I Spy ... an Attendee Wearing Blue

With congressional committees presently debating whether the Natl. Security Agency's domestic spying program broke the law, Americans have got privacy on their minds.

Although most business conducted around tradeshows gets nowhere close to being a real threat to national security, it's nonetheless a good time to revisit issues of privacy in the industry. From the obvious questions surrounding radio frequency identification, to the grayer areas of list acquisition, you can bet your customers will start thinking about some of the practices you — and they — now take for granted.

In the case of the Bush Administration, the question is not whether anybody circumvented the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (President Bush and the NSA admit they did), but whether their actions are justified under the circumstances, according to the authority afforded them by other conventions.

When it comes to the ethics of tracking tradeshow attendees' behavior with RFID tags inserted into their badges, registration technology developers and show organizers could look for guidance in the anti-spam law.

According to that law, passed two years ago, most nonprofit associations and private businesses maintained their right to fax and e-mail promotions to customers and legitimately obtained lists of potential customers — so long as the sender offers recipients a chance to opt out and respects their wishes to do so.

Consumers, on the other hand, maintained their right to be free from unwanted solicitation and from the use of their information by unauthorized parties.

Current thinking about RFID seems to be that a tradeshow attendee is a legitimately acquired customer, who paid a fee and provided his or her information in exchange for the business opportunity offered.

What's missing, however, is the chance to opt out — the right to be free from unwanted tracking.

Show managers have told me that the registration providers currently offering RFID say a disclaimer printed on the back of each badge suffices to protect them from backlash. The small-print disclaimer states that the badges contain tags allowing show management to gather data about attendance patterns.

I doubt anybody honestly believes that organizers want to use attendee behavior data for anything other than improving their shows. But couldn't the same be said for legitimate businesspeople using their fax machines and e-mail programs to communicate with customers?

By the same token, most tradeshow attendees should have nothing to hide. But if somebody spends the afternoon at Hooters instead of in Retail Merchandising 101, isn't that between him and his boss? This kind of detailed information might not be available — or even wanted — right now, but that's the direction we're headed.

Laws don't exist to protect us from the honest, but from the dishonest. You don't have to look outside the tradeshow industry to find examples of exceptions that make rules worthwhile. The companies that got caught up in Construct Data's alleged Fair Guide scam are looking to the courts for recourse as of this writing.

So, when I register for a show and I see that plastic prop on the back of my badge, I look around and wonder how many people in the registration line know to check for a disclaimer among the small print.

I also wonder whether it wouldn't save everybody a lot of time to start telling them about it up front — and letting them opt out now.