Katherine Albrecht

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Katherine Albrecht.

Katherine Albrecht is the founder of CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering), a national consumer organization created in 1999 to educate consumer-citizens about shopper surveillance. She is a consumer privacy advocate and anti-RFID spokesperson. She coined the term "spy chips" to describe RFID microchip tags. She holds a Doctor of Education degree from Harvard University.

[edit] Publications

Katherine Albrecht's publications include:

Albrecht, Katherine."Supermarket Cards: The Tip of the Retail Surveillance Iceberg." Denver University Law Review, Volume 79, Issue 4, Summer 2002. pp. 534-539 and 558-565. See: [1]

Position Paper on the Use of RFID in Consumer Products. Co-authored with Liz McIntyre and Beth Givens. November 14, 2003. Full text at: [2]

RFID: The Doomsday Scenario. In RFID: Applications, Security, and Privacy, eds. S. Garfinkel and B. Rosenberg. New Jersey: Addison Wesley. 2006. pp. 259-273. Amazon listing: [3]

RFID: The Big Brother Bar Code (Co-authored with Liz McIntyre) ALEC Policy Forum, Winter 2004, Volume 6, Number 3, pp. 49-54. Full text at: [4]

[edit] Books

Albrecht co-authored the book "Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID" with Liz McIntyre, CASPIAN's communications director. See Amazon listing: [5] The book, winner of the November 2005 Lysander Spooner Award for advancing the literature of liberty, lays out potential privacy and civil liberties implications of RFID.

RFID industry representatives have criticized the work, claiming it exaggerates some RFID privacy threats. Albrecht and McIntyre have rebutted such criticisms. See for example: [6] and [7].

Albrecht and McIntyre's book "The Spychips Threat: Why Christians Should Resist RFID and Electronic Surveillance" explores how RFID technology could enable the fulfillment of what many see as apocalyptic prophecies in the Book of Revelation. The authors use public documents, and statements and actions of the industry to support their arguments that RFID technology is immoral.^{[citation needed]}