As if it wasn’t bad enough to have a jacket that can track your child’s every movement, parents now think it’s a great idea to put RFID chips in their children’s school uniforms so they can keep track of them even when they’ve taken off their nifty Blade Runner jackets.

Clare Rix, the marketing director, said: “As well as being a safety net for parents, there could be real benefits for schools who could keep a closer track on the whereabouts of their pupils, potentially reducing truancy levels.’

Uh, no.  You can still be skipping school while your buddy has your blazer, wristband, whatever in school.  Better yet, you can leave your shirt in a locker room, the hallway, a garbage bin, your locker, etc., and the school will still have no clue where you are.

Keeping track of your every moment from the time you are a small child only facilitates the transition to a surveillance society.  If you know nothing other than being tracked, how will you ever decide that it is wrong?  How will you be able to discern how much surveillance is too much?  Or will these children grow up to completely distrust everyone and everything, creating constant warfare?

An amusing response by the user, byte, appears on Bruce Schneier’s blog.

From the text; advantages are

- “speedy retrieval and analysis of data.” Erm… why does a school need fast retrieval and analysis of data? Sonds to me like they had some database salesman convinve them.

- “additional benefit of reduced costs in replacing school uniforms that have gone astray” I don’t get it – You add something and it costs less to replace it?

- “limit access to doors for certain people at certain times, including shutting the main doors of a school to pupils during classtime.”

Great. I assume all of you work with software or hardware of some sort. So you know both can have bugs and fail. The more complex, the more likely. Imagine a fire breaking out and the reader at the door denies your kids getting out due to a programming error…

- “it provides immediate registration of the pupil as they enter the classroom. This supports staff as they are getting to know pupils.”

Oh. So there’s this big LCD above the door saying *bing* “Rheanna Myers” or something like that? I didn’t know that staf not getting to know their pupils was that bis of a problem…

“We believe the system will work equally well in corporate and commercial scenarios and we’re now seeking backing to help us attack a huge potential market, including the £300m annual school clothing spend.” A-ha. So, they use pupils as test-scenario for tracking employees

If you want to play some jokes (or test the system), clone some tags and attach them to random pupils. Lets see how “speedy” the analysis gets the fact that some pupils attend 6 classes at the same time…

Even better, swipe the tag of a pupil missing during a test – a test missing means trouble…

Somehow this reminds me of the ear-tags used to track cattle…

Even prisoners aren’t tracked this much.  This will do nothing to protect the security of the children.  It will catch smokers, skivers (those who skip class for my fellow Americans), and those that are tardy.  Columbine, Dunblane, and all the other nutty people who shoot up schools would still have been able to enter school on those fateful days.  They still would have been able to kill and no RFID chip is ever going to change that.

If the school officials don’t trust the teachers or the students, how about they wear these RFID tagged blazers as well?  Wouldn’t it be great if we could track their every move?

Given the fact that teenagers are overly rebellious, this might actually be fun to watch the many ways they discover to circumvent this system.  This is doomed to fail, but at least the children will get a few laughs while “testing” the system.  That is, until the schools install those Battle Royale type collars.