Thursday, February 10. 2005

Tracking Kids, Without Parental OK

School districts in California get some of their funding based on student attendance. So, it makes sense a school would want to gather accurate information. And, since schools are always short on cash, a donation to the school to test a new technology to monitor attendance seems reasonable. Brittan Elementary School District took up an offer from InCom to have its students wear RFID based "ID tags." Sensors are placed over doorways to classrooms and the data is beamed to teacher's PDAs. There were sensors of the bathrooms, too, but they've been removed.

While there appear to have been some measure of public discourse before the trial of the system began, a number of parents have pulled their children from the testing and are furious the school would allow such a thing. The company's technology, interestingly, was designed by two California teachers.

The interesting twist to this story, featured in Wired is that the system can track those without tags, that is, "intruders." I suppose that means when someone walks under a doorway the sensor can "see them" and then "looks for" an RFID tag? If none is found, then what? An alarm goes off somewhere?

The company website is pretty thin and does not mention how "intruders" are found. I suppose if all publicity is good publicity, the company should be fairly happy. The outrage certainly does reflect the current feelings about RFID for many people worldwide.

Update (2/17): It seems InCom has pulled out of the trial.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg at 16:03 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Comments

Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

No comments

Add Comment

Name
Email
Homepage
In reply to	[ Top level ]
Comment	Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_. Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images. E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly. Enter the string from the spam-prevention image above:
	Remember Information?   Subscribe to this entry