of the Auto-ID Center, pledges that RFID technology will be used carefully: You'll be told that your items are tagged, you'll be given the choice to disable the tag when you leave a store, and your name will not be tied to the products you've purchased. If those guidelines are followed, what's so bad about RFID?

RFID, like cloning or genetically modified foods, promises to be one of those technological advances that could remake, for the better, everything about how we live our daily lives. The technology is not just about making shopping cheaper and more pleasant -- although, considering how much time Americans spend shopping, that would be good enough. But because RFID adds intelligence to the things around us, it would usher in an era of networked objects -- an "Internet of things," as the Auto-ID Center says -- that would change the world dramatically: packages that know how to sort themselves for recycling, meat that alerts you when it's been recalled. So far, the debate surrounding its use has also echoed the debate around biotech. Opponents are long on speculation as to all the ways RFID could become disastrous, while proponents may be naive in their expectations that Americans will accept RFID without a fight. But what seems indisputable is the reality that this fully networked world is on its way, and we're going to have to learn how to live in it.

Next Page: An RFID tag in every cow, every car, and every pair of socks

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