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Student RFID Tracking Suspended from School
ewhac writes "As reported earlier, a Sutter County, CA, elementary school unilaterally took the dubious step of forcing students, under penalty of disciplinary action, to wear RFID badges with their name, grade, and photo. The RFID tags were read by sensors placed above classroom and bathroom doors (though the latter had been shut off). The system was ostensibly used to automate attendance-keeping. Well, InCom Corp., the company that provided the tech free of charge to the school, has abruptly pulled out, without explanation. The school superintendant claimed to be, "disappointed," at the development. However, some parents are not mollified, and vow to permanently keep such people-tracking technologies out of their schools."
Due to high demand, this company has no other option but to pull out from this school charity.
But seriously, businesses rarely do things for free, and it's unlikely any one would offer free services in exchange of bad PR.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Hey, a similar scheme seemed to work well at Hogwart's.
Mischief managed.
J
Who moderates the meta-moderators?
It's good that the corp pulled out, but who's to say that the school district won't just find someone else to do the job? Surely someone around would do it just for the publicity now that it's such a big story.
They're children. Surely you want to track them. It's like the big complaints people have about having cameras in schools and people monitoring them. I tell ya, when I went to school we could have done with some of those cameras. Would have put a quick stop to all the anti-social lord-of-the-flies-esq behaviour that characterizes the school years of most kids.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I'm gonna cut class wear my badge for me.
Easy Hack
They probably figured out that kids are smarter than they are when it comes to technology. I'm sure if I was in a school that used RFID (and 10 years younger) I would be able to do some mischief using that system by cloning other peoples RFIDs, making it seem they were in multiple places at once, or letting people skip school and have dupe RFIDs stay in the library etc. For the majority of students I'm sure things would work as expected, but some of those "troubled teens" or "geeks" would have a wickedly fun time with it.
.. but I'd be disgusted if I had a child that a school wanted to monitor in this way. Is this really the way of the future? Get the kiddly-winks used to the idea of being constantly under watch nice and early? This kind of stuff worries me greatly. Are we going to be looking back at these episodes in five years wondering how we let things get so out of hand so quickly?
...Incom Corp. has announced that it is getting out of the RFID market entirely and will instead start producing starfighters.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Hopefully the school can't find another business to continue this crap. I wonder if any parents tried to keep their kids home from school or if there was some sort of opt-out program.
I, for one, will NOT be welcoming our RFID tagging principal overlords.
the company had stated why they pulled out, and stated that it was because they disagreed with the policy of tracking students everwhere, but truth is, they probably don't. That's what this company does. They probably pulled out because of bad publicity and wanting to avoid being named a defendant in a lawsuit. Great, the students aren't being tracked. Problem is, that leaves the door open for the situation to be repeated. Without the clear determent of a court ruling against this, or an open statement against this by the school/company, I can't help but wonder if this is a hollow victory.
www.voiceofthehive.com - Beekeeping and Honeybees for those who don't.
If I were a parent I would not want my child walking around with a RFID tag that could give potential assailants information they could use to manipulate my child. If they actually had the child's name, grade on the tag I am sure someone would figure out how to get it.
LIVE, Love, die
How soon until we're incorporating them into our clothes?
On the other hand though, this system would be rather easy to beat, given that you could ostensibly duplicate your RFID. "How did Jimmy go to the bathroom AND stay in class??". Or just place your tag on someone you know is going to your class and skipping.
Honestly, we need better teachers, not a better way to keep the crappy ones locked in.
I was interviewed a few days ago for my local paper with the hypothetical "what if YOUR school instituted RFID tags?" thrown at me. My reply was that in an age where reliance on technology is reaching a dangerous threshold, it'd be wiser to spend the money and resources on a new administrator or teacher instead of tagging students.
I know, at least at my school, we could stand to drop a few laptop computers in order to hire another body to patrol the halls. Sure, cameras and tags might catch everything but how practical is it when one man is responsible for catching every rule breaker?
O' course, the same article stated that my local school board wouldn't mind implementing the system for "safety and attendance." Where's the ACLU when you need them?
When they try to pull this next time, remember this handy formula:
RFID badge + 3 seconds in a microwave = piece of dead plastic.
Part of growing up is doing things wrong, and getting away with it. If kids couldn't get in a bit of trouble, if they didn't think they could break the rules just a LITTLE, we would have a generation perfectly suited for doing EXACTLY what they are told, by anyone in power.
Thats bad - very bad. Kids have to know they can break some rules and it's ok, and that people in power are not gods. If we all learned that leaving the library 10 minutes early for break is something we can't get away with, (see, word of god) we certainly wouldn't have the balls to tell our employer to F'off when they cut our lunchbreak down to 20 minutes.
Well, InCom Corp., the company that provided the tech free of charge to the school, has abruptly pulled out, without explanation.
Hrm, I wonder if their eventual explanation will involve words like "threats" and "guns".
Anyone have the webpage for Incom, Corp to check out their press releases?
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
However, some parents are not mollified, and vow to permanently keep such people-tracking technologies out of their schools
Hurrah!
"I'm disappointed; that's about all I can say at this point," Earnie Graham, the superintendent and principal of Brittan Elementary School in Sutter, said Tuesday night. "I think I let my staff down. Nobody on this campus knows every student."
How about starting by getting rid of this clown?
Here are some cool things I think can be done with RFID student tracking.
1) If a student was absent from class, automatically email the student the homework assignments for the day.
2) Log times when students enter and exit bathrooms, and share that data with the smoke alarm. Identify which students are potential druggies or smokers.
3) Add RFID scanners to the broom closets, and give teachers RFID badges too, to identify which teacher/students are performing fellatio
4) Use RFID to keep track of room usages for marketing purposes. For example, school clubs are generally hosted in various class rooms. Identifying popular club could lead to better ideas in fundraising events that students would be interested in.
So here we have a case in which 2 opposing sides -- the public, and the publicly-funded government school -- are fighting over a technology that a private company has been selling and promoting.
The people paying for the system get pissed off about it. Company responds by having nothing more to do with the situation -- in other words, the company, recognizing the threat to their own future profits, is catering to the demands of the public.
Meanwhile, the government, represented by the school principal, still wants to act against the will of the public which is funding it.
Please, somebody promote socialism to me, and tell me that the government responds better to public demands than businesses do, or heck, even that the govn't has the public's best interests in mind. LOL!
The sad thing is, that because of vested interests (read: public school teacher unions), the parents are going to continue paying for this system they oppose. Welcome to the wonders of socialism and government, generally.
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
"The school had already disabled the scanners above classroom doors and was not disciplining students who didn't wear the badges."
:)
Doesnt seem like that would produce much worthwhile info from the test now does it?
The privacy aspect sounds like kind of a non-issue at the moment
I say it didn't go far enough, instead of just RFID tags, full GPS should have been used, that way kids could be caught running in the halls, crowding round a toilet (that means someone is getting dunked), cutting in line for lunch and making-out in the bike shed (2 people should NOT be that close together). There would be a display with little dots showing their position at all times. You could even add sensors to this device to make sure its never removed, and a microphone and camera so you can patch in to any kid. Im certain the school would run like clockwork, no-one would be out-of-line, especially after the electric shock modules were installed.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
It's just too bad that the "controversy" detracts attention from the actual issue.
I'm a pretty strong privacy advocate, but I simply can't understand the parents' uproar over this. Teachers take attendance, and hall monitors watch hallways between periods. RFIDs take attendance and watch hallway movements. What's the difference?
I can certainly understand the objection to posting RFID sensors outside bathrooms - that serves no legitimate purpose - we don't care if little Johnny stayed on the can for 45 minutes 'cause he's constipated. And it just... seems... sketchy. So the school removed those. Problem solved.
I can also understand that there's an abuse potential, e.g., people getting hold of some kind of tracker and tracking your kid when he's out of school. So Johnny picks up his ID before he gets on the school bus, and he leaves it at the door when he gets home. For the most part, problem solved.
And, I can understand that it's hardly foolproof: Johnny can just carry Mark's ID around all day as evidence of attendance while Mark skips school. No system is perfect, especially not on the first iteration. People have to try them in the field in order to work out the kinks.
In summary - sure, there are concerns. They can be circumvented or simply ignored. In the absence of a solid complaint, I have to chalk this up to parents protesting primarily for attention-whore purposes... people will rah-rah for any cause if they think they'll get on TV because of it. :shakes head:
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
What if one of these little kids went missing? This would allow literal alarm bells to sound in such case. Tracking attendance in classrooms isn't an invasion of privacy (tracking toilet uses is) because a normal register system does exactly the same thing.
I like the idea. However used on older kids and expanded to the entire school ground might be a little bit of an invasion.
However, I guess that with RFID this law has to be completed in one way or another. For instance by having the RFID sensors signalled, and their purposes indicated by separate colors.
Signature omitted in order to save space. Thanks for your understanding.
I think this is a Good Thing. Not because kids don't need to be accountable for their whereabouts -- hell, they need more accountability -- but because if something like a tracking device is accepted at a young age, it will become more accepted as they grow into adults.
Next thing you know, they'll be putting GPS on our cars.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
It is about INSTILLING the idea that tracking people is ok in young minds. People will grow up thinking hey government, put a GPS receiver on my back, I have nothing to hide! Due to this our future governments will have absolute power over the people because as children they were taught it was ok.
Earnie Graham, the superintendent and principal of Brittan Elementary School in Sutter, said Tuesday night. "I think I let my staff down. Nobody on this campus knows every student."
Now we have identified the REAL problem, that they should be looking to a solution for. Or, of course, we could always try and get technology to think for us.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
but Americans need to make up their fucking minds. They don't want to spend gobs of time teaching and socializing their kids, but by God they'll be damned if someone else is gonna do it 'fer dem. What we're left with is millions of kids with no real direction in life. Their parents are too busy (often just getting by) to do much of anything, but the schools are pretty limited in what they can do. Take Japanese schools, where the school takes an active role in socializing children, for instance. If American parents don't want the school's raising their kids that fine, but they need to start doing it themselves, or just stop having them then.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I don't claim to know why the company withdrew, but here's a though:
:-) is guaranteed that all resident students are required to be enrolled in a meal plan. Students aren't happy, but the administration is pleased about the reduced cost to them.
Companies would be more willing to do things free of charge/at a reduced fee if they know that participation is guaranteed. On my campus, our food provider (who also feeds a local hospital
The school in the article would have a tough time guaranteeing that all students could be forced to participate in a tracking system as controversial as it is. And without global participation, the school's potential as a case study is greatly diminished, leaving hardly any financial return on what can only be a substantial investment.
Is the principle's name Ed Rooney? Cause I hear he IS a pedophile!
Let's see, go to the bathroom or other place where your presence won't be noticed, wrap the badge in aluminum foil, leave the campus to do what you wish. Return, go to the bathroom, remove the foil and resume your day.
Do the same but attend class.
Steal someone's badge, hid it in the bathroom, later on put it in the owners back pack.
And so on...
When confronted "know nothing". The system must be unreliable so the administrtation and parents can't trust it.
Nate
"Technology scares some people it's a fear of the unknown," parent Mary Brower told the newspaper before the meeting. "Any kind of new technology has the potential for misuse, but I feel confident the school is not going to misuse it."
There is no unknown here -- we know exactly what's going on. Get the kids used to being "tagged" -- so that everyone with access knows exactly where they are at all times. Once everyone is used to this kind of Big Brother handling, its easy enough to extend it into "the real world".
2 movies in recent memory depicted this "track every step" mentality as the normal operation of society are:
Minority Report -- in that movie, it has eyeball scanners at every corner, recording who is going where and when. The eyeball scanners were a little overkill -- all they needed were RFID tags.
and
Imposter -- in that movie, the RFID (which was much too large compared with what is available today) was implanted in everyone's back. Tracking stations were everywhere.
If you get into trouble, or if someone wants to know where you are, all they have to do is look you up.
If we don't put into place some very strong laws against this kind of Big Brother attitude, we'll forever be fighting people who try and try again to implement this kind of technology.
I'm sorry, but if people think "it won't happen in this country!", they are wrong. All the government has to do is allow something bad to happen, and in the name of "security", implement these tags. As the opening credits rolled in Imposter, you hear Gary Sinise talking about the beginning of a war with some Alien civilization that was apparently trying to take over the Earth (I'm paraphrasing here):
"Democracy, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, Civil Liberties... all gone in the blink of an eye after the first attack."
"To make a mistake is only human; to persist in a mistake is idiotic." Cicero
Actually, the courts have repetitively not seen it that way. The constitutionality has been tested on this issue, actually. Why?
You can't be trusted.
Wait! Hear me out!
Educators, along with parents and administrators are responsible for your well-being. You are not. You're still growing up; learning what it means to be human. Presumably, you don't have it all figured out, and may not be competent to do so. To help you along, there are limits on what you can do, as well as restrictions on your freedom to ensure that you're not doing anything you shouldn't be doing. Of course, basic human rights as defined in the constitution are still given to you.
When you grow up, you will be held fully accountable for your own actions, and the alienable rights previously protected by your parents on your behalf will be bestowed upon you.
School administrators are legally allowed to search your person, your locker, and any bags you may be carrying in order to ensure that you and your fellow students are safe. Further, they are allowed, forcably or otherwise, to confine you to particular locations (i.e. classrooms) while school is in session to ensure that you are being productive. They can hunt you down and bring you back to school, too. It is for this previous reason that they need to know where you are. Don't build a straw-man argument of it - not for ever second of every day - only while school is in session. It's their job.
Now as far as being just as much of a citizen...I don't know. Most citizens in good standing with society contribute to it or have done so in the past. Minors are generally not a part of that because they aren't ready or competent to do so.
Maybe you think that you are. There has to be some cutoff point, doesn't there? The Bill of Rights supposedly applies to all full citizens in good standing. If there isn't a cutoff point, then a four year old is a full citizen, and therefore entitled to the right to bear arms. That, to me, is a problem. I'm not even sure how many 18 year olds I'd trust with a gun, and I was one not too long ago.
I submit to you that a minor is less of a citizen in the legal, operation sense of the word. You may mean it some other way, but since we're talking about laws of citizenry, this is the definition that applies here.
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How long before someone lost their tag and then got reported for skipping a class?
How long before someone realised that by giving everyone's tag to one person, that everyone except that person could skip class?
There are probably other reasons as well, but those two struck me as the most obvious
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Worse yet, in an elementary school it should be pretty obvious when a student isn't there, since the student only has one teacher. The teacher takes attendance once and if a student disappears, reports it to the school administration. Anything else is a violation of privacy.
No one but the school and the student's guardians should have any knowledge of the student during the school day. Some students are involved as unwitting participants in custody battles, some are on special medications, some have medical problems that require special care. All of this should be confidential.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Forcing the students to wear the badges isn't an issue. The real problem would be a student hiding a badge somewhere deep in their book bag and registering an absent student as present.
I'm sure the faculty was smart enough to recognize this problem, thus they would have been performing manual attendance to audit the system. Plus every time a student forgot their ID, or a part of the system failed, or there's a power outage, they would have to resort back to the manual system.
IMO the heart of the problem is misapplying technology. Is taking attendance really such a time-consuming, difficult task to perform to require tens of thousands of dollars of equipment and the dispersal of hardware to every single student? A teacher should recognize their students, and should be cognizant of empty seats that are normally occupied.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Some of the feedback is interesting as well. Basically, the 'solution' doesn't solve any problems, and it's money that could be better spent on teachers and books. Yes, I know, this one was 'free', but it won't always be free.
g erprinting_1.html
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/01/fin
I think the teacher would notice if there was only one nerd kid in their class, duct taped to his chair and bound with 35 RFID tags.
I drank what? -- Socrates
As a parent I understand being upset reading the AP report that says my kid gets the same tech as my beef. The point everyone misses is this technology is already here and widely deployed in business and government. Ever wave your ID badge to get through the door? As the price keeps coming down on RFID/contactless smart cards it will trickle into schools. That can actually be a good thing if we get off /. and actually help schools write good policies on how this stuff should be deployed.
I remember back when I thought I'd never in my life has to pass through metal detector. Or be forced to stand there while someone rummages through my luggage. I even remember when I thought it was ridiculous that one could be forced to put on a seat belt. Silly me.
If I were a parent I would not want my child walking around with a RFID tag that could give potential assailants information they could use to manipulate my child. If they actually had the child's name, grade on the tag I am sure someone would figure out how to get it.
Nevermind the fact that most kids who are molested are molested by someone they know, like an unkle, grandfather, teacher, coach, or someone else who already knows their name, age, who their parents are, et cetera.
Anyway, this is silly since RFID's are just like a serial number. You need access to the school's database to see what serial number corresponds to which student.
My other first post is car post.
...graduated from HS in 2000.
When I was a senior, a tech company 'volunteered' to install a fingerprinting system for checking out books - the idea is that you have the librarian scan every book, you swipe your fingerprint in the reader, and you're off. It replaced good ol' barcode on the back of our (photo) student IDs (which we were supposed to carry always).
I happened to be in the library during the time that the system was launched, the suits there and all. I walked by, wanting to check a book out and they asked me whether I wanted to test drive this awesome new fingerprinting technology, and I said no to their face (the look was priceless). I graduated soon after and didn't look back, but I found out that all the fingerprints, in BMP form, were stored on an unpatched, networked windows PC in the library. (Oh, the fun I could have had; I could have delivered the fingerprints to the principal Veronica-Mars-style [flippantly] and gotten away with it too)
I don't have a problem with submitting my fingerprint as part of the moral character application to the bar, but for checking out a frigging research book at school?
Anyway, I also heard that they got rid of that later, because kids didn't want to use it. I'm all for phasing out shitty security-dangerous technology de facto.
In the school system that I am employed in, elementary school children have one teacher for all basic subjects. If they are struggling with a subject to the point of needing intervention they have another teacher for that, who teaches all Learning Disabled primary subjects, so that if they struggle with math, reading, and English they go to the same person for all three subjects or any combination therein. Some precocious children will attend a gifted program once per week for the entire day. LD and the gifted program are by definition mutually exclusive. The student has two teachers, tops, for regular classes where they make an unsupervised trek across campus at regular intervals. Students also have music, PE, and in upper "intermediate" elementary grades band or strings, but transitions between these frequently happen at regular intervals when some form of supervision is present in the halls. If a student doesn't show up to LD or band/strings, the teacher calls the regular classroom to find out if something's amiss, usually to find that the student is absent for the day.
The only advantage to this RFID system that I can see is that the initial attendance is taken by computer rather than by hand. The alternate classroom teachers still have to find out why a student isn't present if that student isn't there, the first teacher in the morning still has to figure out who is absent and who isn't, and the school still has to patrol the halls to ensure that nothing mischevious or malevolent is occurring.
Most teachers develop a seating arrangement to tell at a glance who isn't there. They don't have to spend ten minutes per day taking attendance, they glance while the kids are getting situated, mark a scantron bubblesheet appropriately, and leave it in the bin for the campus runner to collect. The only time that lenthy attendance is required is if the teacher doesn't have a seating arrangement, or if there is a substitute teacher, in which case the system is likely broken anyway.
The only place that I'd think that RFID interrogators would make sense is at entrances to the building, if the school is set up for that, as it'd let administration know if a student left early or entered late, assuming the badge was being worn and not encased in aluminium foil. Most schools here are not set up where that could be done though, so that wouldn't have much chance of being successful here.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I don't have much trust in the public school system as it is, and I admit that I am biased against them, but this would have been more than enough for me to remove my kids from the school and to seek alternatives.
Now, however, I do know what the principal would say, and what my wife would say: "This is good because no one could take our kids without us knowing who did it and when. Also, this could prevent another Columbine."
I think that both of those reasons are bunk, and I refuse to give creedence to them, but I do know that many parents believe them. It's a sad sad world we're living in.
Many times I'm inclined to believe that if I instill in my children a love of freedom, liberty, and a hackish spirit, they will either rule the Earth, or be burned at the stake as heretics.
Mark my words. In two years, this will be back, and people will be less resistant. Five years after that, it will become a nationally mandatory perogative.
Personal security erodes over time. Always. Period.
Get used to it.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
The college I was at five years ago used RFID-based ID cards. They weren't used for attendance because I was attending an evening class where attendance was optional anyway, but they did track entering and leaving the college grounds as well as entry into "sensitive" areas like the computer labs and presumably other places where there was expensive equipment. My sister did a course at the same college a couple of years back and told me that they'd extended the scheme to cover most sections of the college more granularly.
I didn't really care at the time. They knew the class was on and I was likely to be there anyway, so I don't mind them having it on record that I was (or, indeed, wasn't). Using it to track attendance is just silly, for the reasons you describe in your post; I don't really see the privacy problem in the school itself.
This only really becomes an issue if shops that are aimed at school-age kids start reading RFIDs on entry and thus have a unique identifier for each student because they are forced to carry their RFID tags around with them at all times. A similar concern exists with the new RFID-based train cards in London, England: shops around stations could track repeat customers who have the cards. I think the exploitation of this is some way off, though.
Wish I had mod points. I'm really getting sick and tired of this, mjedia fed, perception that all paedophiles are predatory loners hanging around in parks and children's play areas when they're not surfing the net downloading child porn or grooming kids in chatrooms. Most of them are parents or people who work with children. Probably the biggest child abuse case in recent years in the UK was Ian Huntley, a school caretaker (Janitor) at the school the children he killed attended, who lived with his girlfriend (I think she also worked at the school) and was well known for being really good with children to the extent that parents had no qualms about their children visiting him in his home. As I recall there was no mention of him even owning a PC let alone downloading child porn or frequenting chat rooms.
MOD PARENT UP
Stephen
"Don't write down to your readers, the only people less intelligent than you can't read" - Sign on Newspaper Office Wall
I'm a pretty strong privacy advocate, but I simply can't understand the parents' uproar over this. Teachers take attendance, and hall monitors watch hallways between periods. RFIDs take attendance and watch hallway movements. What's the difference?
Taking attendance is one thing, its quite another to know each and every step someone takes.
Do you really feel this is the best way to teach kids about freedom? They are free yet are tracked every second of every day? (I'm sure at first it would be just the school..then expanded to the city level...b/c after all, those kids that walk home, we need to make sure they make it there.) That everyone in this country has rights...oh, except for them of course, they have no rights.
I think it also sends the message that no one can be trusted, nor can the child be trusted either. Again, is that the kind of message you want to send to children? That everyone is a potental criminal, even themself?
If thats the world people want (or think it is now), then thats truely sad indeed.
That was in the 1980's - it's probably more chaotic today
You just think it is? Do you have any evidence to back up your feeling?
And look at it this way: Taking attendance takes time. 10 minutes a day * 200 school days = an extra 33 hours of class time per year.
In my school we had something called 'assigned seats.' The teacher knew which seats should be filled, and if they weren't it was trival to figure out who was missing. It never took more then a minute...10 is absurd.
As I moved up, less teachers had assigned seating. They actually got to know you and could remember if you were there or not. Giving us the freedom to pick where we sat demonstrated that the teacher believed we could make that decision in a responsible way (sitting close if your eyes were bad for example). Some learning is done by giving a choice to a person...it teaches people to think for themselves. Where you sit may be no big deal to you, but as a kid, it probably means a lot more.