- Gary Stillman, the director of a small K-8 charter school
in Buffalo, New York, is an RFID believer.
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- While privacy advocates fret that the embedded microchips
will be used to track people surreptitiously, Stillman said he believes
that RFID tags will make his inner city school safer and more efficient.
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- Stillman has gone whole-hog for radio-frequency technology,
which his year-old Enterprise Charter School started using last month to
record the time of day students arrive in the morning. In the next months,
he plans to use RFID to track library loans, disciplinary records, cafeteria
purchases and visits to the nurse's office. Eventually he'd like to expand
the system to track students' punctuality (or lack thereof) for every class
and to verify the time they get on and off school buses.
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- "That way, we could confirm that Johnny Jones got
off at Oak and Hurtle at 3:22," Stillman said. "All this relates
to safety and keeping track of kids.... Eventually it will become a monitoring
tool for us."
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- Radio-frequency identification tags -- which have been
hailed as the next-generation bar code -- consist of a microchip outfitted
with a tiny antenna that broadcasts an ID number to a reader unit. The
reader searches a database for the number and finds the related file, which
contains the tagged item's description, or in the case of Enterprise Charter,
the student's information.
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- Unlike bar codes, which must be manually scanned, RFID-tagged
items can be read when they are in proximity to a reader unit, essentially
scanning themselves. The school uses passive RFID tags that are activated
when radio waves from the reader reach the chip's antenna. (Active RFID
tags incorporate a battery that constantly broadcasts the chip's ID number
and are much more expensive.)
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- The technology has raised a ruckus in recent months,
as companies such as Wal-Mart move from bar codes to RFID to track merchandise
and libraries place the chips in books to streamline loans. Privacy advocates
worry that the technology will be used to track people without their knowledge.
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- But for Stillman, whose public school is located in a
gritty Buffalo neighborhood, RFID is about accounting for the whereabouts
of his charges and streamlining functions.
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- "Before, everything was done manually -- each teacher
would take attendance and send it down to the office," he said. "Now
it's automatic, and it saves us a lot of time."
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- The charter school's 422 students wear small plastic
cards around their necks that have their photograph, name and grade printed
on them, and include an embedded RFID chip. As the children enter the school,
they approach a kiosk where a reader activates the chip's signal and displays
their photograph. The students touch their picture, and the time of their
entry into the building is recorded in a database. A school staffer oversees
the check-in process.
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- The school spent $25,000 on the ID system. The $3 ID
tags students wear around their necks at all times incorporate the same
Texas Instruments smart labels used in the wristbands worn by inmates at
the Pima County jail in Texas. Similar wristbands are used to track wounded
U.S. soldiers and POWs in Iraq and by the Magic Waters theme park in Illinois
for cashless purchases.
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- But the Buffalo school is believed to be the first facility
to use the technology to identify and track children.
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- Stillman was tipped off to RFID by the vice principal's
husband, who works at a Buffalo Web design studio that is partnered with
Intuitek, the company that designed the school's system.
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- Stillman originally wanted the RFID tags sewn directly
into the students' uniforms, but teachers feared that the kids might simply
swap uniforms to dupe the system, so he decided to have students wear the
picture tags around their necks instead.
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- Privacy experts expressed dismay at the idea of using
RFID tags on children.
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- "I think the Buffalo experiment is getting children
ready for the brave new world, where people are watched 24/7 in the name
of security," said Richard Smith, an Internet privacy and security
consultant. "My main concern is that once we start carrying around
RFID-tagged items on our person such as access cards, cell phones, loyalty
cards, clothing, etc., we can be tracked without our knowledge or permission
by a network of RFID readers attached to the Internet."
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- Lee Tien, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation
-- who has vehemently opposed a San Francisco Public Library Commission
plan to use the chips to track its inventory -- was also critical of the
program.
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- "In general, all person-location-tracking technologies
raise privacy issues, from hiding beepers on people's cars or in people's
clothing to video surveillance," Tien said. "Insecure location-tracking
technologies raise the further question of who is tracking, as well as
who has access to any tracking records kept by the system."
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- Intuitek President David M. Straitiff said his company
built privacy protections into the school's RFID system, including limiting
the reading range of the kiosks to less than 20 inches and making students
touch the kiosk screen instead of passively being scanned by it. He pooh-poohed
the notion that the system would be abused.
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- "(It's) the same as swiping a mag-strip card for
access control, or presenting a photo ID badge to a security guard, both
of which are commonplace occurrences," Straitiff said.
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- Additionally, Stillman said that the RFID-linked databases
would require separate passwords to access students' disciplinary, attendance,
health, library and cafeteria records.
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- "It's as private as anything else can be when your
information is stored on a server," he said.
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