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Reading, Writing, RFID
supabeast! writes "Wired has a story about a public charter school in Buffalo that now tracks student attendence with mandatory RFID tags. The school's director said 'All this relates to safety and keeping track of kids...Eventually it will become a monitoring tool for us..' In the future the system will expand to '...track library loans, disciplinary records, cafeteria purchases and visits to the nurse's office...punctuality...and to verify the time [students] get on and off school buses.' I think that we can all stop calling the privacy advocates paranoid now."
My High School had a no hat policy, so I guess tinfoil wouldn't even be an option!
Workaround: "Hey Sandy, if you carry my tag to English today, I'll carry yours on Thursday."
:)
Thus: false sense of security.
-l
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Isn't it amazing that schools always seem to have money for this crap and yet cannot seem to educate literate graduates or provide pencils, books and paper for their students?
They've got endless budgets for in-classroom cameras, RFID name badges and seminars about file-sharing but never enough for field trips, athletic equipment or buses.
It just never seems to improve.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
For example, we could remotely help them with their homework, automatically remove them from dangerous situations, make them do funny dances and speak with foreign accents, as well as invade neighboring countries, all with the push of a button.
Here's to the future.
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
I guess because if you have technology that prevents you technologically from being irresponsible, you can never learn how to be responsible?
What happens when they get out? "Wicked, I'm not being tracked anymore! I can do whatever I want to do, consequence free!"
I have strong feelings about technology 'absolving' humans from learning about responsibility and accoutability, and the merits of making the right choice when you're not forced at RFID-tag-point to do so.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Sweet Zombie Jesus, this is terrifying. Kids growing up in a world where their every move is in effect monitored, as are all objects around them. If you're old enough to know better, you can at least fight the concept. But to grow up in the middle of it as if it were natural... disgusting. We're going to be raising children who are either soulless or, in the case of those who can't deal with it, psychotic. What a truly hateful development. Somewhere Huxley and Orwell are weeping. And yes, I'm aware Orwell wasn't trying to predict the future but was in fact commenting on totalitarian regimes in his lifetime. He's still weeping.
Now, whether or not kids should be tracked is a different debate. I don't think there's any doubt that the idea is good on that level. What parent wouldn't feel more secure leaving their kids at school with this in place? Of course it's smart.
But becoming accustomed to being tracked everywhere, anytime, all the time is something that children shouldn't have to grow up blindly accepting.
No, they WON'T! With this kind of surveilance you are teaching them that it's ok to have your privacy violated. They will grow up to be real wimps and give away all the freedoms that so many have died to obtain and keep. I have kids myself and never have, never will, subject them to this. I just teach them right from wrong, then TRUST them to follow through, they have NEVER let me down, and many parents commend me and my wife for bringing up such great kids. We Americans have been brainwashed into thinking that someone else always needs to take care of us and stick their nose in our business, this is patently childish; I guess many of us never really grow up.
It should scare the HELL out of everyone to have this going on. It starts small with things you really don't object to because on the surface they seem to help... so you give up a little freedom for security, then a little more, then a little more, until something happens that you think is going too far then you find out you no longer have a choice in the matter because you gave up your right to decide bit by bit. We all need to take responsibility on our OWN shoulders, grow up and get everyone elses noses the hell out of our business. People in the Soviet Union are more free than we are! But if you like being under constant scrutiny you can always move to China.
Paranoia was conceived to make you feel that your reasonable suspicions are unreasonable and unwarranted.
So lets tell Mr Stillman and all the teachers and secretaries there that they have to wear the tags as well so the PARENTS can watch them. I want to know just how "punctual" they are and what their attendance is.
Think their tone will change?
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I take no responsibility for any spelling mistakes in the above post.
"School" as we know it was designed to train the children of subsistence farmers to be effective factory workers. Rather than getting up at dawn, working with their families at their own pace, and doing whatever it was subsistence farmers did for fun, the Industrial age required workers trained to wake up at the same time every day, respond to stimuli such as whistles ordering the start and end of the working day, and so on. A few generations of such schooling later, and it's become our cultural norm. At the time of the Industrial Revolution, the notion of schooling was nothing short of, well, revolutionary.
Fast-forward to today. We have Industrial-era schooling in an Security-era economy. Your post ("I don't see why kids should have it any better") is evidence of this - you seem to think that having the Panopticon in the workplace and government is a Bad Thing. And yet, you're learning; you're adapting, as evidenced in your next paragraph:
> When you have kids you'll take whatever steps are necessary to protect them. If that means they have to live without much privacy for 18 or so years of their life then so be it! They have approx. 70 more to have all the privacy they want.
Actually, they won't. But you're correct that the RFID-chipping of kids is a Good Thing. Just as you know no limits when it comes to keeping track track them for their protection, your employer and government has an interest in your well-being. Granted, the interest isn't as overarching as the relationship between parent and child; more like rancher and cattle. But show me a rancher who doesn't take care of his cattle, and I'll show you a rancher who's out of business in a year.
But back to school. We moved from the agricultural age to the industrial age, and we designed schools to raise children who would take us there. We now stand at the transitional generation from the industrial age to the security age. By getting the kids accustomed to the Panopticon at an early age, they'll graduate from school better-prepared to take part in the security society.
300 years ago, old farmers probably hated having to get up at oh-dark-hundred to go to the factory as much as you seem to dislike your zero-privacy expectation at work.
As a result of our transition from an agricultural society to an industrial society, we have a wide range of consumer goods ranging from broadband pr0n to advances in medical treatment that have doubled the human lifespan and nearly tripled the useful part of the human lifespan.
Today, you and I grumble, and your kids might even chafe (initially) at being chipped. Within a generation or so, our presecurity culture will also be abandoned, and 300 years from now, our descendants will look on us and our presecuity culture as just as primitive as we now imagine our preindustrial subsistence-farming ancestors.