Dr. Katherine Albrecht - CASPIAN Founder
Katherine Albrecht, Ed.D.
(Pronounced ALL-breckt)
Founder and Director, CASPIAN Consumer Advocacy
(Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering)
Doctorate in Education, Harvard University
telephone
877-287-5854
e-mail kma(at/@)spychips.com
(click here for a French-translated version)
Dr. Katherine Albrecht is the director of CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering), an organization she founded in 1999 to advocate free-market, consumer-based solutions to the problem of retail privacy invasion.
Katherine is widely recognized as one of the world's leading experts on consumer privacy. She regularly speaks on the consumer privacy and civil liberties impacts of new technologies, with an emphasis on RFID and retail issues. She has testified on RFID technology before the Federal Trade Commission, state legislatures, the European Commission, and the Federal Reserve Bank, and she has given over a thousand television, radio and print interviews to news outlets all over the world. Her efforts have been featured on CNN, NPR, the CBS Evening News, Business Week, and the London Times, to name just a few.
Executive Technology Magazine has called Katherine "perhaps the country's single most vocal privacy advocate" and Wired magazine calls her the "Erin Brockovich" of RFID". Her success exposing corporate misdeeds has earned her accolades from Advertising Age and Business Week and caused pundits to label her a PR genius.
Katherine is co-author of "Spychips: How Major Corporations Plan to Track your Every Move with RFID." Two days prior to its release, Spychips flew the top of the Amazon bestseller charts, hitting number one as a "Mover & Shaker," making its way to the top-ten nonfiction bestseller list, and spending weeks as a Current Events bestseller. Within its first four weeks alone, the book sold thousands of copies, and the journalistic and privacy communities called it "brilliantly written," "stunningly powerful," and "scathing." In a nod to the book's focus on freedom, Spychips was awarded the prestigious Lysander Spooner Award for Advancing the Literature of Liberty and named "the best book on liberty" for 2005.
Katherine is a highly sought-after public speaker, informing audiences across Europe and North America with her well-researched, compelling, and often chilling accounts of how retail surveillance technology threatens our privacy. She is a frequent guest on radio programs worldwide, logging over 500 hours of airtime with her proven ability to entertain an audience and generate listener calls.
Katherine graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration with a concentration in International Marketing. She holds a Doctorate in Education from Harvard University with a research focus in consumer education, privacy and psychology.