Soon we’ll use smartphones to trace our food on the blockchain. But there’s a catch: We’ll be traced, too.

Among the newest entrants to this supply-chain technology field is the Oslo, Norway-based Thin Film Electronics ASA—Thinfilm for short. In May, Thinfilm announced a new service for companies that will make the above “for instance” a reality. That kind of traceability may be good for business, but foodies interested in the provenance of their groceries may have to give up something in return: their privacy.

Founded in 2005, Thinfilm specializes in printed electronics. In the past few years, the company has launched several Near Field Communication (NFC) technology products. NFC is best known as the technology behind Apple Pay and other contactless payment systems, but Thinfilm has used the technology to create “smart tags” that can do things like monitor temperature or even track if and when a product has been opened, a technology they named OpenSense. The Spanish winery Barbadillo used Thinfilm’s tags for the special release of an ultra-luxury wine to commemorate the 125th anniversary of the birth of Manuel Barbadillo, a former president of the winery and son of its founder. Each of the 100 bottles of Amontillado Sherry had a label that—when tapped with a smartphone—could tell the drinker whether it had been opened previously. The bottles sold for £8,000 a pop.

Christian Delay, Thinfilm’s chief commercial officer, says that the company began looking into blockchain solutions at the end of last year. “With cryptocurrency being the big use-case around blockchain, we started to do a little bit of research around how we can basically leverage that with other types of use-cases,” Delay says. “And so we were looking a lot at food, food safety—we have a lot of spirits companies that we’re working with and they’re always worried about the supply chain, traceability, and the auditability of their supply chain.”

Thinfilm had already been working on product authentication, so supply-chain tracking wasn’t a huge leap. Plenty of other companies are also working on blockchain-based technology for product traceability, including corporate giants Walmart and IBM. Even the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) has backed a project that would track tuna from “bait to plate” using RFID tags and QR codes. And last year, Cargill tracked Thanksgiving turkeys on the blockchain; buyers could enter a code online to find out where the bird was raised, see pictures, and read a message from the farmer.

However, blockchain technology is not without controversy, even in the food industry. The MIT Technology Review defines it as a public, permanent, append-only distributed ledger, characteristics that make for a nearly immutable record—a tantalizing possibility for anyone concerned about food traceability, authenticity, and provenance. However, many so-called blockchain applications fall outside of that definition, so the term is increasingly meaningless. Thinfilm’s offering runs on the Ethereum platform, which supports both public and private, or permissions-based, blockchain applications. (Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute at UC Berkeley, has dismissed private blockchains as “a 20-year-old technology that somehow causes idiots to throw money at it.”) In a previous article, I investigated whether the technology was the panacea for food safety that some claim it to be.

Thinfilm believes its edge over competitors is in its smart tags, which executives say are more attractive—practically invisible—than QR codes, and can be used for marketing purposes as well as tracking and authentication.

“Thinfilm is a company that’s really focused on what we call building the internet of everything,” says Matt Bright, Thinfilm’s senior director of product and technical Marketing. “That has two components, one is the physical component and one is the digital component.”

In the IoE world, you can have ‘smart’ bottles and boxes and even bags of produce. Anything you can affix a sticker to could theoretically take on a digital life in addition to the physical. However, as soon as someone touches their phone to a ‘smart’ label, the company that put it there begins learning things, too. “Behind the scenes, the brand has an opportunity to really understand their customer and where and when their customers are engaging and develop insights around that,” Bright says. After working with Thinfilm, a craft gin company in Finland was able to identify countries “where they previously didn’t realize they had loyal customers,” for example. Thinfilm also worked with a nutritional shake company to help it learn what time of day people were “engaging” with their meal replacement shakes—information that had been completely “opaque” previously—and to send customers targeted messages at breakfast and lunchtime.

Bright says that the information gathered isn’t of the personally-identifiable kind, but does include “where in the general sense, where geographically, what time of day, what type of phone is connecting … the first time someone interacts, the second.” Moreover, if the tag prompts the person interacting with the product to do something else—to visit the website to learn more, for instance, the brand can collect additional data based on its own privacy policies, and prompt the person to volunteer additional information.

This can all sound fairly benign, especially because as a society we have become accustomed to companies collecting mountains of data about us at all times. Sometimes, we’re willing participants in this information marketplace: Over the course of one weekend in 2014, hundreds of people gave away sensitive tidbits like their address, driver’s license number, phone number, or the last four digits of their social security number in exchange for a free cookie from a performance artist named Risa Puno. However, if these digital-physical objects become the norm, it will become increasingly difficult to opt out.

“The IoE [Internet of Everything] extends well beyond traditional IoT [Internet of Things] boundaries to include the countless everyday, disposable items in the world,” Thinfilm CEO Dr. Davor Sutija wrote in IoT Central last year. “If the IoT is the solar system, then the IoE is every galaxy in the universe.”