NoSSN - + New York Times writes about RFID product tracking

+ New York Times writes about RFID product tracking
+ How your food purchases reveal your income (and more)
February 28, 2003

Contents:

+ New York Times writes about RFID product tracking

+ How your food purchases reveal your income (and more)

+ Safeway chain in criminal court for overcharging customers

+ Feds working to centralize surveillance of private and gov't databases

+ Warm welcome to Politics and Religion listeners Update on Phoenix

+ television news CASPIAN is #1 in Google

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NEW YORK TIMES WRITES ABOUT RFID PRODUCT TRACKING

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The NY Times finally noticed RFID, writing:

"Stores are beginning to test the "smart shelves" that listen for

signals from merchandise with RFID tags.... Manufacturers are also

testing the tags to ensure that their merchandise makes it to the store.

If a box is removed from a truck prematurely, a sensor will note when and

where it went missing. Companies are tagging clothes, auto parts, copy

machines and even mail with RFID chips. William C. Wertz, a spokesman for

Wal-Mart, says they're tracking everything. 'We want to track all of our

merchandise, and that includes items that people are unlikely to steal.' "

CASPIAN found Katherine Albrecht has done several interviews this week on

RFID technology, including one with the Financial Times that should come

out on Tuesday. As you know, CASPIAN has taken a strong stand against the

technology and will continue to do so vocally.

Source: Claudia Deutsch & Barnaby Feder,

"A Radio Chip in Every Consumer Product"

The New York Times, February 25, 2003

http://www.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/25/te

chnology/25THEF.html (Requires free registration)

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HOW YOUR FOOD PURCHASES REVEAL YOUR INCOME (AND MORE)

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The following article provides a tiny glimpse into how data miners can use

your grocery purchase history to discover things you never knew you were

revealing.

"If recessions had an official food, it might be the pickle, a

University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor claims. In a study on food

buying patterns in different economic conditions, Azzeddine Azzam has

quantified what most people probably already knew - what makes it into

your grocery cart changes according to what's in your wallet. But Azzam,

who runs the Center for Agricultural and Food Industrial Organization at

UNL, has assigned exact numbers to the popularity of different categories

of food as personal incomes rise and fall. "You would expect that as

incomes go up, consumption will rise, but that's not true" for every food

product, Azzam said.

"Categories assigned the lowest numbers - -2.232 for pickles and sauces,

-2.199 for vegetable oil - would be most popular when incomes fall, and

least popular when they rise, Azzam said. Frozen specialty foods such as

TV dinners (0.913) and store-bought ice (0.867) had the highest numbers,

meaning they would be most popular when people have more money to spend.

The numbers quantify "income elasticity" - the flexibility of purchasing

related to personal income - and are based on U.S. Census data.

Consumption of a product with income elasticity near zero, such as cookies

and crackers, according to Azzam's study, would be least likely to change

as incomes change."

Source: Mark Kawar, "As the economy shifts, so do our food choices"

Omaha World Herald, February 19, 2003

http://www.omaha.com/index.php?u_np=0&u_pg=46&u_sid=657790

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SAFEWAY CHAIN IN CRIMINAL COURT FOR OVERCHARGING CUSTOMERS

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Watch your receipt! Pavilions, a division of the Vons Company (owned by

Safeway), has been slapped for the second time with criminal charges in

Santa Monica, California after a routine undercover scanner inspection

found that six of 20 items selected were incorrectly scanned, resulting in

overcharges. That's a 30% error rate. (!)

The Vons Companies, Inc. is charged with six counts of violating the

business and professions code for charging higher prices than the posted

price on sale items. Vons is also charged with one count of violating the

business and professions code for disseminating false and misleading

advertisements. CASPIAN has learned that the company will stand trial for

the charges next Friday, March 7th, in Malibu.

Vons has a long history of ringing items above the posted sale prices and

has been repeatedly convicted of this offense at locations throughout Los

Angeles County.

Source: "Pavillions charged with overcharging customers"

Santa Monica Daily Press, December 9, 2002

http://www.smdp.com/archives/120902.pdf

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FEDS WORKING TO CENTRALIZE SURVEILLANCE OF PRIVATE AND GOV'T DATABASES

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While Congress debated Total Information Awareness funding this month,

more than $20 million in government contracts had already been awarded to

researchers developing a system to sift through the financial, telephone,

travel and medical records of Americans in search of suspicious activity.

The Pentagon hopes this research will enable it to create a master

database linking information from corporate databases, such as credit card

records, bank transactions, car rental receipts, and gun purchases, with

massive quantities of information held by the federal government. A

Defense Department document described the resulting database as "a new

kind of extremely large, omni-media, virtually-centralized and

semantically rich information repository."

Key to the plan will be accessing information collected by businesses for

transaction, marketing, and CRM (customer relationship management)

purposes. As a former CIA information officer explained, "Businesses keep

lists of cardiac patients, BMW owners, subscribers to porn magazines, even

people who tend to do their grocery shopping about the time they receive

sales circulars."

Feeling safer yet? We're not.

Source: "Anti-terror program would comb personal information"

Associated Press in CNN.com, February 12, 2003

http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/02/12/total.information.ap/index.html

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WARM WELCOME TO POLITICS AND RELIGION LISTENERS

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A warm welcome to the hundreds of new subscribers and volunteers who

joined CASPIAN after the February 19th Politics and Religion broadcast.

We're glad to have you on board! If you would like to share the hour-long

program with a friend, it is archived at:

http://www.endtime.com/html/radiohtm.asp

(Scroll down to 2/19/03)

This is one of the most overwhelming responses we have ever gotten from a

radio appearance. Thanks to Endtimes Ministries for making it possible.

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UPDATE ON PHOENIX TELEVISION NEWS

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As we reported earlier this week, the ABC affiliate in Phoenix had

planned to air footage of Stop & Shop executive Curt Avallone admitting to

(a) the fact that most shoppers don't realize that Stop & Shop is using

its card to collect data on them, (b) that the chain has developed

software to turn individual purchase records into detailed nutritional and

health profiles, and (c) that it plans to share the records with HMO's.

Unfortunately, ABC backed out at the last minute and decided not to air

the tape. You can see the story that did air, minus the juicy parts, at:

http://real.scripps.com:8480/ramgen/phoenix/investigators/clubcards.rm

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CASPIAN IS #1 IN GOOGLE

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A recent Wall Street Journal article describes efforts by businesses to

land their websites in the top ten Google search rankings, explaining that

three fourths of all web searches use Google. We did a few Google searches

to find out how CASPIAN ranks. Here are the delightful results:

Term: Google Rank:

______________________________________________________

"Caspian"________________________________1 (first hit)

"Kroger card"____________________________1 (first hit)

"Loyalty card"___________________________1 (first hit)

"Supermarket card"_______________________1 (first hit)

"Albertsons preferred customer card"____ 1 (first hit)

"QFC Advantage Card"__________________ 8 of top 10 hits

______________________________________________________

Albertsons and Kroger, eat your hearts out.

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CASPIAN - Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering A

national consumer organization opposing supermarket "loyalty" cards and

other retail surveillance schemes since 1999

http://www.nocards.org

We encourage you to duplicate and distribute this message to others.

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To subscribe or unsubscribe to the CASPIAN mailing list, click the

following link or cut and paste it into your browser:

http://www.nocards.org/cgi/mojo/mojo.cgi

If you have difficulty with the web-based interface, you may also

subscribe or unsubscribe via email by writing to:

admin@nocards.org

==========================================================

For CASPIAN's overview of pricing and discrimination issues associated

with supermarket "surveillance" cards, please see:

http://www.nocards.org/savings/index.shtml

"Some people think the Federal Reserve Banks are U.S. government institutions. They are not ... they are private credit monopolies which prey
upon the people of the U.S. for the benefit of themselves and their foreign and domestic swindlers, and rich and predatory money lenders. The sack of the United States by the Fed is the greatest crime in history. Every effort has been made by the Fed to conceal its powers, but the truth is the Fed has usurped the government. It controls everything here and it controls all our foreign relations. It makes and breaks governments at will." -- Congressman Charles McFadden, Chairman, House Banking and Currency Committee, June 10, 1932

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