p2pnet view Freedom | P2P:- Back in 2004, kids at a school in Osaka, Japan, are to be tagged with Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) spy chips”, said p2pnet, going on the chips would be read by at school gates and other key locations to track their movements.

“The chips will be put onto kids’ schoolbags, name tags or clothing in one Wakayama prefecture school”, said a now defunct ZDNet post, adding, “Denmark’s Legoland introduced a similar scheme last month to stop young children going astray.”

A year later, the principal of the California school that forced its students to wear spy-chip ID cards around their necks said he was disappointed the project had collapsed, said p2pnet, continuing >>>

Pupils at the Brittan Elementary School in Sutter near Yuba City had RFID (Radion Frequency Identification) badges that held their names, photos, grades, school names, class year and a four-digit school ID number.

A wireless transmitter transmitted the ID number to a teacher’s handheld computer when each child passed under an antenna above a classroom door.

However, Sutter-based technology company InCom Corp that developed the technology pulled out, says the San Francisco Chronicle.

“I’m disappointed; that’s about all I can say at this point,” it has Earnie Graham, the superintendent and principal saying. “I think I let my staff down. Nobody on this campus knows every student.”

But, “I’m not convinced it’s over,” parent Dawn Cantrall, who filed a complaint with the American Civil Liberties Union, told the (Marysville) Appeal-Democrat, is quoted as saying.

“I’m happy for now that kids are not being tagged, but I’m still fighting to keep it out of our school system”, said Cantrall.

“It has to stop here.”

But it hasn’t.

“Scary news from California’s Contra Costa County”, says Rebecca Jeschke (right) in Deep Links.

School officials there have “reportedly decided to track some preschoolers with RFID chips, thanks to a federal grant supplying the funding”, she says, going on >>>

According to a story from the Associated Press, the students will wear a jersey at school that has the RFID tag attached. The tag will track the children’s movements and collect other data, like if the child has eaten or not. According to a Contra Costa County official, this is a cost-savings move, as teachers used to have to manually keep track of a child’s attendance and meal schedule.

But of course, an RFID chip allows for far more than that minimal record-keeping. Instead, it provides the potential for nearly constant monitoring of a child’s physical location. If readings are taken often enough, you could create an extraordinarily detailed portrait of a child’s school day — one that’s easy to imagine being misused, particularly as the chips substitute for direct adult monitoring and judgment.

If RFID records show a child moving around a lot, could she be tagged as hyper-active? If he doesn’t move around a lot, could he get a reputation for laziness?

How long will this data and the conclusions rightly or wrongly drawn from it be stored in these children’s school records? Can parents opt-out of this invasive tracking?

How many other federal grants are underwriting programs like these?

“These are questions that desperately need answers”, says Deep Links, adding:

“California is in the middle of a terrible budget crunch, but the solution is not federally funded surveillance of children who are too young to understand the implications.”

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p2pnet – Japan school gets spy chips, July 14, 2004
p2pnet- CA school drops spy-chip ID, February 17, 2005
Deep Links – Reading, Writing, and RFID Chips: A Scary Back-to-School Future in California

August, 2010

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 2nd, 2010 at 10:19 am and is filed under Freedom, P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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