Sports apparel giant Adidas has admitted that it’s embedding RFID chips into some of its range of clothing. It emerged that the company has already sold thousands of football shirts that carry the controversial tags.
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID ) chip is used to track data or send information via electromagnetic fields.
In a statement the company said:
“As part of a logistics project we have tested for the first time an RFID label with a virtual number. It is a read-only label without any additional data. The label is not tied to the article number, size or color of the article and we also can’t link it with end customer data. It is of course up to customer of this product to cut out the RFID label along the dashed line and throw it in the trash.”
However, Thilo Weichert, a German data protection commissioner, pointed out:
“Consumers do not only have an interest, but a right — not in a legal sense, but in a moral sense and from a consumer protection perspective. They obviously should be informed when their clothes are being tagged and the problem with these RFID tags is that they are very easy to tag.
“I don’t want to imply that Adidas or anybody else is doing that, but it is a feature of the shirt that the costumer must be informed about and he must also be informed about how he can dispose of this form of identification.”