Hmmm, I see Billy Jones is spending too much time in the can.
Wired News: School RFID Plan Gets an F — This won’t work anyway. Kids will swap the chips, wear two, hang them off of dogs, crack them, soak them in pee. Give me a break, these are American kids!
Parents of elementary and middle school students in a small California town are protesting a tracking program their school recently launched, which requires students to wear identification badges embedded with radio frequency, or RFID, chips.
School superintendents struck a deal with a local maker of the technology last year to test the system to track attendance and weed out trespassers.
Dawn and Mike Cantrall’s daughter, a seventh-grader at Brittan Elementary School, poses at her Sutter, Calif., home, wearing the Radio Frequency Identification tag that the school asked her to wear. The Cantralls have filed a formal complaint against the school board, protesting the tag. The elementary school in this tiny rural school district has become an unlikely pioneer on the technology frontier by agreeing to test student I.D. cards designed to automatically take attendance.The badges use the same Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology that has been used to track livestock and store inventory _ and have outraged some parents with privacy concerns who say they were never consulted.
But students and parents, who weren’t told about the RFID chips until they complained, are upset over what they say are surreptitious tactics the school used to implement the program. They also question the ethics of a monetary deal the school made with the company to test and promote its product, using students as guinea pigs.
“This is not right for our kids,” said Michele Tatro, whose daughter received a badge. “I’m not willing for anybody to track me and I don’t think my children should be tracked, either.”
This means nothing.
What we saw as a shocking invasion of privacy 20-30 years ago is now accepted and commonplace. Just look at what happened after 9/11. CCTV is being put up everywhere.
Next time, the powers that be will market the RF technology with a “prettier” wrapper and offer a better excuse.
This is rediculous. While I’m sure there are parents who would want to track their kids this way (yuck) it’s absolutely inexcusable for a school to do it without consulting anyone. I’d be irate. In fact, I think I would probably protest outside the school.
But that’s just me.
Update:
http://news.com.com/Elementary+school+nixes+electronic+IDs/2100-1029_3-5581275.html
“The company, called InCom, put a kibosh on the project after some parents and a representative of the American Civil Liberties Union aired complaints at a school board meeting last week. Their protests became the subject of numerous media reports.”
and…
“Principal Earnie Graham said he regrets the demise of the program. ‘It’s a tremendous loss,’ Graham said. ‘We had the opportunity to be on the cutting edge.'”
Go talk to your pet radish, Earnie.