SNRC Industry Seminar Series "RFID vs. Privacy - Experiences from the Retail Industry", Oliver Guenther - Humboldt University (Berlin)

Abstract

Recent advances in RFID technology are on the verge of triggering fundamental changes in the retail industry. Two of the world's largest retailers, Metro and Wal-Mart, are planning to introduce RFID tagging at the pallet and bin level within the next couple of months, implying major changes to supply chain management. Tagging of individual goods, which will become commonplace within the next two to three years, raises some serious privacy issues. Retailers need to face these challenges proactively in order to optimize the return on their RFID-related investments. In addition to observing the given legal requirements, retailers need to survey consumers' preferences and design their use of RFID technology accordingly.

In order to ascertain consumers' stated and actual (!) preferences regarding RFID, we worked with one of Europe's largest retail chains to carry out a consumer survey and related experiments. We shall present some initial results of this empirical study and discuss possible conflicts between retailer preferences, consumer preferences, and legal requirements that arise from Europe's strict privacy laws. We shall also present a possible technical solution to some privacy-related problems, based on a unique use of passwords in the RFID context. Our presentation concludes with a number of concrete recommendations for retailers and consumer organizations to achieve solutions that benefit all those involved.

Biography

Oliver Guenther is professor and director of the Institute of Information Systems at Humboldt-Universitaet, Berlin, Germany. There he directs several large-scale research projects, including the Berlin Research Center on Internet Economics and the Berlin-Brandenburg Graduate School on Distributed Information Systems. Professor Guenther is president of the German-American Association for Scientific Cooperation in Computer Science and belongs to the IT strategy council of the German Ministry of Education and Research. He served as Chairman of the Board of Poptel AG, Germany's first voice-over-IP company, and as Chief Technology Officer of Teamtoolz, Inc., a San Francisco-based application service provider for the marketing and advertising industry. Prof. Guenther holds a Diplom in industrial engineering from Universitaet Karlsruhe and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from UC Berkeley.