I was more than usually bemused on reading this article on the BBC news website about a school’s pilot of using RFID tags to track? - No, wait they claimed it wasn’t for tracking. Monitor? Who knows, but the gist is that they have an RFID tag woven into the school badge on student’s sweaters.
The school wrote to student’s parents saying that it would allow for automatic registration when they entered a classroom - correct me if I’m wrong, I only managed 5 weeks of teacher training, isn’t that sort of tracking students’ movements?
The RFID tag is to hold information such as the student’s academic record, targets and so on which teachers can access using a hand-held computer. Now surely a good teacher should know the children in their class well enough to know that with out having to scan them in like groceries at the beginning of class. I am then reminded of Eddie Izzard’s routine involving food scanners at supermarkets, when the only interesting thing is when it doesn’t go beep…. will each child have a handy 50 digit number to type in?
I wonder if they have realised that the students might be able to wreck all kinds of havoc akin to thwarting attempts of ‘tracking the evil alien monsters through the bowels of the ship/factory what-have-you’ by swapping sweaters, removing the badges, getting one of them to wear a bunch of sweaters, etc.
This also brings to mind the hidden tracking device mentioned in The Phantom Menace - any attempt to escape and ‘pow-splat’ - they blow you up, according to Anakin, and after three films many people probably wished that tag was still in place.
I generally find it amusing that something that was earlier touted as a great thing to be on groceries so that our smart Fridges could do our shopping over the internet for us, is now being applied for “not” tracking school children, and is so obviously open to abuse either by the children circumventing it or by other undesireables based on the information that it is needlessly storing.
As it is RFID tags shouldn’t contain anything other than a unique id, hence the ID, that is used for looking up the data held elsewhere, otherwise the information on the card/tag could be altered and if is that is the only source for the information….. then the whole system is seriously geborken.
