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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.
Maybe, but it will look good on the tracking screen when all the little dots indicating tags start blinking out.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
"This makes sense for hospitals...."
and maybe even within a large prison
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).
If you're a bad guy, why not just switch tags with someone else?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
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.
Well, when you consider the money students (and by extension, their parents) bring in to the univ through alumni funds, sports tickets, targeted advertising, the college loan bribery scandal, and loan companies profiting off of said bribery scandal...
why yes, yes they are.
Might as well have the asset tags...er, student ID's have tracking capabilities so those carbon-based ATMs don't get away.
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...
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
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.
for some geek student to hack in and stalk a cute target.
You got it all wrong, Geeks are socially adjusted. Nerds are the ones that wouldn't go up and talk to someone cute, and even then they wouldn't have the courage to follow them. You're just talking about a straight-up creep. Geek and creep, while sounding similar, are definitely distinctly different.
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
All cell phones made and sold after 2005 have GPS trackers built-in, and can report their location to the meter to the carrier, second-by-second, whether the owner wishes it so or no. Little known fact: that tracking data is available to third parties for a fee. Anyone with a newer phone is already part of the New World Order, as George's dad named it. Just a matter of flicking a software switch in the phone, so opting out via the phone's menu isn't worth spit.
And NO, using the cell towers to triangulate isn't the same. They didn't keep logs, it was imprecise, and rare. Now it is acceptable to track everyone constantly, and no one even notices.
The mass hysteria about kids' safety (child molesters, etc.) hadn't started.
IIRC, even with this hysteria, the number of actual cases has been fairly static for decades.
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.
Whereas the number of children killed and injured on the road has increased. Possibly due to the "school run". The air pollution probably dosn't help either. In the case you describe it sounds like both the child and her parents know little about basic road safety. Which appears all too common, I've seen one of these "parent taxis" trying to play "chicken" with a large truck.