Students ordered to wear tracking tags

Leff, Lisa. "Students ordered to wear tracking tags" (vt in different outlets). AP story, 9 Feb. 2005. MSNBC coverage: [1]. See annotation for keywords for web search for other sites.

Lead: "SUTTER, Calif.—The only grade school in this rural town is requiring students to wear radio frequency identification badges that can track their every move." Later in the story we're told that the principal "hopes to eventually add bar codes to the existing ID's so that students can use them to pay for cafeteria meals and check out library books." See for real-world background for the fictional motif of constant surveillance: the rationale is "to simplify attendance-taking and potentially reduce vandalism and improve student safety. […] But some parents see a system that can monitor their children's movements on campus as something straight out of Orwell" (see G. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, under Fiction). A knowledgeable correspondent suggests that real-world threats to privacy may be "much greater from a dirt-cheap technology like RFID" than from more science-fictional systems: "There are obvious implications for a wearable tag (or one in your car) that contains a history of everywhere you've been recently ... particularly if it's insecure (forgeable)."

RDE, Title, 28Aug19