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."
Hmmm, did the BBC fire their web designers? (Score:3, Interesting)
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If there was one case when linking to a printable page wasn't necessary in my opinion, it'd be the BBC.
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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.
Re:Help in an emergency? (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't upset the dots. (Score:5, Funny)
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And you left yours where? (Score:3, Interesting)
Adding to your thought: Unless the device is virtually inseperable from the student, what's to say that it isn't left behind during evacuation, or conversely, the student who doesn't evacuate happened to leave their backpack containing it back in their dorm room for the day?
Implant it or strap it to their ankle...otherwise the error rate in tracking the actual location of the individual becomes pretty high.
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Wait...what do you mean comm-badges aren't cool, and you don't want to wear one?
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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
Re:Help in an emergency? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Lecture attendance registers (and alerting a student if they are about to miss a lecture)
Kickass, now all you need to do is get a friend to bring your tag. Purely accidentally too, of course, if anyone were to ask. Then you get the fun of people not getting detected correctly and students having to spend 2 months arguing that they didn't miss all the classes (and so didn't fail the class). The prof is of course on a sabbatical (and didn't really pay attention to who attended anyways) and the TAs slept through the lectures. And since the system can never lie or be wrong the student must be lying.
Student security
Such as? Oh no, I'm in a building that isn't my department so I can use the bathroom, better call the cops.
efficient computers/lighting (i.e. computers/lights turn on/off when someone enters/exits room)
So the school has never heard of motion detectors I take it? Joy, now I'll need to bring a flashlight with me for all the times this more complex thus error prone detection system fails.
computer account security and log-on convenience.
Couldn't have said it better myself. Fuck that shit. No really. I'm paying $30k/year [gatech.edu] I'm going to go to lecture if I want and skip if I want. If your class is worth going to then you shouldn't need attendance grades. Besides, the point is that they learn the material. If I can learn the material fine without your help, why do I have to waste time in class for a stupid check off in your gradebook? The serious teachers here don't bother with that-- they trust us to make the right decision. For the most part
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Very few professors bother to take roll. Personally I don't care if students attend or not, as long as they do the work and show up for exams. They're adults and the choice is theirs.
But I can tell you who would care - the parents. One question I often pose to students: "If this classroom had a webcam that allowed your parents to see if you were attending class, how many of you think your parents would use it?" Typ
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Innovation isn't always immediately obvious, but I think it IS obvious to any foresighted individual that technology such as this could, one day, have amazing uses for the individual wearing it. Of course, if you want to live in a world of paranoia you can join all those who won't touch the internet for fear of "government agents".
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Getting those people whom the data corresponds to out of the burning building will be somewhat harder, esp. if the WiFi trackers aren't fireproof.
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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
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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...
Re:Umm, Stalking. (Score:5, Funny)
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?
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Re:Umm, Stalking. (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
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Are there mod points for creepy?
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This is Snape's idea (Score:5, Funny)
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I believe Sirius Black must've found it useful for Snape-hunting.
Orwell College, I assume... (Score:2)
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Students = Assets? (Score:3, Insightful)
So students are now assets?
It was a typo. (Score:3, Funny)
I think it was a typo. They meant they want to track student asses. You know, the jackasses who get drunk and trash parts of the campus or the ones who think "Animal House" was a video student manual on how to act when at college.
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Or do British colleges have off-campus fraternities?
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On a balance sheet? Yes. Or possibly liabilties. But they are one or the other.
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So students are now assets?
Well, when you consider the money students (and by extension, their parents) bring in to the univ through alumni funds, sports tickets, targeted advertising [mtvu.com], the college loan bribery scandal [google.com], and loan companies profiting [msn.com] off of said bribery scandal...
why yes, yes they are.
Might as well have the asset tags...er, student ID's have tracking capabilities so those carbon-based ATMs don't get away.
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Make It Stylish... (Score:2, Funny)
stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
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and maybe even within a large prison
House Arrest? (Score:2)
Something like this might be useful for monitoring criminals/sex offenders that are on parole, in lieu of GPS. But you're right. It's really only good for someone who has lost their normal level of privacy, either to infirmity or criminal reasons.
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Think of an Oil Refinery. I will use a fire as an example since so many people don't get how this could be helpful.
A fire breaks out in part of the refinery. When the fire fighters get there they would know where everybody that got clear of the fire was instantly because there tags would be near safe and functions base stations. Anyone that might still be in danger you would have at least their last known location to start looking for them.
An other exa
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Where can I get some of this fire that doesn't damage WiFi equipment/cables/sensors/computers?
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Do all fires respect the WiFi system to make sure it still maintains 100% functionality?
Yes. (Score:2)
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That is the thing you don't need any for my example to work.
When the fire breaks out people do evacuate the wifi equipment will still be functioning so they will see everybody that is clear of the fire. So you know who is safe in a fraction of a second. So in a few minutes you would know that Bill, Fred, and Joe are missing.
Once you know who is safe you can go back to the records and see where the missing people
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.
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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 tha
Potentially sarcastic comment to follow (Score:2)
The real data that this program will show you is (Score:3, Insightful)
Apparently some pretty smart RFID tags. (Score:3, Interesting)
So I am gathering that the "brains" on these tags can handle all the handshaking involved with an 802.11(b/g/n) link, including whatever parts of TCP/IP are needed to pass the signal strength data back to the servers? Sounds to me that this is a little bit more involved than just an RFID tag, more like a simple Wi-Fi enabled device that connnects and reports back signal strengths/timing etc. A bit more complex than a chip tied to a small antenna patch (and battery for transmit signal amplification).
Wrong end maybe? (Score:2)
Scanner detects tag, reports to server thru WiFi.
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I suppose that's one possibility. That would make for a lot of scanners in one area puking data at an AP. The article wasn't all that technical, anyway, so it's a matter of speculation on how they would plan to make it work at this point. For all we know, some non-technical type strung together a couple of buzzword technologies to make up this idea without knowing anything about the technical aspects of it. If that were the case, I'm surprised that they didn't find a way to weave nanotechnology into
Re:Wrong end maybe? Nano technology (Score:2)
Soon to opt out of technology will mean a real sacrifice, say your right arm from the elbow up.
Enforcement (Score:2)
Apart from the privacy problems, I'd say this is one impractical proposal, at least for tracking people.
For tracking equipment in a hospital, it might work. Even then, in most wards the nurses will know w
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Say welcome to mandatory flu shots...
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Ever see one of those pet doors that only opens for YOUR pet, based on a collar-mounted radio beacon?
You simply won't be able to pass through a door without one, and you can replace the doors with those cage-things that rotate and only let you pass one way.
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There are several RFID blocking wallets already on the market. Will students be allowed to block the signal if they don't want to be tracked? This reminds me of those some of those PBS nature shows where a wildlife biologist has tagged a animal with a radio collar and is tracking its movements by radio. It also reminds me of the book "1984." [gutenberg.net.au]
Hmm... (Score:3, Interesting)
For student privacy/safety, I'd not make it a "public" website. You'd have to have a Parent ID/login before you could look up where your kid has been all day and maybe associated dots/students around them. The teachers and maybe staff would have access, but the general public should only see lots of dots (without ID numbers) moving around just cause it looks neat.
After 2-3 generations of this "safely" happening, then I'd try to expand the program to all schools, or the entire state's new DLs.
Well, if I were an evil overlord with any power...
Cisco has been doing this for a while (Score:3, Interesting)
Great technology for a hospital, prison, and maybe a handful of other specific situations. But a school? It was scary enough seeing it in action for an office building.
-Rick
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Why must they include bathrooms in the RFID coverage? Is there to be no privacy?
Oh, wait...never mind.
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-Rick
Knowledge is power... (Score:4, Interesting)
1) Crime would be ended since, after any crime, the police would only have to log onto the computer to see who was present at the moment the crime was comitted.
2) Population control would be easy since whenever a boy dot was in very close proximity, say less than 1 inche, to a girl dot, a little pink heart could start flashing on the screen and the government watchperson could administer a little remote-controlled voltage zap to the two parties to ruin the amore of the moment.
3) Transportation problems...a thing of the past...since you would need a permit to commute over road xyz which would specify your permitted travel times.
4) Money? Who would need it? Your id tag would just be automatically billed for whatever. If you didn't pay...you could just be confined to whereever and monitored for compliance. No need for prisons, either, for anyone but the most dangerous.
5) Adultery, stalking, speeding, trespassing, etc. are examples of a few of the many crimes that would be obsoleted due to their degree of difficulty and the ease with which transgressors would be identified.
Okay, maybe we are not quite ready for all of this yet, at least the democrats, but the republicans and Attorney General Gonzales would be down with it, no doubt. Also, what about North Korea, Venezueala, Cuba, China, or Saudi Arabia? They would be fine with this stuff, no doubt. And we all will be eventually, like it or not.
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.
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It's fixed now...
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?
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And NO, using the cell towers to triangulate is
Million WiFi Packet March (Score:2)
Jobs = No Freedoms? (Score:2)
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.
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The obesity epidemic coincides with the adoption of a carbohydrate-based food pyramid, and the subsequent rise in the consumption of processed and packaged foods, which have traditionally been stuffed full of sugar.
Youth/infant diabetes was virtually unheard of in this country before that, as well.
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IIRC, even with this hysteria, the number of actual cases has been fairly static for decades.
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.
Whereas the numbe
We already have this... (Score:3, Informative)
These are passive and so give me little reason to be worried (although I do have a sheet of metal in my wallet anyway, just in case). They also provide pretty much all the benefits of an active chip without as much of a feeling that they are doing some weird prying into your life.
Having said that this system didn't stop my friend from having £180 charged to him because someone stole his library card and took out 10 books on it... having active cards could just make that problem far worse -
Security: "It seems the fire was started by you, Scott"
Scott: "But I was at home on my own all night"
Security: "Tell it to the police, and in the mean time you've been kicked out - read the University ToS, we can kick you out whenever for whatever reason"
Scott: "Bugger..."
500 years too early.. (Score:2)
Paranoia without hope? (Score:2, Informative)
Slashdot seems to have missed the boat on the notion of Ubiquitous Computing.
Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]
CMU's Aura Proje [cmu.edu]
Why students only? (Score:2, Insightful)
That faint bubbling sound you hear? (Score:2)
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Good show, btw. At least, the first season was great and the math was all spot on -- the only crit
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But yeah, that's an obvious problem. Stolen ID == the RFID tracker "proves" it was you who was in the administrative office when the petty cash box was looted.
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Speaking as a physician this is probably not the best place to put it...lots of important stuff in the chest...we wouldn't want any "accidents" now would we?
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In dystopian Burkistan, actually, we do. Just enough accidental fatalities that the intentional deaths caused by making the thing explode next to your lungs didn't look unusual.
Re:Cost (Score:5, Informative)
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Also RFID chips can be as small as a grain of rice and flat as a sticker, so they could easily fit in a student card.
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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.
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sure if there are no large ammounts of either metal or water in the boxes.
if the tagged asset is in a bag with loads of other equipment much of which has EMI shielding built in then its not going to get detected reliablly.
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Given the number and size of piercings the average student wears, I don't think a little more hardware will be a problem.
Or, we could just tattoo a barcode on them.
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Oh? And where exactly have YOU been for the past 7 years or so?
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There are no cute targets in his basement. This means he'd have to leave it. On second thoughts, that new computer game is really cool...
Geeks are the least of your worries.
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You got it all wrong, Geeks are socially adjusted. Nerds are the ones that wouldn't go up and talk to someone cute, and even then they wouldn't have the courage to follow them. You're just talking about a straight-up creep. Geek and creep, while sounding similar, are definitely distinctly different.
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