• by Tom Hespos , August 16, 2004

One Saturday morning in 2006, you head to your local home improvement store for some supplies. You buy a low-voltage lighting kit for your walkway outside your house, a gas can for your lawnmower, and a few bags of fertilizer for your lawn and garden. Packing this stuff into the back of your Dodge Ram pickup truck, you head home, stopping at the gas station to fill up on diesel and pick up a quart of milk at the mini-mart.

Hours later, as you're loading the fertilizer into your lawn spreader, a black SUV with tinted windows pulls into your driveway accompanied by two police cars. It suddenly occurs to you that you purchased fertilizer and diesel fuel today - two ingredients that can be used to make an explosive device. And now you have to explain to Agent Scully why, exactly, you needed to make those purchases.

Sound farfetched? Not in a world where nearly every purchase you make is associated with a profile. Yesterday, my colleague Seana Mulcahy wrote a piece on RFID technology and what we should be thinking about as RFID is rolled out by retailers and other companies. She says in her Online Spin piece:

As Internet advertisers, researchers, and technologists, we need to think ahead. If just about anything physical can be tracked, how do we link this to our online efforts? This may be the link between online and offline that we have been looking for. If we could find a way to say link an online advertising campaign for say a new low-carb soda to actual sales, we'd be doing the happy dance.

Indeed, RFID could be the missing link. However, it could also be an overly intrusive technology that could rob consumers of their privacy.

We thought we had seen one heck of a backlash when ad serving companies tried to link personally identifiable data to profiles of Internet users. RFID could represent something worse. Just read Slashdot for a few days, where you'll find technology early adopters railing against RFID on a regular basis. Scenarios like the one I described above may sound like the latest thing to come out of a cabin in Montana with no electricity or running water, but they become a potential reality as we start to adopt technologies like RFID.

Think about how tags are already on many products you buy. Have you bothered to take all the anti-theft tags out of the DVDs you've bought over the years? Have you ever bought something at one store and then set off the anti-theft alarm at another store you visited a short time later? A few months ago, I went to my bathroom closet when the shampoo ran out in the shower and found the new bottle I had purchased was equipped with a neat little tag. It's easy to see how marketers, database companies and the government could easily abuse data-gathering, particularly when you consider that RFID tags remain live after you've left the store. What's to prevent someone from sitting outside a Wal-Mart with a portable RFID reader, happily gathering data on your most recent purchases as you walk out to your car? It can happen, and there's no reason to think that entities with the capability to track this information will exercise self-restraint.

True, relevance is a driving factor behind online advertising success, but there's a thin line between something like serving ads based on Web behavior and serving advertising based on purchase data linked to a unique identifier. As a marketer, I can't imagine anything else that would make my job easier than being able to link offline sales to online activity via technology. But as a consumer, I can't think of too much else that's more intrusive.

Wal-Mart's insistence that suppliers adopt the technology by 2005 is probably more driven by supply chain needs than anything else, but major retailers could be in for a major consumer backlash if they don't take steps now to protect consumer privacy. Tags that broadcast your purchase behavior to anyone with the technological capabilities to read it (albeit at a short range) could lead to widespread abuse. Before we salivate over the data that might be available to marketers shortly, we should think about the position we've put the consumer in.