LawMeme LawMeme Yale Law School  
LawMeme
Search LawMeme [ Advanced Search ]
 
 
 
 
United Colors of Surveillance: Benetton to use RFID tags
Posted by James Grimmelmann on Thursday, March 13 @ 21:43:34 EST Privacy
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.

 
Related Links
· More about Privacy
· News by James Grimmelmann


Most read story about Privacy:
Accidental Privacy Spills: Musings on Privacy, Democracy, and the Internet

Options

 Printer Friendly Page  Printer Friendly Page

 Send to a Friend  Send to a Friend

Threshold
  
The comments are owned by the poster. We aren't responsible for their content.

Re: United Colors of Surveillance: Benetton to use RFID tags (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Monday, March 17 @ 18:15:40 EST
a colorable DMCA claim based (Pun intended, I assume.) The real question here is whether or not their super-registers will put together an outfit that doesn't clash, doesn't make me look even more fat?


[ Reply to This ]


Leges humanae nascuntur, vivunt, moriuntur
Human laws are born, live, and die

Contributors retain copyright interests in all stories, comments and submissions.
Everything else copyright (c) 2002 by the Information Society Project.

This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions
set forth in the Open Publication License, v1.0 or later.
The latest version is currently available at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/.

You can syndicate our news with backend.php

Page Generation: 0.203 Seconds