The EU is thought to be close to coming out with a definitive statement on RFID privacy and some UK retailers and RFID advocates are understood to be unhappy with its likely positioning.
At the heart of retailers’ concerns are the measures the EU is mooted to want regarding consumers having to opt-in to RFID in-store.
One source told me that a requirement from the EU for consumers to positively opt-in to RFID in-store and for RFID tags to be decommissioned at the point-of-sale would kill RFID at item-level in Europe. Such a move, the source added, would put us internationally behind the curve, cost thousands of jobs in the RFID industry and be a terrible waste of a very useful opportunity.
The European Commission has already said it will make changes to the Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive to take account of RFID with amendments reported to have been proposed by the middle of last year.
And the EU’s Information Society and Media Commissioner Viviane Reding has announced the creation of an RFID Stakeholder Group to help the Commission develop its RFID policy as part of an action plan to address the potential pitfalls and benefits of using RFID technology.
Reding has claimed that Europeans need assurance that radio tags would not be used for large-scale surveillance, and indicated she would consider legislation concerning RFID and privacy.
It is two years since the EU first began looking at the RFID sector when it launched a public consultation on the subject in March at the CeBit 2006 trade fair in Hannover.
It is possible that the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) may now sit down with UK retailers in the next few weeks to discuss how UK industry should respond to the EU’s expected RFID proposals.
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