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Using RFID and Wi-Fi to Track Students
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC reports on a proposal to use RFID and wi-fi to track students wherever they go on campus: 'Battery-powered RFID tags are placed on an asset and they communicate with at least three wireless access points inside the network to triangulate a location.' At The Wireless Event in London, 'Marcus Birkl, head of wireless at Siemens, said location tracking of assets or people was one of the biggest incentives for companies, hospitals and education institutions to roll out wi-fi networks.' The article points out that integration of RFID and wi-fi raises the possibility that RFID can be used for remote surveillance."
Seriously though, I can't remember Slashdot ever linking directly to the printable page. I wish they'd do it more often.
Angelo Lamme, from Motorola, said tracking students on a campus could help during a fire or an emergency.
And how exactly are you going to access the data if the school is on fire? I cannot think of any legitimate use for this.
for some geek student to hack in and stalk a cute target.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Once each student is equipped with a WiFi tag do theyr really imagine that only the school will have this info. Forget the overzealous parent that wants 24/7 monitoring. What about the creepy stalker who wants to follow the girl of his dreams? What about the kidnapper who wants to watch his target?
Forget claims about 'encryption' (it's a unique ID who cares what it "means") or limitations on distance, readers have already shown success at distances far beyond those claimed.
What about the paedophile who wants to track that one kid...
This was the basis of an episode of Numb3rs season 2, where they reverse-calculated the movements of several gunmen in a school.
Thus rendering Harry's invisibility cloak useless.
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no practical reason for this whatsoever.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
"Battery-powered RFID tags are placed on an asset and they communicate with at least three wireless access points inside the network to triangulate a location."
So students are now assets?
And college kids will bleat all the way through WiFi checkpoints.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Identify the RFID codes of all the really great-looking college girls, and superimpose these positions on a map of the campus. The goal is to identify and continuously occupy the point on campus where you are equidistant from all significant beauty on the grounds.
This makes sense for hospitals and that's about it. Everywhere else it's a liability.
Seriously, on students? What would be the cost of such a thing? Surely a school could spend money on far more productive endeavors. Sure, it could help in an emergency, but I would rather possibly die in a fire then have to lug around some big device all day. That being said, how big are these things? What would be the consequence of not carrying one around?
Now in expensive hospital machinery, I can understand.
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Students don't have assets. They'll just end up tracking their parents. Which could actually be cool because you'll have time to put the bong away during surprise visits.
Angelo Lamme, from Motorola, said tracking students on a campus could help during a fire or an emergency.
Sure; during a fire or emergency sounds like a great time to be snooping around to see where particular students are. Fire alarms seem to be much more helpful than tracking techniques for real emergencies; surveillance technology is much more likely to be used during times of "business as usual," and generally not during times when most people are running around screaming for their lives.
BR>Meanwhile, I can see this sort of technology having great applications during "business as usual" times for creepy security guards who want to see what that hot blonde chick does after her chemistry class... Especially for the peeping tom or stalker types who want to make sure they're walking by the right dorm room window when she gets out of the shower.
How long before this such a device will be implanted into our brain, allowing the government to track our move. And it will all be in the name of "stopping the terrorists."
"Now I'm seriously serious!" - Serious Sam
What is the saying? "Give me safety or give me death!" Who needs freedom when you have someone in a position of authority telling you where you can and cannot go, what you can and cannot say, or what you can and cannot do. If it isn't broken, don't fix it. Do not assume there is a problem, i.e. safety of students, when there isn't.
I think it was a typo. They meant they want to track student asses. You know, the jackasses who get drunk and trash parts of the campus or the ones who think "Animal House" was a video student manual on how to act when at college.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
Well there goes the enviable job of hall monitor.
While this technology might have it's uses in some of our more unruly schools. Only the well funded schools will ever be able to afford it.
What school which has that many uncontrollable students is going to be able to afford it.
The money would be more likely spent hiring security guards, and teacher's aides.
that there are typically 5 people sitting in the same chair at Monday morning 8:00 a.m. Calculus classes....
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So I am gathering that the "brains" on these tags can handle all the handshaking involved with an 802.11(b/g/n) link, including whatever parts of TCP/IP are needed to pass the signal strength data back to the servers? Sounds to me that this is a little bit more involved than just an RFID tag, more like a simple Wi-Fi enabled device that connnects and reports back signal strengths/timing etc. A bit more complex than a chip tied to a small antenna patch (and battery for transmit signal amplification).
How would you make sure that every student has his tag on him at all times? For this to work, the tag can't be larger than a credit card. It'd presumably be integrated with the student ID. Even then, what's to prevent the student from carrying the card in a tin foil wallet? And what if the battery runs out?
Apart from the privacy problems, I'd say this is one impractical proposal, at least for tracking people.
For tracking equipment in a hospital, it might work. Even then, in most wards the nurses will know where they left the equipment, and in a hectic environment like the ER nobody's going to have the patience to go to a computer and look up Asset X's location.
Adding to your thought: Unless the device is virtually inseperable from the student, what's to say that it isn't left behind during evacuation, or conversely, the student who doesn't evacuate happened to leave their backpack containing it back in their dorm room for the day?
Implant it or strap it to their ankle...otherwise the error rate in tracking the actual location of the individual becomes pretty high.
Who's going to pay for this? What is the real cost/risk/benefit analysis?
"Who's upsetting my dots?? Are you messing with my dots?!?"
Something like this might be useful for monitoring criminals/sex offenders that are on parole, in lieu of GPS. But you're right. It's really only good for someone who has lost their normal level of privacy, either to infirmity or criminal reasons.
If I was the evil overlord incharge of that school district with the money to implement this plan, I'd start first with each schools' library books and then to all the school books. (The school books are assigned to a student, whose parents are responsible for replacement if the books are lost/damaged so you get 5-7 RFID tags depending on how many school owned books are assigned to each student.) After that, I'd make it a little change in the school ID cards that are redone at the beginning of each school year. I could have all the ID cards with passive RFID chips without informing anyone until my evil parenting OS backend webserver was ready to handle all the parents and slashdotters that will be watching their dots move around.
For student privacy/safety, I'd not make it a "public" website. You'd have to have a Parent ID/login before you could look up where your kid has been all day and maybe associated dots/students around them. The teachers and maybe staff would have access, but the general public should only see lots of dots (without ID numbers) moving around just cause it looks neat.
After 2-3 generations of this "safely" happening, then I'd try to expand the program to all schools, or the entire state's new DLs.
Well, if I were an evil overlord with any power...
wut
I went to a seminar a few years ago that had some head from Cisco speaking. He was showing off their latest wireless system (it was some cool stuff!) and one of the features it had was this RFID location system. He brought up an app that had a map of a floor of one of the buildings in their campus. He showed us, in live time, as one of the employees dot's left their office and walked to the bathroom. From half the country away he could see where everyone was. The location tag I believe was built into their access keys, so they were pretty much always on them.
Great technology for a hospital, prison, and maybe a handful of other specific situations. But a school? It was scary enough seeing it in action for an office building.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Just a guess, since I didn't RTFA, but maybe the RFID scanner would be part of the WiFi hotspot.
Scanner detects tag, reports to server thru WiFi.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
The government could implant an rfid device in every one of its citizens, beginning at birth, and then construct a tracking infrastructure and database system that would let them see the physical location of every person in real time and the historical location by consulting the database. Imagine what this would mean:
1) Crime would be ended since, after any crime, the police would only have to log onto the computer to see who was present at the moment the crime was comitted.
2) Population control would be easy since whenever a boy dot was in very close proximity, say less than 1 inche, to a girl dot, a little pink heart could start flashing on the screen and the government watchperson could administer a little remote-controlled voltage zap to the two parties to ruin the amore of the moment.
3) Transportation problems...a thing of the past...since you would need a permit to commute over road xyz which would specify your permitted travel times.
4) Money? Who would need it? Your id tag would just be automatically billed for whatever. If you didn't pay...you could just be confined to whereever and monitored for compliance. No need for prisons, either, for anyone but the most dangerous.
5) Adultery, stalking, speeding, trespassing, etc. are examples of a few of the many crimes that would be obsoleted due to their degree of difficulty and the ease with which transgressors would be identified.
Okay, maybe we are not quite ready for all of this yet, at least the democrats, but the republicans and Attorney General Gonzales would be down with it, no doubt. Also, what about North Korea, Venezueala, Cuba, China, or Saudi Arabia? They would be fine with this stuff, no doubt. And we all will be eventually, like it or not.
They can tag me like some kind of animal when I'm dead.
If these work anything like the scanners at the exits of the library, this'll probably cause our headphones to emit a ring tone, so loud it renders me still "picking at my ears" for hours afterwards. >_>
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Instead, instal micro cell sites and track using their cell phones. They have a reason to take their cell phone with them (not just a useless tracking tag), you don't have the roll out cost of issuing these tags, and to make this work, you're going to have to put up a heckuva lot of new Wi-Fi APs to do any sort of triangulation, anyway. Why not use cell phone signals on maybe several dozen micro cell sites on campus instead? As a bonus, handled call volume increases and you can get the cell companies to help subsidize the cost...and manage the user database, too.
Then again, why in hell do we really need to monitor student movement so closely in the first place?
I thought the UK already had camera's everywhere.....
n ews.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6108496.stm
http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/pagetools/print/
How about a reverse fake ap MAC address generator/packet injector whereas instead of Fake AP's, fake MAC addresses were injected into the wifi routers...... Wait no... One million more students detected may make them call in the military...
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Will we ever fight back? Or will we have absolutely no freedom if we are employed or are enrolled in private colleges? What if its a state school?
Not bad.
Mischief managed
I was born in 1966. A couple of big things were different then:
Recently we got a mailing from our kids' principal about walking to and from school. It was survey about how many kids walked, but it came with a letter from the principal basically implying that any parent who let their kids walk was a bad parent, because it was so unsafe. This is the same principal who has instituted rules about which direction the kids can swing on the playground swings. The previous principal organized a bike rodeo for kids to improve their skills on bikes, and kids who worked on their skills, and demonstrated them at the bike rodeo, got the privilege of using the bike racks. My older kid passed, but then the new principal came in, and the whole idea suddenly went away. I do not know of any kid at this school who has ever gotten hurt walking or cycling to or from school. I do know of one kid who got hit by a car after school, because her parents were sitting, double-parked, in their air-conditioned SUV on the other side of the street, beckoning her to run across the street and get in.
When I was a kid, I started walking to the babysitter's house after school when I was in kindergarten. Nobody thought that was unusual. This was in an urban environment (Albany, CA). I learned to look both ways before crossing the street, and to cross on the green. No biggie.
Today, it seems like most affluent kids' existence consists of being shuttled back and forth in their mom's SUV from one air-conditioned building to another. And we wonder why the obesity epidemic is happening.
Psychologically, people like to have the illusion of control. For instance, studies have shown that drivers consistently overestimate their own ability to deal with an emergency. When it comes to kids, parents want to have the illusion of safety that comes from having their kid carry a cell phone all the time. Radio-tracking your kids is just the latest instance of this kind of mass hysteria.
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Young Steve Gates had for a long time had enough. The corporate feudal state commandeered by larcenous sycophants crying crocodile tears for obsolete religions. The deserted wasteland of a city drenched in crime and hatred. The constant exhaust, litter everywhere, and his boring 2nd, 4th, 5th, and 7th period classes, each of which was designed to teach the low-intelligence worker of the future how to sit down and shut up.
Worst of all was that his fellow hallway sheep did not seem to mind or even notice. Bored in class, text your friends about clothes and hair. Society in the hands of vicious predators, smoke some dope or sniff paint. It was them he minded most of all, the people through whose inattention and selfishness the elites ruled. They were the ones who perpetuated this mess in which he had to live, miserable and alone.
Today, they were going to face that fact. Steve Gates was going to murder them all.
He was ready for the shame, the guilt, and the inevitable end with a pistol in his mouth popping his brains on the wall as the SWAT team made its final sweaty charge into the barricaded classroom three deep in slumped bodies. He knew it would hurt, and that every moment of it would be agony, for each bullet he put into a fool would be another nail in his coffin. After the first, it gets easy, he thought, checking the slide on his Glock.
Four minutes later the auditorium erupted in confusion as the first student to die met a hollowpoint to the face, her sinuses and brain and eyes meshing in an improbably contorted mess that reminded Steve of a tomato funnel cake, if such a thing existed. He kept the rhythm, pacing himself as if he were in an aerobics class in hell, the entire thing resembling a dance. Step into the room, step to the side, shoot a teacher, then drop anyone who rose, then shoot the cowering ones who bleated out prayers and begged. Steve laughed and reloaded. Next classroom. At the end of each hall, the emergency door he had epoxied together rattled with the thrusts of fists infantile in their ineffectiveness, and the squeals of people simultaneously excited by a change in their boring lives and terrified by impending death.
Principal Gerald H. Giuliani wasted no time. He bolted the door in the face of a student, and swept his staff over to see the computer they called, simply, "The Big Board." On it was a graphical display of all the students in the school, tracked by their RFID tags. They looked like dots in a game of Pac-Man... pickups in a game of Doom... bacteria under the microscope wielded by a cruel child. He had to do something.
"Thank God for those RFIDs," said Dana Wilson, the secretary. "We can see where all the kids are, and get them away from this insane maniac. He even said our classes were boring, so he's obviously lost his mind. You see, only crazy people don't like the progress we've made here in adapting our classes so that everyone can fit in... no one feels like the work is beyond them, and we all get gold stars at the end of each day."
Giuliani shot her a look. The nitwit probably thought this was more than a job, he mused, and reached for the microphone. "He's in Hallway C, so if we get them to the cafeteria, we can send the SWAT team in there," he said, keying the microphone. And keying, waiting for the "plik" that came over the speakers when he fired it up.
Sarah Howard backed away. Her locker, once a bright pink and green, was now spattered in the blood of her first ever honest-to-god boyfriend, Jim Dozer. It looked like super-strawberry yoghurt covering her books... but she knew it was the least used part of Jim's body, the brain. A heave throttled deep within her. He had been no prize, but he was her first sexual conquest and real boyfriend, so she knew she would always treasure that status that conferred upon her among others. But that was yesterday, and today was hell.
"Attention all students!" the thick voice split through the loudspeakers. Giuliani really sounded worked up, almost squeaky. "There's a madman l
technical writing / development
Hudson: We've got multiple signals... uh, front and behind... reading's off the chart!
Vasquez: There's nothing here. You're just reading us, there's nothing!
Hudson: Look there's something moving in here and it ain't us! Reading's off the charts man! They're all around us man! What the hell?
Dietrich: Maybe they don't show up on infra red at all -
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
Nano technology is the only way they will keep high school students "tagged".
Soon to opt out of technology will mean a real sacrifice, say your right arm from the elbow up.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Yes. When the fire is no where near the WiFi equipment, all fire will allow WiFi to continue working. I would say 'make sure' is too strong of words. But I have yet to see a fire that is no where near WiFi equipment, interfere with said equipment.
...I go to the University of Warwick, and we have this already. There are RFID chips in our library cards which we have to use to go into the library, take out books, the learning grid (its a 24/7 mini-library and work area that they've packed full of buzz-words...) or sports center. They are also used to give variable access to departmental buildings when they are not "open", as it were. For example if you are a statistics student you can get into that departments building at 3 in the morning but you can't get into social sciences.
These are passive and so give me little reason to be worried (although I do have a sheet of metal in my wallet anyway, just in case). They also provide pretty much all the benefits of an active chip without as much of a feeling that they are doing some weird prying into your life.
Having said that this system didn't stop my friend from having £180 charged to him because someone stole his library card and took out 10 books on it... having active cards could just make that problem far worse -
Security: "It seems the fire was started by you, Scott"
Scott: "But I was at home on my own all night"
Security: "Tell it to the police, and in the mean time you've been kicked out - read the University ToS, we can kick you out whenever for whatever reason"
Scott: "Bugger..."
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
"Dude, are you unscannable?!"
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
Damn, you guys know how to spin YRO articles to make everything sound apocalyptic and awful. What exactly do you think this technology is meant to be used for? Do you think that university administrators have such a vested interest in vending machine habits and profit maximization that they want to data mine their own students? Do you think they really care when and how often you go to the bathroom?
Slashdot seems to have missed the boat on the notion of Ubiquitous Computing.
Wikipedia article
CMU's Aura Project
UbiComp 2007
http://jesuspancakes.net/context.htm - A little summary paper I wrote about the field this past semester summarizing a few experimental trials of context-aware systems identical to the one described in this article.
This isn't technology designed to control and monitor people - this is technology intended to make people's lives better, provide interesting new services, utilize all the miniature computers that we carry around to make our lives easier.
I don't trust the damn government any more than the rest of you, but you don't have to implant RFID into your skin in order to try these out - most technologies are based on location badges, Wi-Fi triangulation with PDAs, and cell phone GPS. Guess what - you can turn them off, too!
So yes, blah blah, data mining, government spying, privacy, et cetera. Stop whining about it - these discussions are only useful if you actually think of useful solutions to the privacy dilemnas. If you're not, then you're just being a stubborn Luddite who can't see that it's possible for location-based computing to actually make your life better.
I don't care if there are any practical uses. The potential for abuse is too high. I don't want to be tracked, even if it IS for my own protection.
Carbon based humanoid in training.
Exactly, and does it even matter if only the "school" has it? Like nobody bad ever worked in a school. So the Creepy Vice Principle can see that this one girl is alone in the bathroom in the middle of a class session. Great.
This is not a signature.
That's the water approaching full boil, silly frogs.
A useful idea: a range of faraday cage rucksacks, knapsacks and satchels for the aware student.
Your local law enforcement officers will be at your door any minute now.
But didn't the BBC just do a show about how WiFi Eats Babies?
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So the RFID tags are going to be attached to an "asset" - I'm guessing either the student's laptop or backpack would be the best for attaching the device. At least that way it's something you don't want to lose, and it's something that gives a little bit of freedom as students try and sneak off to the other gender's dorm rooms. But seriously... what asset are they going to attach the tags to? And what happens when the battery runs low? And who is going to grab their laptop when the school is on fire? Or when there is a true emergency that requires immediate evacutaion of the school? Needless to say, even if they had a GPS layout showing where each of the devices were (hover over the dot to see the name of the student whose name is associated with it), it'd be a big waste of time to even look at it, because half the school is going to leave their possessions behind if they are in true danger. So, case in point, it is utterly 100% useless to do this. All it does is give a few pædoes a way to track down the students they want. All they would have to do is pay a coder a good $100 to make the unique program. Well, it'll remain unique until it's posted on Limewire/shared files/servers/etc. But that's another comment waiting to happen. Or already made.
...is probably rolling over in his grave right now. People shouldn't be tracked in any way whether they are students, hospital staff, prisoners or soldiers. It's a fundamental violation of one's right to privacy. I like my "ownlife."
"Battery powered" RFID chips? Don't they mean, "small radios?" At the point that they're adding batteries, they should have considered that the students are already carrying around GPS-enabled battery powered radio trackers, and forgone designing the thing altogether.
The students could just sign up for the tracking program with their cell phone numbers, and the university could get the data from the cell companies. No triangulation necessary.
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Does anybody sell a personal-size ElectroMagnetic Pulse generator? I'm thinking I want to buy one soon. I'm getting really tired of the increasing surveillance that not only governments, but businesses, seem to think is okay for them to do. Makes me want to do some serious property damage to said surveillance devices.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
If they want to break in and free the lab rats bad enough, they'll just leave their backpack at home.
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