Japan Today reports on the following case of RFID tags being used to track students in a Japanese primary school. School introduces security system to monitor students’ movements
From the article: “TOKYO Rikkyo Primary School on Monday introduced a new security system at its Tokyo campus that uses active RFID tags to accurately monitor the comings and goings of its students in real time.”

RFID stands for Radio Frequency Identification, and the technology is being deployed in small tags that can be attached to everything from articles of clothing to tires on your car. These tags can then be used to track movement, location, etc. of the items to which they are attached, which obviously raises many privacy issues to be considered as this technology gets deployed into widespread use.

Dean McCullagh wrote a good article called RFID tage: Big Brother in small packages which explains the technology in a fair amount of detail. There’s also a lot of information available just by searching Google for “RFID tags”.

These things, like many technologies, have the possibility of being extremely useful or extremely creepy, depending on the uses that they are put to. They have already been made as small as half the size of a grain of sand and can be attached to almost anything.

In the case of the Japanese school, the technology may turn out to be a great help to the administration in keeping track of students, preventing unauthorized activities, etc. We may see similar systems deployed in the workplace for employee tracking, in place of time clocks, etc.

But what happens when every item of clothing, every posession that you are carrying with you begins interacting with transmitters in the stores you walk by. They know your preferences, your previous purchases, maybe they’re even predicting the kind of mood you’re in at the moment (by the comfort food you’re holding, etc.) The whole thing has the possibility of becoming very much like the eye scanning depicted in the movie Minority Report.

It’s important to consider the privacy implications of any new technology, and this just happens to be one we should be watching closely.

This entry was posted by Will () on Wednesday, September 29th, 2004 at 12:12 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Note: Blog posts are the opinions of their authors and do not reflect the official opinion of the National Science Foundation or North Carolina State University.