A GROUP of activists who have taken on some of the world’s biggest corporations and seemingly forced them into humiliating retreat is turning its attention to Marks & Spencer.
The group, run by an American graduate student with deep religious convictions, believes that the retail giant has gone too far with new technology for tracking its products. The company is planning a trial this autumn of tiny “smart tags” in its suits.
Katherine Albrecht lists Gillette, Benetton and Wal-Mart among the companies she says have bowed to her concerns in the past four months and delayed implementing a stock-tracking technology. The companies deny her activities have affected their decisions. Now she is turning her attention to Britain, and M&S, although Tesco and Asda are also in her sights.
M&S should take her seriously. Last week Gillette appeared to pull back from its commitment to the technology after Ms Albrecht organised a global “Boycott Gillette” campaign. She encouraged thousands of people to write to Dick Cantwell, the company’s vice-president, threatening to step up protests. A similar campaign against Benetton last spring led the company to announce that it was not planning to adopt the technology.
What bothers Ms Albrecht and her growing international band of supporters is what she describes as a “spy chip” designed to identify everyday consumer products using a low-powered radio signal. Those who support the technology, including leading retailers and manufacturers, say that it will allow them to track billions of items from the factory to the checkout, so that no stock is lost in the warehouse or misplaced on shelves.
Ms Albrecht sees a more sinister, “Big Brother” use for a system that she says will make it possible to monitor individuals long after goods have left the store, through the radio signals their clothes or personal items continue to emit.
Through her grassroots pressure group, Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (Caspian), Ms Albrecht has repeatedly attacked companies adopting the technology, using web-based customer boycott campaigns to make them delay multimillion-dollar trials.She now sees it as her “mission” to bring her message to the British people.
The smart tags, embedded in goods or built into the packaging, emit radio signals that can be read from up to five metres (17ft) away, and unless “killed” they remain active long after they have left the store. Unlike barcodes, the tags — known as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) labels — identify individual items whose movements can be tracked by scanners connected to the internet. The microchips involved are the size of a grain of sand, and with the price falling to a few pence they can be fitted to virtually any item.
There is no legal requirement for the tags to be “killed”. Supporters say that keeping the tags active will ensure smoother product recalls and rubbish disposal.
“This technology has the potential to track people from the time they get up in the morning to the time they go to bed at night,” Ms Albrecht said from her home in New Hampshire. She wants Britons to know that the police, criminals and marketers will all be motivated to scan people’s property to learn more about them from their “electronic cloud”.
“Everything from your earrings to what’s in your briefcase would be sending out information,” she said. “My concern is this will be tied in with Britain’s CCTV surveillance system, and you’ll be literally under surveillance at every turn.”
She is working on setting up a British branch of Caspian, whose early target will, she said, be M&S.
A spokeswoman for the company said yesterday that it was aware of Ms Albrecht’s campaign, and would endeavour to work with her should it decide to extend its use of RFID tagging. “Whatever we do we will do responsibly, talking to people like Katherine Albrecht if we go ahead,” she said. “There’s no benefit to us in storming ahead if it will cause our customers concern. She’ll clearly make herself very vocal, and that would get back to our customers.”
The Government has been sponsoring trials of RFID tags as a means of reducing theft and counterfeiting, and the European Central Bank plans to put them in euro banknotes. Companies such as Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble and Unilever are working with the Auto-ID Centre, part of Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, to develop the common standard that would allow RFID tags to gain widespread adoption.
Kevin Ashton, the centre’s executive director, said that consumers would benefit from lower prices and shelves that were permanently full if companies could use a global network of scanners, connected to the internet, to track individual items wherever they were. He suggested that companies should advise shoppers that the tags can be “killed”.
Ms Albrecht characterised Mr Ashton as “one of my arch enemies on the planet”. While working on her doctoral dissertation at Harvard — on consumer privacy — she has been devoting her time to exposing what she sees as the dangers of smart tags.
Caspian claims to have almost 6,000 members in 15 countries, with Britain now a “core constituency”. “What makes us powerful is that 78 per cent of people oppose this technology on privacy grounds, and 61 per cent on health grounds,” she said. No health risk has been identified. The figures are from the Auto-ID Centre’s own confidential research, which was mistakenly made available on the internet. Much to its embarrassment, she also discovered internal briefings from the centre’s PR advisers suggesting that it create “a privacy advisory council”.
Ms Albrecht says that her interest stems from her religious convictions. “When I was eight years old, my grandmother sat me down after a visit to a grocery store and told me that there will be a time when people will not be able to buy or sell food without a number, referring to the Mark of the Beast, Revelations xiii,” she said.
“I made a promise to myself at eight years old that if there was ever a number to buy or sell food, I would stop what I was doing and fight it.”
