RFID and the Perception of Control: The Consumer's View

Abstract

In his seminal 1991 Scientific American article The Computer for the 21st Century, Mark Weiser, an early visionary of ubiquitous computing, wrote the social problem associated with ubiquitous computing, while often couched in terms of privacy, is really one of control. The ongoing public debate over RFID technology and how it might affect consumer data privacy in the retail industry very much reflects this tension between control and privacy. The Metro Group Future Store Initiative represents the first large scale roll out of RFID technology in a retail context. We have been working for the past year with Metro Group to identify consumers' major privacy fears relating to RFID and develop and evaluate appropriate privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs). Here, we analyze the results of our empirical study of ordinary German retail consumers conducted in the spring of 2005. We gave a representative sample of 129 consumers two distinctly different types of PETs, one user-based, one agent-based.

Keywords: RFID, ubiquitous computing, privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), empirical study

JEL Classification: O31, O33, O38