As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, Benetton will use RFID tags -- radio transmitters the size of a grain of rice -- in its clothing. The article lays out the usual set of privacy concerns, not least that such tags could eventually be used for consumer surveillance. As usual, these concerns are all the stronger given how questionable some of the putative "applications" for the tracking technology are. Is provoding washing machines with specific washing instructions really a killer application for clothing?
Unmentioned, however, are some of the other unfortunate overtones of this move. For one thing, it's yet another step in the conversion of retail jobs into wholly unskilled labor -- the point of RFID tags, from Benetton's perspective, is that they largely eliminate the need to train cash register clerks in being able to recognize different sizes and designs of clothing. For another, it's only a matter of time before someone figures figures out how to make a colorable DMCA claim based on the presence of these chips.