After a tour in the Future Store of the German Metro concern, privacy advocate Katherine Albrecht discovered spy-chips with unique numbers in the customer loyalty cards. She also found RFID tags on products sold in the store that were not completely de-activated after the purchase.
Albrecht, founder of CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering) was invited by the German civil liberty group Foebud to lecture about RFIDs and visit the Future Store, that was opened last year to test experimental RFID applications on live shoppers. "We were shocked to find RFID tags in Metro's 'Payback' loyalty card," said Albrecht. "The card application form, brochures, and signage at the store made no mention of the embedded technology and Metro executives spent several hours showing us the store without telling us about it."
In addition to the tags in the loyalty cards, Albrecht discovered that Metro cannot deactivate the unique identification number contained in RFID tags in products it sells. The use of unique, item-level ID numbers is one of the key privacy concerns surrounding the use of RFID tags on consumer goods.
"Customers are misled into believing that the tags can be killed at a special deactivation kiosk, but the kiosk only rewrites a portion of the tag, while leaving the unique ID number intact," she said.
Foebud detailed analysis of the Metro RFIDs
http://www.foebud.org/rfid/
Website CASPIAN dedicated to RFIDs
http://www.spychips.com