At an RFID trade show — “Smart Labels USA” — held in Boston last month, industry leaders outlined a future in which home appliances equipped with RFID could speak to one another. Washing machines and ovens will eventually preset themselves, trade-show delegates said, and refrigerators will manage their own contents by reading tags on food items containing expiration dates, recipe suggestions, and cooking instructions.

“Imagine going home, taking out meat, and having the oven read it and preset the oven,” Geoff Seago, vice-president of marketing at the Emirates Technical Innovation Center, told fellow trade-show delegates. Seago says his company has already begun work on a futuristic supermarket in which all food items will bear RFID tags that moderate temperature and contain extensive expiration information.

The technology will allow companies to follow products as they are transported from manufacturers’ headquarters to distribution centers and stores. And once RFID readers are placed on shelves, they will manage inventory and reorder items when stock runs low. Eventually, registers will even scan RFID tags and charge the items to a store account, eliminating the need for cash registers, Seago said at the Boston RFID trade show.

By planting readers around a store, trade-show delegates said, customers could be identified by RFID-embedded technology they are carrying. They could then be followed remotely as they browse, and the items they look at and purchase would be recorded and stored in a database, which marketers could use to target an individual’s consumption patterns.

Jamshed Dubash, director of technology EPC at Proctor & Gamble/Gillette (the companies merged in 2005), says that Gillette has already used RFID chips inside many Braun CruZer packages to “track when displays moved from the backroom to the store floor.” The company uses this information to set up promotions and better sell its product.

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RFID applications will not be limited to retail or home appliances. Representatives say hospitals will use chips to read a patient’s medical history and reduce errors; airports will use tags to track luggage. Pharmaceutical companies plan to use RFID to ensure that counterfeit items don’t enter the supply chain. The industry is especially excited about this innovation, as counterfeit drugs cause thousands of deaths each year, representatives say.

Despite complaints lodged by privacy advocates, “RFID is saving lives, preventing counterfeiting, and increasing security,” Harrop says. “People in RFID have a lot to be proud of.”

Private eyes
Indeed, even staunch privacy advocates like Albrecht recognize the potential for RFID technology and are therefore not urging that RFID tags be banned. “We’ve essentially told consumers, ‘Go ahead and use RFID on pallets and other uses,’ ” says Albrecht.

But eventually, she says, a line should be drawn. For her, that means “no item-level tagging and no RFID used to track people.”

For other privacy advocates, however, the question of where to draw the line is not as clear. Some opponents would simply like to be informed that the technology exits, while others are seeking to drastically curb its uses. Yet the majority of RFID opponents agree that something needs to be done to ensure that the technology promising so many benefits will not be used to invade privacy as well.

RFID chips “promise great new efficiencies and conveniences, but [they] also hold the potential to enable the most Orwellian kinds of surveillance,” Barry Steinhardt, of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said in a 2004 US congressional subcommittee information session that explored the nature of RFID.

A handful of state senators, privacy groups, and the ACLU have pushed for legislation to ensure that abuses of the technology will not occur. Yet so far the industry has been resistant to even moderate legislative restrictions.

Harrop says that manufacturers have not backed RFID legislation because it is both “unnecessary” and would hurt the industry before it is allowed to grow. RFID will not be used to track individuals as privacy advocates fear, Harrop says, because the industry has already enacted a number of rules similar to those that govern the bar code.

These rules, established by EPC Global — an outgrowth of the MIT Auto-ID Center — say that individuals have the right to “know when RFID tags are in location and in use,” to “have RFID tags deactivated,” and to “buy tagged products without having their personal information linked to the tag number of that product.”

Legislators, who are fearful of allowing the industry to police itself, have attempted to do little more than codify these stipulations into law. Still, the RFID industry has resisted. In 2004, Utah became the first state to try, and fail, to enact RFID regulations. State legislators attempted to pass a “Right to Know” Act based on the EPC Global regulations. The bill passed the House of Representatives, but it expired before it was voted on in the Senate.