Junkbusters Inc., based here, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (Epic, Wash.) hope to raise a consumer backlash against the plan and force Intel to scrap or redesign parts that are already sampling to major computer makers.

Jason Catlett, president and founder of Junkbusters, a group dedicated to consumer online privacy, said the call for a boycott came after private efforts to dissuade Intel from its security plans failed. "We started contacting Intel in December when we heard they would be using a processor serial number on the Pentium III, and we have not been able to persuade them that this is a bad idea for consumer privacy," said Catlett. "All the privacy advocates are against this."

Intel announced last week that it would embed a unique processor identification number and a random number generator in every Pentium III chip. The moves are just the beginning of Intel's plans for PC security; according to sources, future actions may include embedding digital certificates in flash chips that are part of upcoming core-logic chip sets and enhancing the Pentium instruction set to handle cryptographic tasks more easily.

Intel has said it would ship Pentium III chips with embedded ID numbers as a way to track and validate e-commerce transactions, although users could erase the numbers by running a software utility. That option has not mollified critics.

"Technical experts have told us this form of security is extremely weak and raises huge issues in privacy," said Catlett, whose group plans to reach out to other privacy and consumer-advocacy organizations, including Ralph Nader's Consumer Project of Technology, to generate a ground swell against the Pentium III plan.

"When people put public pressure on a big company like Intel, they can make things happen," Catlett said. "If you look at the Pentium floating-point bug incident, you see Intel wanted to decide what customers should get, but ultimately they were forced to back down."

A spokesman for Intel was unavailable at post time.