Privacy Advocates Concerned About New Walmart Smart Tags
New smart tags being added to jeans and underwear in Walmart stores will allow employees to assess when a size or color needs to be restocked with the wave of an electronic wand.
Walmart plans to post signs telling customers about the removable tags, the Wall Street Journal reports. But that isn’t satisfying some privacy advocates who say the tags could allow marketers or criminals to learn about recent consumer purchases by driving past garbage cans and scanning for the radio-frequency IDs.
They also hypothesize a triple play of scanning by retailers involving the smart tags, credit cards and enhanced drivers licenses being issued by some states that carry radio-frequency ID tags to make border crossing easier. Retailers could combine the information to learn a customer’s identity and purchasing habits as he or she walks into a store, they say.
Katherine Albrecht, founder of Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering, told the Wall Street Journal of her concerns. “The inventory guys may be in the dark about this, but there are a lot of corporate marketers who are interested in tracking people as they walk sales floors,” she said.
