The suit makes the man.
You can tell a lot about a woman by her shoes.

Such idle phrases are not lost on privacy advocates who fear they may one day become chillingly true. Technology dubbed Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is being fitted to a chip the size of a rice grain that can be embedded in clothing and other devices and allow tracking via the Internet.

Controlled by antenna and facilitated by its small size, privacy advocates question whether RFID technology will move from supply chain management to insidious Trojaned clothing used to track the buyers rather than the merchandise.


When Italian designer Benetton revealed they were testing the spywear chips on their Sisley clothing brand, consumer-privacy advocate Katherine Albrecht, a Harvard doctoral researcher and founder of CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering), immediately called for a boycott of Benetton fashions.

"Benetton could easily link your name and credit card information to the serial number in your sweater, in essence 'registering' that sweater to you," she explained. "Then any time you go near an RFID reader device, the sweater could beam out your identity to anyone with access to the database -- all without your knowledge or permission."

Benetton has since declared the tests a misunderstanding, assuring, "We are not using any RFIDs in any of our garments today." Indeed, the March 2003 press release announcing "Benetton selects Philips to introduce smart labels across 5,000 worldwide stores" has been pulled from the Philips website.

RFID was developed in World War II, helping radar operators distinguish friendly aircraft from enemy.

By the 1980s it had evolved into wireless tracking and access applications and today provides omnidirectional electronic storage technology on chips that can read, write, store, and transmit data in freely available international frequency bands. In short, while many of us worry about SpyWare, perhaps we should be most concerned with SpyWear.