PARIS: Thousands of garments in the sprawling men's department at the Galeria Kaufhof are equipped with tiny wireless chips that can forestall fashion disaster by relaying information from the garment to a dressing-room screen.

The garments in the department store, in Essen, Germany, contain radio frequency identification chips, small circuits that communicate by radio waves through portable readers and more than 200 antennas that can not only recommend a brown belt for those tweed slacks but also track garments from the racks, shelves and dressing rooms on the store's third floor.

This pioneering pilot project of the Metro Group, a retail chain in Germany, heralds a shopping experience of the future in which dress shirts can wirelessly offer accessorizing tips to shoppers. But the rapid development of RFID technology is also being regarded cautiously by the authorities in the European Union, who are moving quickly to establish privacy guidelines because the chips - and the information being collected - are not always visible.

(Article continues below)

Their goal is to raise awareness among consumers that the data-gathering chips are becoming embedded in their lives - in items like credit cards, public transportation passes, work access badges, borrowed library books and supermarket loyalty cards.

There are also policy concerns regarding whether retailers could link a customer's credit card data to an RFID tag in a product, allowing clients to be identified when they return to a store.

In late February, the European Commission issued privacy protection proposals to establish a code of conduct for companies using RFID technology, fueling a debate among privacy advocates who seek more openness and trade groups of manufacturers and retailers who want practical guidelines that will allow the developing technology to flourish.

The guidelines will be open to public comment and debate through late April. They will stop short of becoming part of actual legislation, instead offering direction to members of the European Union for developing privacy protections.

Full article here.