But with the RFID tagging becoming more common, retailers have started to use the tags to combat theft. These tags have traditionally been used by retailers to track products along the supply chain and to alert store associates when an item might be low and need restocking. The devices contain a tracking number associated with that particular item’s model, color or size. But now, they typically appear as small metal prints on a cloth tag along with a garment’s sizing and cleaning information. In a retail store setting, RFID tags originally took the form of hard plastic pins fastened to products that couldn’t be removed without a magnetic device at a checkout counter by a store clerk. I live at this address and this is how much I make.'” Changing plastic He added that the tag includes data such as the size or the color of the clothing or shoes. “What is going to be attached to that file is not what you think,” said Read Hayes, director of the Loss Prevention Research Council. This would make it nearly impossible for the tags to be read by someone without a RFID gun from far away, he said. Instead, RFID chips require specific reader guns to access the information contained in the tag and these reader guns only work from 10 to 30 feet away, said Dean Frew, the chief technology officer and senior vice president of RFID Solutions for SML Group. It does not allow retailers to broadly track a customers' whereabouts if they are wearing the clothes and cannot even help track items if they’re stolen or lost. However, retail security experts point out this technology is not very sophisticated. RFID has privacy implications particularly because of a company’s ability to track people inside their store to provide very finely targeted ads based on a shopper’s movement patterns or whether and where a person lingers, he said. “So anyone who has access to a reader can track that RFID wherever it goes if they’d like to.” “They are essentially just a little bit of technology and it has a little data that is usually a unique identifier,” said Eric Null, director of the privacy and data project with the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology. Although the tags can be removed by customers once they leave the store and don’t by themselves allow stores to identify shoppers, privacy advocates are concerned that customers could be tracked in stores without consent. “RFID gives you that ability.”īut while retailers say the technology helps them track inventory and stop theft, some consumer advocates are concerned about shopper privacy. “What you’re seeing now across retail and the staffing challenges for law enforcement is a greater need for retailers to package the cases to do all the investigation,” Joe Coll, vice president of asset protection, operations and strategy at Macy’s, said during a webinar last week hosted by the trade publication RFID Journal.
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