The Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (Caspian) are organising a boycott of all Tesco’s stores in response to Tesco’s plans to increase their use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). The campaign was launched on Tuesday night during an interview with Caspian’s director and founder Katherine Albrecht BBC’s Newsnight. Caspian is protesting that RFID’s allow Tesco’s to track products once they leave the store, claiming they are an invasion of personal privacy. RFID’s are currently used to security tag items in stores like DVD’s but Tesco plans eventually put them in all of their products. Katherine Albrecht claimed Tesco’s plans “would involve potentially hundreds of thousands more shoppers… it essentially means that more people will be taking home items containing spy chips".
Tesco is planning to completely phase out the use of soon-to-be-obsolete radio barcode technology by the end of this year and aims to replace them with RFID’s.