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From each, according to his balance

Advertising Age worries that a new best-seller will hurt marketers' efforts to use radio-frequency id (RFID) chips to track consumer habits.

Me? I'm delighted to hear about the work of Katherine Albrect and Liz McIntyre, who track the direct market industry so we don't have to. Albrect and McIntyre's book Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID, has hit the top 10 of Amazon's nonfiction list - a small triumph for their activist group, Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (CASPIAN).

I haven't read the book but from a look at CASPIAN's website, I can guess one of the central arguments: shopping cards and other direct marketing devices appear to benefit consumers by providing discounts when in fact they do the opposite. Though cards may appear to save shoppers a few cents, the enormous costs of implementing these programs increase prices overall. Card-club stores tend to cost more than stores without cards. One study found that Albertsons and Brookshires - two stores with card programs - were selling packages of Velveeta cheese marked with the manufacturers' suggested retail price of $3.99 for $5.99 and $5.59 (respectively); the only way customers could get the $3.99 price was to use a club card. Nearby stores without card programs were selling the stuff for $3.99.

Store costs only stand to worsen as marketers further refine their targeting, with stores catering to high-profit customers (middle and upper-class families, for instance) at the expense of low-profit ones (low-income singles). By providing companies with ever-increasing information about your purchasing habits, they stand to swing the balance of power even further toward corporations and thereby maximize the dollars they suck out of each individual customers.

As Albrect argues, corporate claims to reward customer "loyalty" with tracking devices are but a ruse. Marketers primary duty is and will always be getting as much from its customers - however "loyal" - as possible.

For example, L.L. Bean recently produced two versions of its catalog:

"This holiday season, L.L. Bean, which has a tradition of offering unconditional free shipping, made it conditional to some and unconditional to others. It mailed a catalog to existing customers with no offer of free shipping. A second catalog that went to prospects, however, offered free shipping with no minimum purchase required."

In other words, the loyal customers got the shaft.

Albrect and McIntyre also raise serious concerns about the civil-liberties implications of widescale consumer tracking. The strongest criticisms are based on potential or future uses of these technologies. And if some of the fears ring a curiously conspiratorial note, well, so be it.

Albrect is, in fact, an eschatological Christian who has produced videos for Endtime Ministries, including one that equated RFID with [cough] the mark of the beast. But unlike most evangelicals, she's discreet about her biblical beliefs and seems to have a grasp on the difference between fact and fiction. According to a Wired story, the EFF and other mainstream privacy advocates have actively encouraged her to reach out to Christian fundamentalists. And it's not hard to see why. As anyone who remembers Proctor & Gamble's battle over its "satanic" logo in the 1980s can attest, Christian conspiracists make for a formidable (if crazed) foe.

Conveniently enough, one of the companies researching the use of RFID in consumer tracking: Proctor & Gamble.