The Washington legislation outlaws the use of RFID “spy technologies” to collect consumer information without the owner’s consent. The only problem is, heavy corporate lobbying narrowed the scope of the law (before Governor Gregoire signed it) to cover only criminal acts such as fraud, identity theft, or “some other illegal purpose” (making it a Class C felony to do so). Collecting information from consumer RFID chips for marketing purposes in Washington—with or without the owner’s consent or even knowledge—is still fair game.
[From Washington State passes RFID privacy law; where’s Uncle Sam?]
Surely, collecting information for anything but the purpose for which is was intended is just wrong, and it doesn’t matter why it’s being collected. Anyway, the point of this post is that Jens said that the trigger for item-level tagging is the five euro cent tag and this has arrived sooner than they were planning, so they are going to begin item-level tagging earlier than they had originally planned (they are already rolling out pallet-level tracking). He also said something about two Watts at 868MHz, but he was losing me a bit there…
