Surpriv: RFID Surveillance and Privacy

CNET covers a GAO report on RFID use by Federal agencies, which suggests that they may be inattentive to security issues:

In a report published Friday, the Government Accountability Office said that 13 of the largest federal agencies are already using RFID or plan to use it. But only one of 23 agencies polled by the GAO had identified any legal or privacy issues–even though three admitted RFID would let them track employee movements.

Using SITIS, I posted a query on the DOD SBIR solicitation on “tracking important assets” noted previously; given the interest in identifying/tracking both “friendlies” and “unfriendlies” (which should presumably be RFID-tag-free, if they know what’s good for them!) RFID seems to be ruled out. The solicitation does seem a bit tilted toward magical solutions, though…

The SITIS page for the solicitation is here.

Knowledge@Wharton describes research on shopper behavior, collected via RFID tags on shopping carts:

In a new paper called “An Exploratory Look at Supermarket Shopping Paths,” Fader, Wharton marketing professor Eric T. Bradlow and doctoral candidate Jeffrey S. Larson analyze this RFID-captured grocery store data, focusing exclusively on travel patterns without regard to purchase behavior or merchandising tactics. The results, they conclude, challenge many long-standing perceptions of shopper travel behavior within a supermarket, including ideas related to aisle traffic, special promotional displays, and perimeter shopping patterns.

Using a new “multivariate clustering algorithm,” the authors identified 14 distinct grocery store travel paths during short, medium and long shopping trips…

Later in the article, there’s an interesting allusion to more fine-grained surveillance:

Until researchers are able to obtain positioning data directly from the shoppers themselves, Fader argues that PathTracker offers the next best thing — using customers’ grocery carts as a proxy for their shopping path…

Not clear either from the article that a tagged shopper would add too much to what’s being collected from tagged carts; even knowing where an individual was standing would give little information, unless one could also tell which direction s/he was looking, and especially if an item was selected. I suppose it would be possible to couple cart ID with POS purchase data, to retroactively label all the points where an item would have been selected and placed in the cart.

What’s really needed is a means to identify who the shoppers are who get a couple of pounds of deli meat, and stash it on a shelf in the cereal aisle… what’s up with that?

This is a reasonably interesting application of RFID for collection of personal data in a reasonably nonthreatening way, though it’s also possible to do this sort of data collection via video (e.g., using in-store cameras, with the shoppers’ trajectories calculated through use of machine vision).