Published by Anonymous on 10/24/2003 05:30:00 PM
Excerpted from a scary 1984-ish Wired article about an inner-city charter school which tracks kids' school attendence (soon everything else) with RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) chips.
Reading, Writing, and RFID
Gary Stillman, the director of a small K-8 charter school in Buffalo, New York, is an RFID believer.
While privacy advocates fret that the embedded microchips will be used to track people surreptitiously, Stillman said he believes that RFID tags will make his inner city school safer and more efficient.
Stillman has gone whole-hog for radio-frequency technology, which his year-old Enterprise Charter School started using last month to record the time of day students arrive in the morning. In the next months, he plans to use RFID to track library loans, disciplinary records, cafeteria purchases and visits to the nurse's office. Eventually he'd like to expand the system to track students' punctuality (or lack thereof) for every class and to verify the time they get on and off school buses.
"That way, we could confirm that Johnny Jones got off at Oak and Hurtle at 3:22," Stillman said. "All this relates to safety and keeping track of kids.... Eventually it will become a monitoring tool for us."
"(It's) the same as swiping a mag-strip card for access control, or presenting a photo ID badge to a security guard, both of which are commonplace occurrences," Straitiff said.
Additionally, Stillman said that the RFID-linked databases would require separate passwords to access students' disciplinary, attendance, health, library and cafeteria records.
"It's as private as anything else can be when your information is stored on a server," he said.
Reading, Writing, and RFID
Gary Stillman, the director of a small K-8 charter school in Buffalo, New York, is an RFID believer.
While privacy advocates fret that the embedded microchips will be used to track people surreptitiously, Stillman said he believes that RFID tags will make his inner city school safer and more efficient.
Stillman has gone whole-hog for radio-frequency technology, which his year-old Enterprise Charter School started using last month to record the time of day students arrive in the morning. In the next months, he plans to use RFID to track library loans, disciplinary records, cafeteria purchases and visits to the nurse's office. Eventually he'd like to expand the system to track students' punctuality (or lack thereof) for every class and to verify the time they get on and off school buses.
"That way, we could confirm that Johnny Jones got off at Oak and Hurtle at 3:22," Stillman said. "All this relates to safety and keeping track of kids.... Eventually it will become a monitoring tool for us."
"(It's) the same as swiping a mag-strip card for access control, or presenting a photo ID badge to a security guard, both of which are commonplace occurrences," Straitiff said.
Additionally, Stillman said that the RFID-linked databases would require separate passwords to access students' disciplinary, attendance, health, library and cafeteria records.
"It's as private as anything else can be when your information is stored on a server," he said.