“4,200 students at Jay High School and Jones Middle School are being required to wear “SmartID” card badges embedded with an RFID tracking chip which will actively broadcast a signal at all times…”
Two articles caught my eye recently, both covered the same topic: real world situations of tagging people. In both cases the need for the Tag is questionable, and in both cases the Tag’s have been implemented.
The first article is about a woman attending a college in San Antonio, Texas where she has gone to court to prevent her dismissal from the college because she will not wear an RFID chip – “include tiny Radio Frequency Identification (“RFID”) chips that produce a radio signal, enabling school officials to track students’ precise location on school property.
“The Northside Independent School District in San Antonio, Texas, has launched a program, the “Student Locator Project,” aimed ostensibly at increasing public funding for the district by increasing student attendance rates. As part of the pilot program, roughly 4,200 students at Jay High School and Jones Middle School are being required to wear “SmartID” card badges embedded with an RFID tracking chip which will actively broadcast a signal at all times. Although the schools already boast 290 surveillance cameras, the cards will make it possible for school officials to track students’ whereabouts at all times. School officials hope to expand the program to the district’s 112 schools, with a student population of 100,000. Although implementation of the system will cost $500,000, school administrators are hoping that if the school district is able to increase attendance by tracking the students’ whereabouts, they will be rewarded with up to $1.7 million from the state government.”
The second article is worse. Saudi Arabia have actively started using tracking technology on ALL of its women.
Any country that treats its citizens as Saudi Arabia does should be subject to international sanctions of the kind imposed on North Korea – instead, the country where women are the property of men, not allowed to drive, and now, have their every move electronically tracked – is a fully supported ally of the West – in particular the USA and Britain. But hey, oil is more important tht human rights – right.
I am amazed that more people are not extremely concerned about the moves by the school district in Texas. Maybe truancy is an issue, but electronic chips to track students are not the answer. Some suggestions to improve attendance:
– Improve the lessons to make them more interesting
– Pay teachers more so that they will be more interested
Yes, much harder to do than slap a chip on a child – but here’s the thing, all you are going to achieve with the chip is to know where someone is when they are not in your school… you haven’t solved the problem.
These little (and in Saudi Arabia’s case big) infringements, and encroachments on individual privacy are how one day we will all meekly accept a Tag being implanted. Many people I work with who have to fly internationally, already say they wouldn’t mind being implanted with a chip if it removed some of the hassle of travel. Scary.