Suppose you could enter some personal information about yourself into a corporate database, and in return you'd receive a discount on that company's products. Would you be game?
What if it meant lower rates on auto insurance? Better still — how much personal privacy would you be willing to give up for a really nice-fitting pair of jeans?
As you first enter the expansive new Original Levi's Store in San Francisco's Union Square, there's no mistaking its technology-centric atmosphere. A labyrinthine tower of black metal beams, halogen track lighting, lacquered wood and brushed aluminum, the building's interior styling evokes some modernist decorator's living room designs for the Death Star.
Still, it's not really how you'd picture the front line in the battle for electronic privacy. With its multicolored lighting and omnipresent trip-hop soundtrack, at first glance there's more Björk here than Big Brother.
Then again, there are those slightly ominous, periscope-looking contraptions in the foyer. A color LCD monitor on each is linked to closed circuit video cameras distributed throughout the store.
By manipulating buttons visitors can angle and turn the cameras, to get a somewhat voyeuristic bird's-eye view of their fellow shoppers on other floors. Still, it's all in good fun — right?
The real eyebrow-raiser doesn't come until you reach the third floor, home of the Levi's Original Spin Program. There, reminiscent of David Cronenberg's 1986 remake of "The Fly," discriminating jeans buyers can step into any of a number of large steel capsules, strip down to their underwear, and be scanned with optical sensors to find their perfect fit.
Having done this, customers enter their names and addresses into a terminal outside the capsule, select a style and fabric, and within two or three weeks have custom-sewn Levi's jeans shipped direct to their homes.
What Levi Strauss gains in the transaction — besides the price on the jeans — is a precise data profile on each customer who participates. These become part of a database the company can mine to track individual purchasing patterns and develop strategic understanding of its retail customer base.
But the collected statistics are hardly anonymous. Individual customers are keyed to their profiles by their fingerprints, which are also digitally scanned at the time of the fitting.
San Francisco-based Levi Strauss certainly isn't the first business to compile a central data repository on their customers. Most consumers were first introduced to this practice through "discount club" cards, offered by such large retail chains as Safeway and Rite Aid.
More and more e-commerce websites, too, require that customers "sign in" with a profile before they make purchases. But the Levi's Original Spin initiative represents the first known example of such data being indexed by a precise, biological identifying mark, like a fingerprint.
All in good fun? Clearly, much of the futuristic air of the Original Levi's Store is to be taken somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Long castigated by the advertising industry as being one of the best examples of how to effectively destroy a great American brand, Levi's now seems determined to leap back into public consciousness with a flashy, irreverent, hi-tech image.
Besides the biometric scanning capsules, there are DJ booths, custom embroidery stations, video screens, even a hot tub. (The latter is meant to be enjoyed while wearing a new pair of jeans, and followed by a session in the stand-up drying chamber, for that perfect shrink-to-fit.)
But the fingerprint scanning units at the Original Spin terminals are no joke. Similar technology is already in use by the Philadelphia Police Department to speed up the process of booking suspects.
The units are capable of returning a positive ID from a central crime database in as little as six minutes. Kind of makes handing out your Social Security number seem like no big deal, doesn't it?
Electronic fingerprinting won't remain a novelty for commercial concerns for long, either. Compaq is already developing products to allow PC users to log into networks by fingerprint ID; their combination of hardware and software is expected to retail for about $100 per user.
And Intershop Communications of Munich, Germany, is readying a new version of their e-commerce server software that replaces user passwords with fingerprint-based login — though for now it's aimed mostly at business-to-business applications.
You might ask, what's to worry about, really? So a business I buy things from manages to track my purchasing habits, and creates a perfect profile of me as a consumer. Worst case scenario: Every piece of junk mail advertising I receive from now on is for a product I actually want. Right?
But it's not so simple, say privacy experts. The real trouble comes when the information you volunteer starts to change hands, often without your knowledge. One company might sell its customer information. Another might be bought outright, database and all. Information could be stolen through industrial espionage. Or, a business might be forced to turn over its database to a government agency under future legislation.
All sorts of people are interested in getting their hands on the other guy's database — even groups as innocuous as Public Broadcasting Service. Some thirty PBS affiliates recently came under fire for swapping mailing lists with the Democratic Party and related organizations, in search of new potential donors. (Presumably, Republican children don't watch Sesame Street.) Personal data is big business.
The issue reaches its thorniest when databases from different sources are combined to form more detailed profiles of individuals. Imagine one day being turned down for a health insurance policy because your fingerprint-coded Levi Strauss sizing profile reveals that you are obese — or pregnant. Or, an insurance company that merged with a bank could potentially have access to both your medical and financial records.
Specific legislation has been written to address the last possibility, but by and large the government has done little so far to prevent these types of data transactions between companies. Still, that doesn't mean you're helpless to control the flow of your personal information into other hands. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), an organization dedicated to preserving privacy in the digital age, has some suggestions:
- Withhold any information that isn't essential or required.
- Give false information, where appropriate. For example, Safeway actually recommends that Club Card applicants concerned about privacy write their names as "Safeway Customer."
- Familiarize yourself with the laws of your state governing use and exchange of personal information.
- Periodically request copies of your personal records, such as your credit report.
But most important is awareness. As mentioned earlier, it's hard to fake a fingerprint. But a Levi's Original Spin customer who voiced concern about the fingerprint identification procedure would be advised by sales staff simply not to use it. Turns out it's optional — just as you could choose to be sized the old-fashioned way, with a tape measure, rather than step into the scanning capsule. In each case, the hi-tech method is merely presented as the "simplest" choice.
In the end, the Original Levi's Store should probably be seen as less a threat than a warning. Today it's not actually as easy as it may sound to build a global personal information storehouse.
The price tag of the FBI's new national crime-prevention fingerprint database is expected to hit $640 million, well over its initial budget. But developing network technology is making it ever easier to link disparate information systems.
How we allow our personal data to be used and exchanged will ultimately be up to each of us, through our vigilance and our votes. Today's designer fashions can cost a pretty penny. But what price will you be willing to pay for tomorrow's pair of jeans?
