04-26-2007, 10:03 AM
:wave: Hello friends! I thought I'd post this here and get you friends' opinions - it makes me feel... kinda creeped out. lol. We've talked about this subject a little before - but this news item goes into more detail, as they're trying to figure out why all the secrecy behind the building of a Wal-Mart data storage facility. This is a snippet of the 4-page news item in the Joplin (MO) Globe newspaper:
'Retail surveillance'
Albrecht, the consumer activist, said that when the contractor came to her with the story about Wal-Mart wanting to biometrically identify customers through video, one of the reasons given was to help law enforcement.
"You could search for all sales of a particular kind of rope and get a photo of who bought it," she said. "On the other end, you could research all of the purchases of a particular individual, even if they paid in cash."
Albrecht is the co-author of "Spychips," about the use of RFID, or radio frequency identification devices, by the government and corporations to track individuals. She lives in Nashua, N.H., and is getting ready to receive a doctorate of education in consumer education.
"To the best of our knowledge, the only consumer-level item that is (RFID) tagged at Wal-Mart are Hewlett-Packard products and some Sanyo television sets," she said. "Now, the privacy implications of that are fairly trivial, because you're not going to be walking down the street carrying your printer box in your back pocket."
But in 2003, she said, Wal-Mart did two experiments using RFID on smaller items: razor blades and lipstick.
At Brockton, Mass., Albrecht said, the company used a surveillance camera on a shelf that was linked to chips in packages of razor blades. When someone picked up a package, she said, the shelf camera would be activated. Another camera would take a mug shot of the customer at the checkout stand.
At Broken Arrow, Okla., she said, the company linked devices in packages of lipstick that triggered a camera that allowed the lipstick manufacturer to watch consumers on live video.
The experiments apparently were aimed at decreasing theft or for use in merchandise research, she said. "Since 1999, I've been working on a phenomenon called retail surveillance, which is a whole panoply of technologies that are being secretly deployed," she said. "I think most people, when they learn about these technologies, are quite disturbed. There's a sense that when you enter a retail space, you should retain some degree of privacy."
But, Albrecht said, there's a push among retailers to collect as much information about their customers as possible - and to keep the lower-profit individuals, known as "barnacles" and "bottom-feeders," away.
"There's a lot of hand-wringing about how we can find out even more about our customers," she said. "And to the extent that Wal-Mart may be creating the ability to monitor consumers by RFID and identify them by video, I'm extremely concerned. ... If that's the case, they would need that kind of data storage."
The full article starts here > http://www.joplinglobe.com/siteSearch/ap...art:int=15
What do you think? :confused: I think this world is gettin' curiouser and curiouser...:huh::dontknow: But then... I'm using a 'barnacle's' brain... ;)
Love to you all -
Willa :peace:
'Retail surveillance'
Albrecht, the consumer activist, said that when the contractor came to her with the story about Wal-Mart wanting to biometrically identify customers through video, one of the reasons given was to help law enforcement.
"You could search for all sales of a particular kind of rope and get a photo of who bought it," she said. "On the other end, you could research all of the purchases of a particular individual, even if they paid in cash."
Albrecht is the co-author of "Spychips," about the use of RFID, or radio frequency identification devices, by the government and corporations to track individuals. She lives in Nashua, N.H., and is getting ready to receive a doctorate of education in consumer education.
"To the best of our knowledge, the only consumer-level item that is (RFID) tagged at Wal-Mart are Hewlett-Packard products and some Sanyo television sets," she said. "Now, the privacy implications of that are fairly trivial, because you're not going to be walking down the street carrying your printer box in your back pocket."
But in 2003, she said, Wal-Mart did two experiments using RFID on smaller items: razor blades and lipstick.
At Brockton, Mass., Albrecht said, the company used a surveillance camera on a shelf that was linked to chips in packages of razor blades. When someone picked up a package, she said, the shelf camera would be activated. Another camera would take a mug shot of the customer at the checkout stand.
At Broken Arrow, Okla., she said, the company linked devices in packages of lipstick that triggered a camera that allowed the lipstick manufacturer to watch consumers on live video.
The experiments apparently were aimed at decreasing theft or for use in merchandise research, she said. "Since 1999, I've been working on a phenomenon called retail surveillance, which is a whole panoply of technologies that are being secretly deployed," she said. "I think most people, when they learn about these technologies, are quite disturbed. There's a sense that when you enter a retail space, you should retain some degree of privacy."
But, Albrecht said, there's a push among retailers to collect as much information about their customers as possible - and to keep the lower-profit individuals, known as "barnacles" and "bottom-feeders," away.
"There's a lot of hand-wringing about how we can find out even more about our customers," she said. "And to the extent that Wal-Mart may be creating the ability to monitor consumers by RFID and identify them by video, I'm extremely concerned. ... If that's the case, they would need that kind of data storage."
The full article starts here > http://www.joplinglobe.com/siteSearch/ap...art:int=15
What do you think? :confused: I think this world is gettin' curiouser and curiouser...:huh::dontknow: But then... I'm using a 'barnacle's' brain... ;)
Love to you all -
Willa :peace: