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Chinese Schools Are Using 'Smart Uniforms' To Track Their Students' Locations (theverge.com)
"It's as dystopian as it sounds," opines The Verge:
Chinese schools are now tracking the exact location of their students using chip-equipped "smart uniforms" in order to encourage better attendance rates, according to a report from state-run newspaper The Global Times. Each uniform has two chips in the shoulders which are used to track when and where the students enter or exit the school, with an added dose of facial recognition software at the entrances to make sure that the right student is wearing the right outfit (so you can't just have your friend, say, wear an extra shirt while you go off and play hooky). Try to leave during school hours? An alarm will go off....
There are additional features, too, according to a report from The Epoch Times: the chips can apparently detect when a student has fallen asleep in class, and allow students to make payments (using additional facial or fingerprint recognition to confirm the purchase). The uniforms are being used in 10 schools in China's Guizhou Province region, and apparently have been in use for some time -- according to Lin Zongwu, principal of No. 11 School of Renhuai, over 800 students in his school have been wearing the smart uniforms since 2016.
There are additional features, too, according to a report from The Epoch Times: the chips can apparently detect when a student has fallen asleep in class, and allow students to make payments (using additional facial or fingerprint recognition to confirm the purchase). The uniforms are being used in 10 schools in China's Guizhou Province region, and apparently have been in use for some time -- according to Lin Zongwu, principal of No. 11 School of Renhuai, over 800 students in his school have been wearing the smart uniforms since 2016.
... the way the Chinese are taking the concept of an orwellian state further to unseen depths on a biweekly basis, is it not?
Don't kid yourself that this is only in China, although yes it is scary as fuck.
RFID tags in clothing has been a thing for roughly a decade now.
https://rfid4u.com/rfid-for-uniform-and-laundry-tracking/
The UK has done it
https://www.engadget.com/2007/10/21/uk-secondary-school-tests-rfid-embedded-uniforms/
Brazil has done it
https://www.zdnet.com/article/uniform-computer-chips-track-student-locations/
India has done it
http://www.childsafetyindia.com/
The US has schools that have done it too
https://www.wired.com/2012/09/rfid-chip-student-monitoring/
Those are just the ones I remember reading about. I have no doubt plenty of other places are doing it as well.
but it is already happening globally to some extent think smartwatches and smartphones. they all have gps tracking. then you have your cars and smart homes.
I work at a perfectly ordinary school in the UK. We issue all students with chips - in the form of identity cards. These cards contain a photo of the student and a simple RFID chip. They serve as passes to open doors, as identifiers for paying for lunch, as their library card, and for identifying themselves to the printer-copiers. They are also supposed to be an essential part of our safeguarding procedures, because without these cards any teenager could wander in and pose as one of our students - though in practice this doesn't work so well, because students are constantly losing, forgetting or defacing their cards. The girls in particular often hold the view that their photo is the ugliest thing ever taken, and will scratch it off of their badge rather than allow anyone to glimpse their shameful image. Students also routinely body-slam the doors to force the magnetic locks open, or loiter outside waiting for someone else to come through, because they left their badge at home or lost it. Issuing RDIF badges is a very common practice - schools have been doing it for years.
So some schools in China put the ID chips into the uniform. It's the obvious next step: An identifier that, hopefully, the horrible creatures won't lose or destroy within a week.
The only thing we don't use the cards for is attendance. Too easy to defraud - if we did that then any student could bunk off for the day and just lend their badge to a friend to beep them in. I suppose facial or fingerprint recognition could fix that, if you can get it working reliably.