Using RFID and Wi-Fi to Track Students 183
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC reports on a proposal to use RFID and wi-fi to track students wherever they go on campus: 'Battery-powered RFID tags are placed on an asset and they communicate with at least three wireless access points inside the network to triangulate a location.' At The Wireless Event in London, 'Marcus Birkl, head of wireless at Siemens, said location tracking of assets or people was one of the biggest incentives for companies, hospitals and education institutions to roll out wi-fi networks.' The article points out that integration of RFID and wi-fi raises the possibility that RFID can be used for remote surveillance."
Help in an emergency? (Score:5, Insightful)
And how exactly are you going to access the data if the school is on fire? I cannot think of any legitimate use for this.
Umm, Stalking. (Score:5, Insightful)
Forget claims about 'encryption' (it's a unique ID who cares what it "means") or limitations on distance, readers have already shown success at distances far beyond those claimed.
What about the paedophile who wants to track that one kid...
Students = Assets? (Score:3, Insightful)
So students are now assets?
stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
emergencies, right... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure; during a fire or emergency sounds like a great time to be snooping around to see where particular students are. Fire alarms seem to be much more helpful than tracking techniques for real emergencies; surveillance technology is much more likely to be used during times of "business as usual," and generally not during times when most people are running around screaming for their lives.
BR>Meanwhile, I can see this sort of technology having great applications during "business as usual" times for creepy security guards who want to see what that hot blonde chick does after her chemistry class... Especially for the peeping tom or stalker types who want to make sure they're walking by the right dorm room window when she gets out of the shower.
Re:Students = Assets? (Score:2, Insightful)
On a balance sheet? Yes. Or possibly liabilties. But they are one or the other.
Re:Umm, Stalking. (Score:5, Insightful)
What about the paedophile who wants to track that one kid...
What's he going to hang around a college for?
The real data that this program will show you is (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Umm, Stalking. (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly, and does it even matter if only the "school" has it? Like nobody bad ever worked in a school. So the Creepy Vice Principle can see that this one girl is alone in the bathroom in the middle of a class session. Great.
Re:Orwell College, I assume... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Umm, Stalking. (Score:2, Insightful)
Are there mod points for creepy?
Re:Cost (Score:5, Insightful)
There's an argument being made that it can help firefighters rescue people in fire-engulfed smoky buildings -- rubbish. Sure, there may be someone in the building needing rescue; but, what if the person is nothing more than an RFID ID card that's been dropped in the hustle to escape a fire? Now the fire-fighter is NEEDLESSLY endangering himself and others to rescue a piece of plastic and silicon.
Besides, power is cut to buildings that are on fire to mitigate further risk of electrical shorts that might have caused the fire in the first place and to prevent electrocution when those wacky fire-fighters start throwing water around. OK, forget the water. The power's been cut. Where exactly are these RFID towers again? Do they have power? Was the grid taken down to facilitate putting out the fire? Two towers still up so I have an idea where some RFID *tag* is *someplace* in level 2,3 or 4 somewhere in a 40,000sq ft building?
Great job, Angelo Lamme, from Motorola - Keep up the good work.
And, yes, I used to write software that used RFID technology.
There's also the idea of dropping said device into someone else's possession - I'm sorry, who are you tracking again? The suspect exited stage right while RFID card went left.
On the other hand, using RFID to track equipment is a very handy use for RFID. There are huge RFID readers that span entire docking bays than can read some kinds of tags and accurately report the contents of dozens of boxes' contents with ease.
Why plug up the Wi-FI APs with this? (Score:3, Insightful)
Instead, instal micro cell sites and track using their cell phones. They have a reason to take their cell phone with them (not just a useless tracking tag), you don't have the roll out cost of issuing these tags, and to make this work, you're going to have to put up a heckuva lot of new Wi-Fi APs to do any sort of triangulation, anyway. Why not use cell phone signals on maybe several dozen micro cell sites on campus instead? As a bonus, handled call volume increases and you can get the cell companies to help subsidize the cost...and manage the user database, too.
Then again, why in hell do we really need to monitor student movement so closely in the first place?
Re:Knowledge is power... (Score:4, Insightful)
You forgot to add - the most dangerous crime of all is not murder, it's removing or tampering with your ID.
what's the real crisis -- safety, or obesity? (Score:5, Insightful)
I was born in 1966. A couple of big things were different then:
Recently we got a mailing from our kids' principal about walking to and from school. It was survey about how many kids walked, but it came with a letter from the principal basically implying that any parent who let their kids walk was a bad parent, because it was so unsafe. This is the same principal who has instituted rules about which direction the kids can swing on the playground swings. The previous principal organized a bike rodeo for kids to improve their skills on bikes, and kids who worked on their skills, and demonstrated them at the bike rodeo, got the privilege of using the bike racks. My older kid passed, but then the new principal came in, and the whole idea suddenly went away. I do not know of any kid at this school who has ever gotten hurt walking or cycling to or from school. I do know of one kid who got hit by a car after school, because her parents were sitting, double-parked, in their air-conditioned SUV on the other side of the street, beckoning her to run across the street and get in.
When I was a kid, I started walking to the babysitter's house after school when I was in kindergarten. Nobody thought that was unusual. This was in an urban environment (Albany, CA). I learned to look both ways before crossing the street, and to cross on the green. No biggie.
Today, it seems like most affluent kids' existence consists of being shuttled back and forth in their mom's SUV from one air-conditioned building to another. And we wonder why the obesity epidemic is happening.
Psychologically, people like to have the illusion of control. For instance, studies have shown that drivers consistently overestimate their own ability to deal with an emergency. When it comes to kids, parents want to have the illusion of safety that comes from having their kid carry a cell phone all the time. Radio-tracking your kids is just the latest instance of this kind of mass hysteria.
Re:Hmmm, did the BBC fire their web designers? (Score:2, Insightful)
If there was one case when linking to a printable page wasn't necessary in my opinion, it'd be the BBC.
Re:Help in an emergency? (Score:3, Insightful)
You obviously cannot think very hard then. Lecture attendance registers (and alerting a student if they are about to miss a lecture), finding lost patients (apparently a common problem, especially with mentally unstable patients), Student security, efficient computers/lighting (i.e. computers/lights turn on/off when someone enters/exits room), computer account security and log-on convenience.
There are probably many more, but they're the ones I've come up with in under a minute. They would also help in fire/emergency situations; just because a fire breaks out doesn't automatically mean all computer systems around the entire campus instantly stop working. Not that fire is a particular problem at any university I know of, but in the event of fire they could undoubtedly save lives.
Sure the technology could be abused, but privacy can easily be abused without such technology anyway. Respecting student/patient privacy is a policy issue, not a technology issue.
Re:Help in an emergency? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Help in an emergency? (Score:3, Insightful)
Wirelessly, presumably.
Of course, your WAPs need to a little more sophisticated than most, and have local batteries, and be resistant to particulates (so smoke doesn't kill them easily; fire, of course, will), and the network has to extend out from the buildings a bit so it covers where your normal evac and emergency access sites would be. You then just need a portable terminal, even a PDA, that can connect to the network and gather data from whatever is still alive: its not perfect, of course, but it could be a lot better than nothing.
Of course, if the whole school has burned to the ground, its going to be useless, but one imagines the goal is to use it before that to make sure that people are rescued.
Re:emergencies, right... (Score:3, Insightful)
That raises another interesting point. According to TFA the tags will require a power source and software that can interact with WLAN.
This means that those chips would be intelligent enough to detect some kind of emergency flag embedded into the normal signal and only then actively communicate with the access points, so that the required information can only be obtained when needed. Also a committee could be created to define rules in which situations this flag would be activated, sign off and publish privacy warnings in advance regarding any scheduled use for maintenance and other non-emergency purposes (like collecting useful traffic flow information) and have general oversight over uses and abuses of the system.
But since such a system could only be used for real emergency situations I guess it would never be implemented. Because, you know, who would ever spend that kind of money for preemptive security measures that would hopefully never be used when you could have detailed data about every individual ready to be automatically profiled for the same price?
Why students only? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Help in an emergency? (Score:2, Insightful)
No need for any of that.