14 DAY TRIAL // Attention pupils, you're being watched! According to Engadget and Timesonline, British children are going to be tracked down by micro-chips, embedded in their uniforms in a trial at a secondary school from the UK.
These freaky-to-think-about-devices are going to be used for the surveillance of any pupil movement. It will register their arrival in class on a teacher's PC. The chips are going to be connected to PCs to show the photo of a pupil, data about his current academic performance and more. The worst part is that it will restrict the access to other areas of the school, so no more smooching in the restrooms, especially during classes.
According to Timesonline, for the time being, the radio frequency identification system is being tested at Hungerhill School in Doncaster, South Yorkshire, where ten pupils began wearing their chip set into their uniforms, eight months ago. As expected, the system has drawn some severe criticism from many human rights campaigners, who find this security scheme as an abuse. David Cleater, from Leave Them Kids Alone, which campaigns against the finger-printing of pupils for Timesonline, said: "Tagging is what we do to criminals we let out of prison early. It is appalling."
Still, after these remarks, the head teacher denied any resemblance with the Big Brother show of the newly implemented security scheme. The only benefit this could have is to store registration of every pupil's daily routine on a school information management system.
A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said to Timesonline that: "it intended electronic registration to log attendance on a schools data-base, not "logging every detail of every pupil via covert means". Of course, for parents that would mean no more slinking around playgrounds in conspicuous cars, to know exactly where the kid is. But RFID is said to be ridiculously easy to hack into.
Actually, high tech has never been used successfully for ''innocent purposes", and if we think about the costs of such a scheme...a complete waste. Big Brother style...
