In the State of Texas, certain schools are requiring students to carry ID cards that have RFID chips embedded in them so there whereabouts can be monitored.
Note on linked article above: The title of it is totally misleading, as the students are not being “micro-chipped”; it’s just a card and not an implant.
As far as children in schools being tracked as to where they are at any given moment, yes I can see the value of that from an administration perspective. However there’s a darker side to this which could spell out disaster quite easily.
Aside from the Big-Brother-Extreme crapola going on here, let’s take a realistic view at what could happen.
The first thought I had was, “Gee.. wouldn’t it be really easy for students to simply swap cards with each other?”
Example scenario: One student swaps his card with someone else. Then one of those students vandalizes something. Later on the students swap cards back again. Guess who gets pinched? The wrong student.
You may say, “Well, school administration would have to confirm who actually did the vandalizing from video surveillance footage.” Are you sure they’d actually check, or would administration just explicitly trust the technology instead without confirming?
And of course, you know the students know where cameras are pointing, and more importantly where they’re not.
Now think about this: How long do you think it would take for students to realize that those ID cards are valuable, to the point where they get stolen and used for bad things so they can pin the blame on others?
Remember, we’re not talking about responsible adults here, we’re talking about kids. Kids who if upon discovery of finding a way to exploit weaknesses in the system will do so.
While I’m sure administration is adequately instructing their students not to lose their cards, are they also instructing not to swap them with others? Probably not.
Consider that any stolen card is physical identity theft. Wherever that card goes, administration will simply assume whoever is holding the card is the true owner.
If I were a high school student, you can bet anything I’d purposely mess with administration on purpose just for the comedy factor, such as purposely taking my ID card and putting it under a drop-tile in the ceiling (they’d never find it). Or maybe running my card up the flagpole. Or taping it to a frisbee and then whizzing that on the roof of the buliding. Or taping the card under one of the toilets in the girl’s bathroom. Believe me, I could find many ways of ticking off administration just to laugh at them because of that card. I’d have them running in circles trying to find the stupid thing and take class-clowning to a whole new level. I’d be on double-secret probation in no time…
Anyway..
Yeah, I can’t see this RFID-chipped ID card thing working too well. Ultimately, students will ruin the system, either from card swapping or class-clowning with them. And it doesn’t take a lot to ruin the system because the idea of it is just flawed to begin with. With cameras and physical eyes watching, yeah, that works. As for chipped cards.. no. Total recipe for disaster.
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Nice. I’d stash it in something mobile. Like… a groundskeeper’s vehicle, or perhaps attach it to a mop-head, or hide it in a library book sleeve.
Granted, there are probably ways to encourage the kids to keep their cards safe, such as using them for library checkouts, cafeteria paycards, and plain old student ID cards where the cards must be presented at request. Of course, that would require enforecment and that the technology is integrated with all of those services, something that was probably not originally planned for.
The possibilities are near-endless of where to stash the card just to tick off administration. Behind a vending machine in the teacher’s lounge, under the bleachers on the football field, under a seat in the auditorium, taped under the bumper of the principal’s car… like I said, near-endless possibilities for frivolity there.
And yes, the only way to combat frivolity like that is to tightly integrate the card into every system in the school, which would in turn waste tens of thousands of dollars in admin costs. Go, progress, go.
RFID systems cannot pinpoint a tag like you can a gps enabled phone (Hell cell phones can barely do that). It is more of a checkpoint reached. A RFID tag passes a location or portal and is registered as passing through that location. You don’t get a direction without another checkpoint portal being passed. From tag data you can only say X tag passed this checkpoint. Your ceiling tile, flagpole and girl’s bathroom thoughts fairly pointless. The system is not very fine. If you want fine, check some stuff AT&T labs was doing 10-15 years ago with sonic transponders. You could get identity, location and heading with that.
Walmart uses RFID on ship box sets of product and large items. They have portals at the truck docks and the exits to the warehouse. They can roughly tell when a tag has arrived at the warehouse of a store, left the warehouse headed to the store floor, and tell a tag has arrived back to the warehouse. With a portal over the trash compactor and over the cardboard box compactor, they can tell when a tag (and hopefully empty box) has been discarded. They however cannot find what shelf tag 34823498 is at without implementing a handheld scanner and manually sweeping an area for a specific tag. They really don’t care. What the geeks want to know is how long stuff sits around, turnover rate on overstock and speed of truck to sales floor stocking. RFID is also implemented in their main warehouses so they can say X tag did get shipped out and arrived at store N.
RFID is also used by some toll road authorities. They can track your car passed mile marker 8 at 2:30 am and mile marker 68 at 3:30 am (and know you averaged 60 mph) but once it gets away from any portals or doesn’t check past any portals, they have no idea where your car is. RFID is not lowjack. RFID is about as useful for tracking as your credit card. Just swipe, ding they know you were at Woolworth’s at 10 am and swipe again at the gas station in the next town over within an hour. Very granular tracking.
Kids are not getting lowjacked. Any kid can just walk off away from any RFID portal sensing area and never be noticed electronically.
“RFID is not lowjack”
If you’re going to mention a recovery system, at least spell it correctly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoJack
And yes, duh. No kidding. Obviously, passive RFID has a limited range of where it can monitored. LoJack is an active (as in powered) system which is why is has such greater range.
I think this RFID paranoia is just overblown. When people don’t understand how things work and the conspiration theorists start talking nonsense people get paranoid. Lots of companies use RFID cards for access control and work time record keeping. Surely beats traditional punch cards and prevents fraud by preventing buddy punch since the same card is used for access to the facility. It’s not like they can pinpoint the location of a passive device at will. Draco Trapnet below explained it quite well. You can tell if the specific tag passed through a specific location (such as an electronic toll lane or a controlled access point) but not the current location. They also have a very short range unless the applicacion (such as electronic toll) requires a longer range.