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.

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H.R. 2929, the Safeguard Against Privacy Invasions Act, is a bill that was introduced in 2003 by Rep. Mary Bono, a republican from California. It has been approved for a full vote on the house floor.

According to this article from ZDNet, “The Spy Act includes 21 pages of dense regulations that specify what software can and can’t do and under what circumstances it must seek explicit permission from the user to proceed.”

As noted in this PC World article, this is not the only piece of legislation being considered regarding the fight against spyware. Utah has already passed some legislation to combat the technology, as discussed here.