Texas schools punish students who refuse to be tracked with microchips
rt.com
rt.com
I guess the ick factor comes down to how you feel about living in a surveillance society, and what you think forcing students to accept this type of continuous monitoring will do to them.
Students, in general, have fewer rights in a school, and are subject to search without due cause, so, from a legal perspective, not much leg to stand on.
I guess I'm kind of nonplussed about all this as I've carried an identification card/chip in every job I've worked at in Silicon Valley since 1996. The benefit has been 24x7 access to the office and all of it's equipments, servers, routers, whenever I wanted to go do work at the cost of the company knowing when I entered the building without tailgating someone (I've never worked at a company that required chipping out).
The RFID "distance" monitoring would be somewhat more annoying (if that's a function of this school system) - I'm not sure I'd be too keen on someone knowing my precise physical location on campus at all times, and being able to get a report on that - so I can see the resistance to that.
And I have always had extreme problems with this, particularly when it comes to things like random locker searches. If we don't allow children their rights in school, we are training them to give up their rights as adults. Cynics might say this is exactly what the goal is.
There's two problems here from my perspective. One is the invasion of privacy, which is just ridiculous. There's no justifiable reason for this Giving people the ability to track the location of another person at any time is wrong.
Second is that this "solution" is the wrong way to go about solving their problem. Their issue is that people aren't attending schools, and, thus, the school is losing money. If you were approached with a problem of "people aren't going to school" would your solution be "let's put RFID chips on them?" That's nowhere near an effective solution. This idea punishes both children who do attend and children who do not attend. An ideal solution wouldn't need to punish anyone, but raise attendance through positive and supportive means, such as offering incentives to attend school.
There was an educator from the US speaking at a conference I was at last week, and it honestly felt like stealing her passport and return tickets so she couldn't go home would be a kind thing to do.
A kind thing to do for her or for the students?
Hernandez said in an interview with Salon that subjecting herself to constant monitoring through an RFID chip is like being branded with the “mark of the beast” – a reference to the Bible's apocalyptic Book of Revelations.
...why should I give a hoot about people with such crackpot religious beliefs? We pander enough to this sort of nonsense already, and if the student finds it that objectionable maybe she should go to a private school instead. I am not a fan of the surveillance society, but given the staggeringly high truancy, dropout and incidence of gun crime on American high school campuses, trackable student IDs are low on the list of things to worry about.
Actually, if I were in Texas, I would absolutely take that approach. There are enough highly-conservative Christians in the state that this approach might garner some support against the evil government wanting to "mark our children".
A little investigation shows the story is real. http://www.aclutx.org/blog/?cat=21
Argue mark of the beast and you have a large portion of the state support you.
As a Texan, I think it is ridiculous to spend millions on a technology "solution" just to get more funding. Why would you want kids in class that don't want to be there? Money would be better spent on actually educating the kids that do attend than tracking kids that don't.
Seriously? People with religious beliefs you don't agree with aren't entitled to privacy? And if they disagree with the policies they should spend tens of thousands of dollars on a private school?
Also, which RFID technology are they using? The readers look like Octopus card readers. (Which is FeLiCa-based.) I doubt the claim that the cards are "always broadcasting" and that designing a practical remote RFID reader is much more difficult than "parents" imagine. But even the federal government put some privacy provisions into the RFID passports, so you'd think that the same courtesy could be extended to high school students too.
That would imply that the people providing the cards for the students think of them the same way the government is forced to think about its citizens.
Unfortunately, there are few organizations doing that forcing and the courts have often sided on the side of administrators to be able to treat them as much-less-than-citizens (which is a great way to teach citizenship in our country...).
All the other potential use-cases such as payment for lunch, logging onto computer systems, identification etc sounds useful. Tracking attendance sounds very misguided though. I didn't go to class a lot and whenever I did show up I caused a ruckus (yea yea, I know... but back then I thought it was hilarious). I don't think anyone's situation would have improved if somebody made me tag in and out of classrooms or globally punished me...
Bonus points if the scanning is pulled off with drones flying in public airspace.
Q.1 Could someone manufacture a copy of a WGA RFID reader and use it to intercept information transmitted by student RFID tags?
A.1 WGA has approached this as an issue of system architecture. By ensuring that the “smart” ID contains no information of interest to anyone, WGA has simultaneously removed any motive for cloning its reader and removed any problem if someone does clone its reader.
Surely that would involve making it not work.
This sounds like the root cause of the protests. Students and parents aren't complaining about the idea of just having to carry an ID card like a license. They are complaining about the RFID aspect of the card. They just have some superstitious fear of technology. There was a similar panic by crackpots when barcodes came out because barcodes were also thought to be the "Mark of the Beast"
“Using this information along with an RFID reader means a predator could use this information to determine if the student is at home and then track them wherever they go. These chips are always broadcasting so anyone with a reader can track them anywhere,”
Anyone want to bet those same students have Google Latitude, Twitter+geolocation, or some similar app on their smartphones?
The whole education sphere really needs a large revolution. I'm not sure of the answer, but I bet there is a startup waiting to happen here.
I seem to remember homeschooling being a rare thing when I was younger, but now it's at 2..9%(0). I heard a story the other day about a service that allows teachers to sell their curriculum (1), so there is definitely a sphere here that's available. I think that, although RT is horribly biased, the premise that _coercing_ children to stay in class isn't a net positive for society in any sense; instead, make education a good that children _want_, and we'll likely see the entire provision system improve.
Forcing consumption of the same good on people is surely going to be net negative for society, even if that good is deemed by society to be important.
--- (0) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling_in_the_United_Sta... (1) http://www.kansascity.com/2012/10/11/3862033/teachers-make-m...
There has been quite a bit of push-back to the use of RFID specifically. My college used magstripe cards. They're not quite as robust, but they do need physical contact to read the information. It seems like a fair trade-off considering that these are a) kids and b) they are legally required to be at school (and by extension, school policies carry some force of law).
So truancy is a part of lack of funding? There's something wrong with that picture. Texas needs to fix that issue before trying to act all fascist on their students.
Shitty ads- the ultimate market failure
Is that unlikely? Yes, very.
You know what I think is more unlikely? Someone actually sneaking into in a case where this ID card would keep them out. I can't imagine a single reason students couldn't just punch a number to do all of those things, and save the school system money that could be better spent on any number of things.
That will get the vast majority.
And yes, I totally get that RT has no problem pushing bullshit; I agree. Doesn't mean we should discount it completely. We could miss a chance to improve.
Students are devious. If you punch my ID monday, I'll punch yours Friday. (in a non-creepy way, of course)
This too shall pass.
The teachers will finally catch on when there is only one student in class, with 30 tags in his pocket :-)
Indeed, ID cards seem like they might make identification more difficult, as they would allow unscrupulous students to trade tags and make it seem that their friends were in places that they were not.
That's about a $10 roll call, even if you assume the children's time and education is valueless. (Assumption: you can complete it in only 10% of the instructional time per day, teachers have a fully loaded cost of approximately $100 an hour.) The school would, quite literally, spend thousands of dollars a day on roll calls.
When you choose an appropriate data structure, the efficient algorithm (distributed seat finding + visual glance) is simple to implement :-)