Brazilian Schoolchildren Tagged By Computer Chips

New submitter smi.james.th writes with an AP story, and extracts from it: "'Grade-school students in a northeastern Brazilian city are using uniforms embedded with computer chips that alert parents if they are cutting classes, the city's education secretary, Coriolano Moraes, said Thursday.' Personally I don't find this too inspiring. Mr. Orwell certainly has warned the world about this."

Comments

Oh the possibilities

[schrodingersGato]

I sure hope pedophiles in Brazil can't hack or learn to hack. Holy crap this is bad on so many levels

Re:Oh the possibilities

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, 'cause predatory paedophiles will have such a hard time finding kids otherwise, right?

Re:Oh the possibilities

[Anonymous Coward]

Certainly not at random, no, given that the vast majority of the time it's a family member or friend who perpetrates the offence.

Re:Oh the possibilities

[hawguy]

Let's say the pedo-hacker, good at what he does, has a preference: a young girl, aged 13, blonde, tiny. Let's say he goes on facebook and finds that preference: name, location, school they go to. Let's say he knows how to get into this chip-system, which might just list their names or giveaway-details (which may or may not be the case, but for argument's sake, it does). Oh hey, there's lil' Jenny McVulnerable, waiting outside for the bus stop.

Yea I know, it's not the USUAL, but things like this bring up the UN-usual.

Since he's such an uber-hacker, he could just hack into the school's ID card database, and download student pictures, home address, parents' names, possibly siblings and emergency contact info, then he can intercept the kid and say "omg Josh, your mom Mary and Uncle Joe were in a terrible accident, your sister Maria is already at the hospital, they sent me to pick you up".

This RFID system doesn't add a risk that's not already there.

Re:Oh the possibilities

[EdIII]

People are not assets, and should not be tracked.

A perceived increase in security is never worth a tangible loss in freedoms.

The danger is the children growing up and thinking this is okay everywhere they go. It is most emphatically, not okay .

There can be exceptions, for adults only, in high security businesses. In those situations it will be a choice, and most likely well compensated. Tracking systems like this should never, ever, be acceptable in public and daily life, and certainly not for children. They should grow up thinking such systems are weird, intrusive, and only required in the most serious of circumstances.

People need to fucking grow a pair and realize that life is dangerous. Have some courage and face life head on, and stop being such cowards trading away your freedoms at every corner for shiny trinkets and illusions of a safer world with a better informed authority.

Re:Oh the possibilities

[solidraven]

Here we go, again another round of 1980 hysteria in the "government is going to track our every move" category.
First of all, if they wanted to track you; then they'd sure as hell do it no matter what. They don't need high tech gadgets to do that either.
But on to RFID. Our student ID cards at college/university here work by RFID. We use them to open doors, as copy cards, to pay for food in the cafeteria... . So you end up with a bunch of (electronic/electrical) engineering students with RFID cards that you actually get to store money on indirectly (its kept on the server how much money is on the card). So there are enough reasons to duplicate somebody else's card. Contrary to what you might be thinking, not a single person has even managed to do that successfully. The encoding is fairly tricky and just replicating it is extremely hard.
What we did try was to track each other using the RFID tags in these cards (as that's considerably easier than trying to reverse engineer them). The thing is, a tracking range of a whole 15cm isn't all that useful last time I checked. So claiming you can track people through these tags is foolish. Unless if they're passing through lets say a door frame.
So I seriously doubt that any high school kid will be able to figure it out that easily, all this does is save the school some time in the morning by being able to skip the daily roll call.

Yeah, this is a job for face recognition CCTV!

[Dr. Spork]

Doing this with chips is barbaric. We must do this with cameras and biometrics, hopefully also we'll get drones involved somehow. That's the American way!

Re:Yeah, this is a job for face recognition CCTV!

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Doing this with chips is barbaric.

No, it's British. The American way would be doing it with fries.

Re:Yeah, this is a job for face recognition CCTV!

[EdIII]

Look.... as far as cuisine goes.... you both (America and British) are like two ugly fat chicks arguing about who is uglier.

Americans got Mac'N'Cheese, everything drowned in ketchup, and the nastiest processed food on Earth, .... and ... you Brits got spotted dick, the traditional breakfast with those charcoal briquettes of fried blood, and some of the most bland tasting food of all time. All the more hysterical since you practically invented the Spice trade.

Anything good in America was imported along with immigrants. Quite frankly, the only uglier chick in the room is Indian cuisine. Not hard to see why they are rail thin peoples.

Counter-intuitively, you would expect Chinese and Thai people to be fat as fuck, since that is some seriously, seriously tasty food.

When was the last time you were messed up on a couch with some people all craving British food?

Now I will give props to the British for their lecherous and lazy gambler that invented the sandwich. One of the best culinary inventions in the last thousand years. The best being, of course, the chocolate covered peanut.

Fuck yes!

[owenferguson]

Sounds like the ideal provocation to strip buck naked and cut some class.

Re:Fuck yes!

[ColdWetDog]

"Johnny, why are you wearing six shirts today?"

I will reiterate....

[wanzeo]

Technology CANNOT solve social problems. It can only hide symptoms.

Re:I will reiterate....

[thegarbz]

It can SHOW the symptoms. Seriously every school in the world already does this kind of checking. A roll call at the start of the class is the normal way.

Throughout all of my highschool I've been wondering why we don't do something more productive with technology to automate this waste of the first 5 minutes of every class and incorporate all other services as well such as library loans with technology such as RFID.

To be perfectly clear GPS tracking of students off school property is completely unacceptable, but this is not the case. This looks like a basic system to see who is in the class. An automated roll call. It's not solving anything, it's simply automating what we do already.

PoppyCock

[WindBourne]

Declaring that this is bad is a joke. These are tags in the uniforms of CHILDREN. It is as orwellian as putting RFID in my dogs. I would love to know if my teens cut school. And I am just fine with using a tag in their clothes.

Now, if they want to do this to an adult, or forced embed it in a human, that is a DIFFERENT issue.

Re:PoppyCock

[Trepidity]

Ah yes, the conservative mentality: children are pets of their adult owners.

Re:PoppyCock

[causality]

Now, if they want to do this to an adult, or forced embed it in a human, that is a DIFFERENT issue.

If you had always been tagged from the time you were a small child, and had all your life to get used to the idea, would you still think so?

That's the danger.

It's early conditioning (indoctrination) for a future time when it will be easier to justify (excuse) doing this to adults. Right now lots of adults feel the way you do about tagging or chipping adults. That makes it politically difficult or impossible to do that right now. That's about the only thing stopping it because politics is full of authoritarian types who would love to do it.

Re:just put them in the microwave

[Gonoff]

That is probably illegal in Brazil. Even if it is legal to do that to the kids, their parents might object.

Shhh

[kenh]

Don't tell the kids there are 'magic transmitters' in their school uniforms - they'll just take off the RFID tag-laden article of clothing and put it in a friends backpack...

And the teachers will wonder how her computer says every student is in the class when half the seats are empty?

Re:Get used to it

[epyT-R]

The actions those kids take when not in class could have a harmful and costly impact on others (vandalism, illegal drug use causing health problems that must then be paid for, a lack of education resulting in more stupid grown-ups that can't hold a job and drag on the economy, etc.). In addition, plenty of parents want their kids to go to school because it keeps them safe and is ultimately good for them.

I guess you didn't take into account the psychological harm from obsessive, oppressive, non-stop surveillance into every aspect of life.. your statement here is also quite black and white.. school is not pure 'good' or pure 'bad', nor does cutting a class equate to 'vandalism' or drug use (which is also not pure 'good' or pure 'bad.')

This doesn't just apply to kids, it applies to everyone. The actions any person takes impacts one's neighbors, and as such everyone has direct incentives to encircle everyone else in systems of control. This isn't a matter of "them" wanting to take "our" freedoms away. It is am matter of "us" wanting to make sure "they" don't do things that have a negative impact on "us." This principle is universal.

and this is the attitude that will ensure we do live out that dystopia of infinite control of others = infinite freedom for the individual. is that really what you want?

Re:Hey buddy, that's as liberal as it comes

[causality]

Ah yes, the conservative mentality: children are pets of their adult owners.

Conservatives are the ones for freedom and elimination of government oversight at all levels.

Liberals are the ones who do things "for your own good".

Get it straight man or you end up voting for exactly the opposite result as you desire. See: present.

Actually conservatism is all about worship of the status quo. It is the belief that it should change very slowly if at all. It's misused all the time by people who don't understand it, and so has become one of those words that means whatever the speaker intends it to mean. But that's the actual definition; look it up if you doubt me.

Libertarians (similar to classical liberals, nothing like modern liberals) are the ones who want to maximize freedom. Libertarianism is the belief that consenting adults should be able to do whatever the hell they want, no matter who disapproves, so long as they don't pose a threat to non-participants. Libertarianism would seriously take off as a political movement if it were possible to get candidates on the ballot for all major elections, which is why the two-party duopoly creates ridiculously elaborate, inconsistent, burdensome electoral rules and deeply entrenched funding mechanisms to prevent this from happening.

Of course, "convervative" has been co-opted as a term and now tends to mean someone who is prudish, religious in an institutional (not personal) way, and wishes their preferred lifestyle to have the force of law, combined with the celebration of corporate power over state power. Just like "liberal" has become co-opted to mean "we know what's good for you" social engineering as well as an obsession with group identity (black, white, female, etc) at the expense of dealing with people as individuals. In that sense conservatives tend to be materialistic while liberals tend to be utterly childish and unable to separate their emotions from reason. Both are the delight of power-hungry politicians everywhere because both can be pandered to.

I knew this would happen - and more worse to come

[Taco Cowboy]

Back in the 1980's when they started tagging dogs and cats, - by inserting a chip into the neck of the animal, - in the name of "identify owners of lost pets", I already wondered aloud when will they start doing the same thing to human beings

This Brazilian example only tag students via chips embedded in their school uniform

Wait till someone come up with similar scheme with what they did to dogs and cats - insert chips into the body of human beings - and I am sure they can come up with whatever grandiose reason to justify what they do

It would be not that dis-similar to the tattooing of Jews by the German Nazis

Those who do not learn from history will find ways to repeat it

Orwellian fears are killing people.....

[Desmoden]

I get a SMS if my car moves 2ft when I'm not in it. My 3 yellow labs all have id chips as well as GPS trackers. My laptop and phone have "find me" features so I don't loose my precious terminal.

However your kids, your husband, wife, parents run around in complete secrecy under the guise of "privacy"

When people aren't looking, people do HORRIBLE THINGS. When teachers aren't looking kids do screwed up things, uncles "touch" and ask to not "tell", priests take advantage, people have strokes on hiking trips, pass out in bars.

I should not only know where my most precious humans are, but I should know they are safe, conscious and alive.

Sex trafficking, kidnapping, dump luck kill, wounds and mentally damages the brother and sisters and wives and husbands of all of us, and we sit around saying " oh it's totally worth it, because "privacy" is so critical.

I grew up in a town with a secret gov facility. We were all under constant surveillance We all knew it.

If sunlight or starlight can touch you, so can anyone who wants to. Anyone who thinks differently is kidding themselves.

It's time we get over that book and start taking care of our loved ones.

It MUST be transparent. It MUST have watchers watching watchers watching watchers. It MUST be optional.

and we MUST stop losing humans like car keys.

Re:Lo-tech hacking

[EdIII]

And what purpose does this serve? have teachers completely forgotten how to take attendance? I know it's low tech, but it's a whole lot more accurate, cheaper, and much less orwellian.

Not to mention it puts the responsibility with an adult that should already be investing time, energy, and interest in the child's welfare. Not only will that always be better than an automated system, it's also the right thing a teacher should be doing anyways.