Public concern about RFID technology’s potential for compromising consumer privacy recently caused some retailers to scale back their plans. Last March, Royal Philips Electronics announced that it would provide Benetton, the retailer that has always marketed itself as socially conscientious, with RFID-enabled “smart labels” to put in its clothing. Philips also announced that clothing manufactured under Benetton brand Sisley already had been fitted with RFID-enabled labels. For Benetton, which has been hurting financially for the past several years and has gone through several management changes, RFID held the promise of helping the company win back shareholder confidence by improving supply chain efficiency. Within days of Philips’s announcement, privacy advocates were organizing a boycott. Three weeks later, Benetton released a statement denying that any of its clothing had been tagged and declaring that it had not undertaken any studies in preparation for an RFID rollout. The company has since declined to discuss its RFID plans. Wal-Mart and Gillette also scaled back an RFID pilot this year after encountering negative public reaction. The companies had planned to tag individual packs of razors. Brett Kinsella, general manager of the supply chain management group for IT consultancy Sapient, says that Wal-Mart and Gillette did not cancel the RFID pilot because of PR concerns but because of the “hurdles, both technical and organizational, that make [item-level tagging] a harder implementation to do in the near term,” he says. Ironically, in Europe, where citizens and corporations are more concerned with personal privacy than they seem to be in America, and where more government legislation exists to protect customer data, Metro AG and Tesco are much further along in RFID trials than are American retailers. In spite of protests outside their stores, they’ve already implemented RFID at the pallet and case level. Metro AG has started to tag some items in select stores in Germany, and Tesco undertook a controversial pilot involving tags on Gillette razor blades in conjunction with closed-circuit TV cameras on shelves. The cameras would snap a photo of a consumer and stored it in a database each time he picked a pack of blades off a shelf. -M.L. Related content opinion Website spoofing: risks, threats, and mitigation strategies for CIOs In this article, we take a look at how CIOs can tackle website spoofing attacks and the best ways to prevent them. By Yash Mehta Dec 01, 2023 5 mins CIO Cyberattacks Security brandpost Sponsored by Catchpoint Systems Inc. Gain full visibility across the Internet Stack with IPM (Internet Performance Monitoring) Today’s IT systems have more points of failure than ever before. Internet Performance Monitoring provides visibility over external networks and services to mitigate outages. By Neal Weinberg Dec 01, 2023 3 mins IT Operations brandpost Sponsored by Zscaler How customers can save money during periods of economic uncertainty Now is the time to overcome the challenges of perimeter-based architectures and reduce costs with zero trust. By Zscaler Dec 01, 2023 4 mins Security feature LexisNexis rises to the generative AI challenge With generative AI, the legal information services giant faces its most formidable disruptor yet. That’s why CTO Jeff Reihl is embracing and enhancing the technology swiftly to keep in front of the competition. By Paula Rooney Dec 01, 2023 6 mins Generative AI Digital Transformation Cloud Computing Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe