School attendance tracked by RFID

WIRED -- Brittan Elementary School in Sutter, California, has received national attention for trying to launch an RFID program in January  to track students without properly notifying parents or students. The school wanted to require students to wear photo ID cards embedded with an RFID chip containing a 15-digit number assigned to each student to track attendance. Acrroding to Wired, the school cut a deal with a local maker of the technology to test the tracking system and receive a percentage of profits if the company succeeded in selling the system to other school districts. But after a group of outraged parents protested the plan, the school dropped it. But California lawmakers picked up on the story, and the incident sparked a discussion in the California State legislature about using electronic tagging.

Now California State Senator Joe Smitian has brought legislation into committee that will prevent the use of RFID as a means of personal identification. As pointed out by numerous publications, concerns about RFID center around surreptitious scanning and tracking, since data on the chips can be picked up by either an authorized or an unauthorized reader without the knowledge of the person carrying the chip.

In an article for Wired, Kim Zetter points out that "a student participating in a protest on a state university campus could be scanned by a campus policeman carrying a reader to track his political activities. Or, depending on the kind of data stored on the card, someone could read the data on a chip in order to clone it and create false documents. "

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Kim Zetter -- "State Bill to Limit RFID"

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