Katherine Albrecht is a Harvard doctoral candidate and the founder of CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering), a national consumer organization created in 1999 to educate consumer-citizens about shopper surveillance. She is a leading consumer privacy advocate and anti-RFID spokesperson. She coined the term "spy chips" to describe RFID microchip tags. See the CASPIAN website at [1]. Image File history File linksMetadata Albrecht. ... For Caspian Sea, go to: Caspian Sea CASPIAN Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (CASPIAN) is a national grass-roots consumer group dedicated to fighting supermarket loyalty or frequent shopper cards. ... An EPC RFID tag used for Wal-Mart An RFID tag used for electronic toll collection Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) is an automatic identification method, relying on storing and remotely retrieving data using devices called RFID tags or transponders. ... Spychips is a term used to describe RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) microchips. ... An EPC RFID tag used for Wal-Mart An RFID tag used for electronic toll collection Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) is an automatic identification method, relying on storing and remotely retrieving data using devices called RFID tags or transponders. ...

Publications

Katherine Albrecht's publications include:

Albrecht, Katherine."Supermarket Cards: The Tip of the Retail Surveillance Iceberg." Denver University Law Review, Volume 79, Issue 4, Summer 2002. pp. 534-539 and 558-565. See: [2]

Position Paper on the Use of RFID in Consumer Products. Co-authored with Liz McIntyre and Beth Givens. November 14, 2003. Full text at: [3]

RFID: The Doomsday Scenario. In RFID: Applications, Security, and Privacy, eds. S. Garfinkel and B. Rosenberg. New Jersey: Addison Wesley. 2006. pp. 259-273. Amazon listing: [4]

RFID: The Big Brother Bar Code (Co-authored with Liz McIntyre) ALEC Policy Forum, Winter 2004, Volume 6, Number 3, pp. 49-54. Full text at: [5]

Books

Albrecht co-authored the book "Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID" with Liz McIntyre, CASPIAN's communications director. See Amazon listing: [6] The book, winner of the November 2005 Lysander Spooner Award for advancing the literature of liberty, lays out the serious privacy and civil liberties implications of RFID. Bruce Sterling, who wrote the forward for the book, called it "a masterpiece of technocriticism" and compared it to Rachel Carson's famous work "Silent Spring."

Boston Globe tech reporter Hiawatha Bray wrote, Spychips "makes a very persuasive case that some of America's biggest companies want to embed tracking technology into virtually everything we own, and then study our usage patterns 24 hours a day. It's a truly creepy book and well worth reading."

Marc Rotenberg, Georgetown University Adjunct Professor of Law and Executive Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) gave Spychips a hearty endorsement, writing "Spychips is one of the best privacy books in many years....The privacy movement needs a book. I nominate Spychips."

Not surprisingly, RFID industry representatives have criticized the work, claiming it exaggerates some RFID privacy threats. Albrecht and McIntyre have rebutted such criticisms. See for example: [7] and [8].

Albrecht and McIntyre's forthcoming book "The Spychips Threat: Why Christians Should Resist RFID and Electronic Surveillance" explores how RFID technology could enable the fulfillment of widely-held interpretations of biblical prophecy. The authors use public documents and the words and deeds of the industry to support their arguments.

External Links

CASPIAN's anti-RFID web site