Katherine Albrecht
Dr. Katherine Albrecht is a consumer privacy advocate, Vice President of Startpage.com and spokesperson against radio-frequency identification. Albrecht devised the term "spy chips" to describe RFID tags such as those embedded in passport cards and certain enhanced United States driver's licenses. Albrecht holds Doctorate in Human Development and Consumer Education from Harvard University.
Albrecht was interviewed about RFID chips in Aaron Russo's 2006 documentary America: From [Freedom to Fascism].
Publications
Books
Albrecht and Liz McIntyre co-authored the book Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move, which won the November 2005 Lysander Spooner Award for advancing the literature of liberty. The book lays out the potential implications of RFID on privacy and civil liberties. RFID industry representatives have criticized it, claiming the authors exaggerate some RFID privacy threats. In a lengthy rebuttal, Albrecht asked why critics don't "mention sworn patent documents from IBM describing ways to secretly follow innocent people in libraries, theaters, and public restrooms through the RFID tags in their clothes and belongings? Where is outrage over BellSouth's patent-pending plans to pick through our garbage and skim the data contained in the RFID tags we discard?"Articles and papers
- Albrecht, Katherine. "" Denver University Law Review, Volume 79, Issue 4, Summer 2002. pp. 534–539 and 558–565.
- Position Paper on the Use of RFID in Consumer Products. Co-authored with Liz McIntyre and Beth Givens. November 14, 2003.
- "RFID: The Doomsday Scenario." In: RFID: Applications, Security, and Privacy, eds. S. Garfinkel and B. Rosenberg. New Jersey: Addison Wesley. 2006. pp. 259–273.
- "" ALEC Policy Forum, Winter 2004, Volume 6, Number 3, pp. 49–54.
Radio talk show host