Pro-RFID Group Sends Wrong Email To Anti-RFID Group

Email

from the um.--we-didn't...-actually...-mean...-that dept

You’ve all heard stories (or been a part of) about email exchanges where the wrong thing was sent to the wrong person. One of the more common mistakes is someone hitting “reply” instead of “forward” and typing in a comment that the original sender as clearly not intended to see. That seems to be the case with an email exchange between a student intern at the Grocery Manufacturers of America (GMA) and the founder and director of Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (CASPIAN). The GMA supports using RFID tags, while CASPIAN has been outspoken against the tags. GMA had an intern contact the founder and director and ask for a bio. When she wrote back asking what it was to be used for, the intern accidentally hit reply instead of forward and wrote what they really wanted it for, which is probably not what they wanted to tell her: “I don’t know what to tell this woman! ‘Well, actually we’re trying to see if you have a juicy past that we could use against you’.” As you might imagine, the folks at the GMA have apologized for the misdirected email – and now both sides are saying that the mistake may actually have opened up some lines of communication between the two groups – though, I imagine the trust level won’t be particularly high.