On Oct 10, 2005, at 7:09 PM, Russell Chapman wrote:
The Fool wrote:
Electronic anti-theft devices have been installed in vehicles cars for
years -- such as the LoJack, which gained fame during countless TV
commercials. Soon, similar technology will be used in the clothes you
and your children wear.
You wouldn't believe how many people, especially parents, think we
should be employing this, with readers in each classroom, throughout
the school.
They want roll marking done every lesson, and we would struggle to
compile the rolls often enough in a day to be aware when a student
skipped class.
( As an inner city school, a student who leaves the campus can be up
to all kinds of things in a very short time...)
We already SMS the parents if a child is absent at the morning roll
call, but they want it for each class. (Of course, a shirt stuffed
into a mate's pencil case would do the trick nicely...)
And this is of course the crux of the problem with RFID. Relying on a
machine to do the work that humans are really best at — such as
tracking a kid's attendance in school — won't be effective.
A single clever student could do as you suggest, show that he had in
fact attended every class (the RFID tracker says so!) and, since no one
would question The Infallible Record, he'd be more able to get up to no
good than in the low-tech days, when a kid who was missing from roll
call would be tracked down immediately by human individuals and put
under kiddie lockdown.
This RFID BS is simply no substitute for actual, human vigilance, and
to me the real threat isn't to privacy — it's to *genuine* safety, the
safety that can only come when humans don't have — and therefore don't
place undue trust in — high-tech solutions to problems that genuinely
need close conscious attention.
--
Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books
<http://books.nightwares.com/>
Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror"
<http://books.nightwares.com/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf>
<http://books.nightwares.com/ockrassa/Storms_on_a_Flat_Placid_Sea.pdf>
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