Posted on 07/23/2010 2:37:58 PM PDT by deport
NEW YORK — Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is putting electronic identification tags on men's clothing like jeans starting Aug. 1 as the world's largest retailer tries to gain more control of its inventory. But the move is raising eyebrows among privacy experts.
The individual garments, which also includes underwear and socks, will have removable smart tags that can be read from a distance by Wal-Mart workers with scanners. In seconds, the worker will be able to know what sizes are missing and will also be able tell what it has on hand in the stock room. Such instant knowledge will allow store clerks to have the right sizes on hand when shoppers need them.
The tags work by reflecting a weak radio signal to identify the product. They have long spurred privacy fears as well as visions of stores being able to scan an entire shopping cart of items at one time. ......
"This is a first piece of a very large and very frightening tracking system," said Katherine Albrecht, director of a group called Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering.
Albrecht worries that Wal-Mart and others would be able to track movements of customers who in some border states like Michigan and Washington are carrying new driver's licenses that contain RFID tags to make it easier for them to cross borders.
Albrecht fears that retailers could scan data from such licenses and their purchases and combine that data with other personal information. She also says that even though the smart tags can be removed from clothing, they can't be turned off and can be tracked even after you throw them in the garbage, for example. ....
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(Excerpt) Read more at chron.com ...
Just get all your friends to help you save up about 1000 of them, take them back into the store and hide them under a stack at the bottom of the jeans counter, and watch the fun begin!
BS! My WalMart is always out of everything and very badly stocked. Most of the workers hate stocking shelves and simply leave them empty. Saw a manager try to get someone to stock a shelf and the worker let loose a string of expletives ending with "I don't have to take this". And this is the "nice" store near me. The other one is worse.
“Why does Walmart want to track you and your pants after you have paid for them?”
It doesn’t. These RFID tags are for inventory tracking only. WalMart approached RFID suppliers appx. 10 years ago, with the goal of being able to track all of its inventory, worldwide, in real time. Walmart HQ can tell right now, for example, exactly how many Brand X toothbrushes it has in all stores, or in one store, and where more are needed.
So, I guess “privacy experts” need to find something else to fret about?
The one near me is very efficient. Around midnight they start stocking and the place is like a beehive.
More Luddite paranoia. RFIDs can’t be tracked from further than a few feet so once you get out of the store all the “tracking” ends, unless your trash winds up back at WalMart. And the government probably won’t give them the decode for the RFIDS in the driver’s licenses, so there’s no tracking there. RFID protests are marked by their misinformation and downright silly claims.
that’s why if you save the tags and take them back in the store, the scanners will think they are way overstocked on everything and shut down all of the ordering, which will result in empty shelves in no time. Problem solved!
IMHO, yes :)
My thoughts exactly. . . . Seem like much ado about nothing.
Yes, they also detect what future diseases you will get and send this info immediately to Dr. Berwick’s I-phone.
This is so much bull.
I work with RFID tags all day long.
You have to be within 10 feet to pick up the I.D. identifier.
There is no way they can ‘track’ you any further than the end of the register line.
Scaremongering at it’s best!
That’s just what they want you to believe. The chip made you say that.
They can’t be tied to you, but they are generally tracked. Like he said it’s trending and marketing, they like to know what other things people who bought product X also bought, they also like to know what types of products tend to be bought by people who pay cash. The modern world of retail is all about generating is all about creating a gigantic pile of data and slicing it up very thinly from every imaginable angle. It’s kind of crazy, in an incredibly boring actuarial table kind of way.
Given the current state of the security of RFID tags, the theft will probably skyrocket. It’ll just be done by smarter people and harder to catch is all.
From price switching to large scale inventory theft, it’s all possible with RFID. Easier, in fact.
“That’s just what they want you to believe. The chip made you say that.”
Only the one in my head!
:0)
If you go out to the parking lot, and see the black helicopter above you, take off your pants and hide under a car until you can run to the river and jump in without being seen.
Our WalMart was WONDERFUL! Then they made it a “super” WalMart. And changed managers. OMG! What a difference. Awful. We have bought certain products and then they disappear. When you ask you’re told they never carried it. If you complain to a manger he tells you he has no control over what the store receives. I’ve started shopping at K-Mart more often.
Wal-Mart also has cameras everywhere, so they have to avoid ever looking at them or enforcing all theft prevention to let what you say happen IMO.
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