METRO GROUP BACKTRACKS 2004-11-15 (1)

Michael Garry

The RFID privacy brouhaha at Metro Group earlier this year centered around its widely publicized Future Store, an Extra supermarket in Rheinberg, Germany, featuring a host of consumer shopping devices like an intelligent veggie scale and computer-equipped shopping carts.

Opened in April of last year, the Future Store is also one of the first stores in the world to test RFID (radio frequency identification). (For its efforts, Metro, based in Dusseldorf, Germany, received SN's 2004 Technology Excellence Award in the International category.)

At the Future Store, Metro applied tags to three types of packaged goods: Philadelphia cream cheese, Pantene shampoo and Mach 3 Turbo razor blades. Tags are also applied to DVDs, videocassettes and CDs for theft prevention. By reading the tags on the DVDs, consumers are able to view trailers of the movies they contain.

However, because Metro needed to prevent minors from viewing certain trailers, it developed a card-based age-identification system. This is what got it into hot water with privacy groups.

In order to access a trailer, a consumer must present a "Metro Payback Extra Future Card," the store's loyalty card, available to those age 16 and older. Instead of using a traditional bar code or magnetic stripe on the card, Metro decided to employ an RFID microchip that would verify the shopper's age upon being read. About 10,000 of the chip-carrying cards were issued; it was probably the first marriage of loyalty and RFID technologies.

Katherine Albrecht would like it to be the last. It was Albrecht, a well-known privacy activist in the supermarket industry, who unleashed the publicity storm that quickly caused Metro to withdraw the chip-based cards and replace them with conventional ones.

At one of her Web sites, spychips.com, Albrecht describes how this came about. In late January, Albrecht, founder of CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering), participated with German privacy group FoeBuD in a tour of the Future Store. Metro offers tours to explain the store's technology.

Following the tour, she decided to pick up some samples of the loyalty card "for my collection," she said on the Web site. The following day, during a talk on RFID privacy issues, she inadvertently discovered the card also contained a data chip. "It took me several moments to regain my composure enough to explain to the audience the importance of what they had just seen," she recalled.

Albrecht's biggest complaint about the card was that the presence of the RFID chip was not brought up during her tour, nor did she see it mentioned in any literature or store signs. Albrecht von Truchsess, a Metro spokesman, told her that signs in the DVD area explained that the trailers were enabled by the RFID chip on the Future Card.

According to Albrecht, her discovery triggered "an avalanche of press coverage" in Germany, and later received attention around the world. On Feb. 28, a group of privacy advocates and other citizen activists held an RFID protest rally outside the Future Store.

Two days before the rally, Metro announced it would stop issuing the chip-bearing cards and replace them with conventional bar-coded cards. Since then, Metro has proceeded with its RFID tests at the Future Store. Earlier this month, it announced the launch of RFID tagging of pallets by 20 suppliers. Metro has not suffered any further public snafus over privacy.

"Of course, we still hear from [privacy groups], but the discussion has become significantly more reasonable and more helpful," said von Truchsess. "One of the main reasons is that people simply know more about the technology now."