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US Report: Opposition to "Big Brother Inside" grows

Online privacy advocates emerged from a meeting with Intel officials angrier than ever about the chip maker's plans to put ID numbers on its Pentium III processors and may eventually demand a recall of the next-generation chips.
Written by Maria Seminerio, Contributor

Online privacy advocates emerged from a meeting with Intel officials angrier than ever about the chip maker's plans to put ID numbers on its Pentium III processors and may eventually demand a recall of the next-generation chips.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center, Privacy International, and anti-spam group Junkbusters on Thursday asked the Federal Trade Commission to induce Intel to recall the chips, and are renewing their call for a boycott of Intel and any PC maker shipping systems that include them.

"After meeting with Intel officials for two hours on January 28, the organisers of the boycott determined that the software patch announced by Intel Monday was not sufficient to eliminate the privacy problems of the (chip)," the groups said in a statement. They also called on Intel to disable the ID mechanism in future Pentium III chips.

The controversy erupted last week after Intel(Nasdaq:INTC) debuted the new chip and announced plans to include the ID mechanism, which company officials called a security measure for e-commerce. Intel said it had no plans to link the data from the chips to customers' names and addresses, but this did little to calm critics' fears about the technology they have dubbed "Big Brother Inside".

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