Gary Secondino's Weblog

More significant in relation to privacy, however, is the onset of a new form of monitoring, one being tested right now in UK stores, as Albrecht revealed to the Guardian. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), a form of electronic tagging using wireless technology, was pioneered in the US at the Auto-ID Centre in Boston, a partnership of around 100 global companies. Big grocers such as Wal-Mart (which owns Asda) and Tesco, as well as brands such as Nestlé, Pepsi and Kellogg's, are partners of the centre, as, incidentally, is the US department of defence.

Each product code links to its own internet database entry, which can be retrieved by the scanner - so anyone with access to both can establish what and where that product is. The ultimate goal is to assign a unique number to every product on the planet, allowing for what the Auto-ID Centre describes as a "physically linked world". In this world, everything will be tracked and identified. The main obstacle to this vision is financial - the centre is working to bring down the cost of the tags from 50 cents to five cents apiece, or less.

Katherine Albrecht, director of the US-based Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion And Numbering, or Caspian (nocards.org), says that the danger lies in legal or political bodies overriding the stores' privacy agreements. "The data that supermarkets have quietly collected for nearly a decade has become a tempting target for busybodies of all stripes," she says. According to Albrecht, loyalty card details have already been used in personal injury and family law cases in the US. In one instance, a man's card-tracked purchase of expensive wine was used as evidence in a divorce case to show that he could afford to pay more alimony. In another, a supermarket proposed to use till receipts to prove that a man who sued after tripping over a yogurt spill in its store was an alcoholic. Data protection laws allow for such information to be disclosed if a court requests it.

The British Broadcasting Corp. said Sunday that David Kelly, a Ministry of Defense scientist whose suicide intensified a fierce debate over intelligence used to justify war in Iraq (news - web sites), was its main source for a story at the center of the dispute.

Two soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division were killed and one was injured in an ambush Sunday when their convoy came under rocket-propelled grenade and small arms fire in northern Iraq (news - web sites), the U.S. military said.

The deaths brought to 151 the number of American soldiers killed in action since the March 20 start of the war, four more than the total killed in the 1991 Gulf war.

Also Sunday, a U.S. soldier was killed and two others injured when their vehicle crashed and flipped over near Baghdad International Airport, according to a statement from U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Fla.

Systems powered by the Extensible Markup Language may prove to be the standard for sharing information between businesses, but experts at McKinsey explain why most CIOs won't make the leap in the near future. [CNET News.com]

Feedster, the RSS search engine, now understands Creative Commons licenses found in feeds. They'll start implementing them on cache pages but are open to other suggestions for use. [Creative Commons: weblog]

A court tentatively approves a settlement to end a California class-action suit that claims the software giant overcharged for Windows. [CNET News.com]