Using RFID and Wi-Fi to Track Students

An anonymous reader writes "The BBC reports on a proposal to use RFID and wi-fi to track students wherever they go on campus: 'Battery-powered RFID tags are placed on an asset and they communicate with at least three wireless access points inside the network to triangulate a location.' At The Wireless Event in London, 'Marcus Birkl, head of wireless at Siemens, said location tracking of assets or people was one of the biggest incentives for companies, hospitals and education institutions to roll out wi-fi networks.' The article points out that integration of RFID and wi-fi raises the possibility that RFID can be used for remote surveillance."

Hmmm, did the BBC fire their web designers?

Seriously though, I can't remember Slashdot ever linking directly to the printable page. I wish they'd do it more often.

Help in an emergency?

Angelo Lamme, from Motorola, said tracking students on a campus could help during a fire or an emergency.

And how exactly are you going to access the data if the school is on fire? I cannot think of any legitimate use for this.

Re:Help in an emergency?

Maybe, but it will look good on the tracking screen when all the little dots indicating tags start blinking out.

Don't upset the dots.

"Who's upsetting my dots?? Are you messing with my dots?!?"

And you left yours where?

Adding to your thought: Unless the device is virtually inseperable from the student, what's to say that it isn't left behind during evacuation, or conversely, the student who doesn't evacuate happened to leave their backpack containing it back in their d

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notice that schools (even elementary) have become crazy about all the students displaying their school IDs... they're planning ahead.

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"I cannot think of any legitimate use for this."

You obviously cannot think very hard then. Lecture attendance registers (and alerting a student if they are about to miss a lecture), finding lost patients (apparently a common problem, especially with mental

Re:Help in an emergency?

Lecture attendance registers (and alerting a student if they are about to miss a lecture)

Kickass, now all you need to do is get a friend to bring your tag. Purely accidentally too, of course, if anyone were to ask. Then you get the fun of people not getting detected correctly and students having to spend 2 months arguing that they didn't miss all the classes (and so didn't fail the class). The prof is of course on a sabbatical (and didn't really pay attention to who attended anyways) and the TAs slept through the lectures. And since the system can never lie or be wrong the student must be lying.

Student security

Such as? Oh no, I'm in a building that isn't my department so I can use the bathroom, better call the cops.

efficient computers/lighting (i.e. computers/lights turn on/off when someone enters/exits room)

So the school has never heard of motion detectors I take it? Joy, now I'll need to bring a flashlight with me for all the times this more complex thus error prone detection system fails.

computer account security and log-on convenience.

...unless the tag is embedded in your arm you gain no security benefit unless there is a password as well. Then you gain no convenience benefit. Not to mention that you'd need a detector next to each computer as a tracking system (that is error prone likely) would be far from "Secure."

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And how exactly are you going to access the data if the school is on fire?

Wirelessly, presumably.

Of course, your WAPs need to a little more sophisticated than most, and have local batteries, and be resistant to particulates (so smoke doesn't kill them eas

Umm, Stalking.

Once each student is equipped with a WiFi tag do theyr really imagine that only the school will have this info. Forget the overzealous parent that wants 24/7 monitoring. What about the creepy stalker who wants to follow the girl of his dreams? What about the kidnapper who wants to watch his target?

Forget claims about 'encryption' (it's a unique ID who cares what it "means") or limitations on distance, readers have already shown success at distances far beyond those claimed.

What about the paedophile who wants to track that one kid...

 

Re:Umm, Stalking.

What about the creepy stalker who wants to follow the girl of his dreams?

Hrmmm... Good point. On second thought, I support RFID tags for students.

Re:Umm, Stalking.

What about the paedophile who wants to track that one kid...

What's he going to hang around a college for?

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17 year olds.

Re:Umm, Stalking.

um, hello - pedos don't go for 17 year olds. Normal people do, at least until they open their mouths.

Re:Umm, Stalking.

Once each student is equipped with a WiFi tag do theyr really imagine that only the school will have this info. Forget the overzealous parent that wants 24/7 monitoring. What about the creepy stalker who wants to follow the girl of his dreams?

Exactly, and does it even matter if only the "school" has it? Like nobody bad ever worked in a school. So the Creepy Vice Principle can see that this one girl is alone in the bathroom in the middle of a class session. Great.

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Imagine. Someone could peer through the logs and see when/where a person is by themselves late at night on a regular basis. Most criminals are opportunistic and there's no better opportunity than what this would create.

Are there mod points for creepy?

This is Snape's idea

Thus rendering Harry's invisibility cloak useless.

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Offtopic? C'mon, it was funny. A little levity here please before we go back to trying to think of how this won't be misused in a college setting.

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Actually, it is how the Marauder's Map works

Orwell College, I assume...

no practical reason for this whatsoever.

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Tell that to the parents of the Purdue University kid who was dead in a utility closet for a week or more before they found him.

Students = Assets?

"Battery-powered RFID tags are placed on an asset and they communicate with at least three wireless access points inside the network to triangulate a location."

So students are now assets?

It was a typo.

So students are now assets?

I think it was a typo. They meant they want to track student asses. You know, the jackasses who get drunk and trash parts of the campus or the ones who think "Animal House" was a video student manual on how to act when at colle

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So students are now assets?

On a balance sheet? Yes. Or possibly liabilties. But they are one or the other.

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So students are now assets?

Well, when you consider the money students (and by extension, their parents) bring in to the univ through alumni funds, sports tickets, targeted advertising [mtvu.com], the college loan bribery scandal [google.com], and loan companies profiting [msn.com] off of said bribery scandal...

Make It Stylish...

And college kids will bleat all the way through WiFi checkpoints.

stupid

This makes sense for hospitals and that's about it. Everywhere else it's a liability.

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"This makes sense for hospitals...."

and maybe even within a large prison

emergencies, right...

Angelo Lamme, from Motorola, said tracking students on a campus could help during a fire or an emergency.

Sure; during a fire or emergency sounds like a great time to be snooping around to see where particular students are. Fire alarms seem to be much more helpful than tracking techniques for real emergencies; surveillance technology is much more likely to be used during times of "business as usual," and generally not during times when most people are running around screaming for their lives.
BR>Meanwhile, I can see this sort of technology having great applications during "business as usual" times for creepy security guards who want to see what that hot blonde chick does after her chemistry class... Especially for the peeping tom or stalker types who want to make sure they're walking by the right dorm room window when she gets out of the shower.

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surveillance technology is much more likely to be used during times of "business as usual," and generally not during times when most people are running around screaming for their lives.

That raises another interesting point. According to TFA the tags will

Potentially sarcastic comment to follow

What is the saying? "Give me safety or give me death!" Who needs freedom when you have someone in a position of authority telling you where you can and cannot go, what you can and cannot say, or what you can and cannot do. If it isn't broken, don't fix it.

The real data that this program will show you is

that there are typically 5 people sitting in the same chair at Monday morning 8:00 a.m. Calculus classes....

Apparently some pretty smart RFID tags.

So I am gathering that the "brains" on these tags can handle all the handshaking involved with an 802.11(b/g/n) link, including whatever parts of TCP/IP are needed to pass the signal strength data back to the servers? Sounds to me that this is a little bit more involved than just an RFID tag, more like a simple Wi-Fi enabled device that connnects and reports back signal strengths/timing etc. A bit more complex than a chip tied to a small antenna patch (and battery for transmit signal amplification).

Enforcement

How would you make sure that every student has his tag on him at all times? For this to work, the tag can't be larger than a credit card. It'd presumably be integrated with the student ID. Even then, what's to prevent the student from carrying the card in

Hmm...

If I was the evil overlord incharge of that school district with the money to implement this plan, I'd start first with each schools' library books and then to all the school books. (The school books are assigned to a student, whose parents are responsible for replacement if the books are lost/damaged so you get 5-7 RFID tags depending on how many school owned books are assigned to each student.) After that, I'd make it a little change in the school ID cards that are redone at the beginning of each school year. I could have all the ID cards with passive RFID chips without informing anyone until my evil parenting OS backend webserver was ready to handle all the parents and slashdotters that will be watching their dots move around.

For student privacy/safety, I'd not make it a "public" website. You'd have to have a Parent ID/login before you could look up where your kid has been all day and maybe associated dots/students around them. The teachers and maybe staff would have access, but the general public should only see lots of dots (without ID numbers) moving around just cause it looks neat.

After 2-3 generations of this "safely" happening, then I'd try to expand the program to all schools, or the entire state's new DLs.

Well, if I were an evil overlord with any power...

Cisco has been doing this for a while

I went to a seminar a few years ago that had some head from Cisco speaking. He was showing off their latest wireless system (it was some cool stuff!) and one of the features it had was this RFID location system. He brought up an app that had a map of a floor of one of the buildings in their campus. He showed us, in live time, as one of the employees dot's left their office and walked to the bathroom. From half the country away he could see where everyone was. The location tag I believe was built into their access keys, so they were pretty much always on them.

Great technology for a hospital, prison, and maybe a handful of other specific situations. But a school? It was scary enough seeing it in action for an office building.

-Rick

Knowledge is power...

The government could implant an rfid device in every one of its citizens, beginning at birth, and then construct a tracking infrastructure and database system that would let them see the physical location of every person in real time and the historical location by consulting the database. Imagine what this would mean:

1) Crime would be ended since, after any crime, the police would only have to log onto the computer to see who was present at the moment the crime was comitted.

2) Population control would be easy since whenever a boy dot was in very close proximity, say less than 1 inche, to a girl dot, a little pink heart could start flashing on the screen and the government watchperson could administer a little remote-controlled voltage zap to the two parties to ruin the amore of the moment.

3) Transportation problems...a thing of the past...since you would need a permit to commute over road xyz which would specify your permitted travel times.

4) Money? Who would need it? Your id tag would just be automatically billed for whatever. If you didn't pay...you could just be confined to whereever and monitored for compliance. No need for prisons, either, for anyone but the most dangerous.

5) Adultery, stalking, speeding, trespassing, etc. are examples of a few of the many crimes that would be obsoleted due to their degree of difficulty and the ease with which transgressors would be identified.

Okay, maybe we are not quite ready for all of this yet, at least the democrats, but the republicans and Attorney General Gonzales would be down with it, no doubt. Also, what about North Korea, Venezueala, Cuba, China, or Saudi Arabia? They would be fine with this stuff, no doubt. And we all will be eventually, like it or not.

Re:Knowledge is power...

No need for prisons, either, for anyone but the most dangerous.

You forgot to add - the most dangerous crime of all is not murder, it's removing or tampering with your ID.

Why plug up the Wi-FI APs with this?

Instead, instal micro cell sites and track using their cell phones. They have a reason to take their cell phone with them (not just a useless tracking tag), you don't have the roll out cost of issuing these tags, and to make this work, you're going to have to put up a heckuva lot of new Wi-Fi APs to do any sort of triangulation, anyway. Why not use cell phone signals on maybe several dozen micro cell sites on campus instead? As a bonus, handled call volume increases and you can get the cell companies to help subsidize the cost...and manage the user database, too.

Then again, why in hell do we really need to monitor student movement so closely in the first place?

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All cell phones made and sold after 2005 have GPS trackers built-in, and can report their location to the meter to the carrier, second-by-second, whether the owner wishes it so or no. Little known fact: that tracking data is available to third parties for

what's the real crisis -- safety, or obesity?

I was born in 1966. A couple of big things were different then:

1. The obesity epidemic hadn't started.
2. The mass hysteria about kids' safety (child molesters, etc.) hadn't started.

Recently we got a mailing from our kids' principal about walking to and from school. It was survey about how many kids walked, but it came with a letter from the principal basically implying that any parent who let their kids walk was a bad parent, because it was so unsafe. This is the same principal who has instituted rules about which direction the kids can swing on the playground swings. The previous principal organized a bike rodeo for kids to improve their skills on bikes, and kids who worked on their skills, and demonstrated them at the bike rodeo, got the privilege of using the bike racks. My older kid passed, but then the new principal came in, and the whole idea suddenly went away. I do not know of any kid at this school who has ever gotten hurt walking or cycling to or from school. I do know of one kid who got hit by a car after school, because her parents were sitting, double-parked, in their air-conditioned SUV on the other side of the street, beckoning her to run across the street and get in.

When I was a kid, I started walking to the babysitter's house after school when I was in kindergarten. Nobody thought that was unusual. This was in an urban environment (Albany, CA). I learned to look both ways before crossing the street, and to cross on the green. No biggie.

Today, it seems like most affluent kids' existence consists of being shuttled back and forth in their mom's SUV from one air-conditioned building to another. And we wonder why the obesity epidemic is happening.

Psychologically, people like to have the illusion of control. For instance, studies have shown that drivers consistently overestimate their own ability to deal with an emergency. When it comes to kids, parents want to have the illusion of safety that comes from having their kid carry a cell phone all the time. Radio-tracking your kids is just the latest instance of this kind of mass hysteria.

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The mass hysteria about kids' safety (child molesters, etc.) hadn't started.

IIRC, even with this hysteria, the number of actual cases has been fairly static for decades.

I do not know of any kid at this school who has ever gotten hurt walking or cycling

We already have this...

...I go to the University of Warwick, and we have this already. There are RFID chips in our library cards which we have to use to go into the library, take out books, the learning grid (its a 24/7 mini-library and work area that they've packed full of buzz-words...) or sports center. They are also used to give variable access to departmental buildings when they are not "open", as it were. For example if you are a statistics student you can get into that departments building at 3 in the morning but you can't get into social sciences.

These are passive and so give me little reason to be worried (although I do have a sheet of metal in my wallet anyway, just in case). They also provide pretty much all the benefits of an active chip without as much of a feeling that they are doing some weird prying into your life.

Having said that this system didn't stop my friend from having £180 charged to him because someone stole his library card and took out 10 books on it... having active cards could just make that problem far worse -
Security: "It seems the fire was started by you, Scott"
Scott: "But I was at home on my own all night"
Security: "Tell it to the police, and in the mean time you've been kicked out - read the University ToS, we can kick you out whenever for whatever reason"
Scott: "Bugger..."

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I saw that episode, but wasn't sure if it was something that had actually been done in a real school before. Of course like all such cop dramas it portrayed such surveillance as though it was completely positive and had no negative implications at all. O

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If you're a bad guy, why not just switch tags with someone else?

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Because it was embedded somewhere in your chest cavity at birth, of course.

But yeah, that's an obvious problem. Stolen ID == the RFID tracker "proves" it was you who was in the administrative office when the petty cash box was looted.

Re:Cost

That being said, how big are these things? What would be the consequence of not carrying one around?

The RFID chips themselves are small they can be implanted under your skin or woven into clothing, or into the student ID that you have to carry around everywhere. The battery power is probably the size of a battery; it's unclear from the FA what kind of battery is necessary, but I imagine it would be pretty small. "Lugging it around" would not be an issue, and I'm sure student fees could easily absorb the cost without much notice. The real question is what real value does this have other than providing a tool for stalkers or control freak administrators? Do we really want to encourage the equivalent of temporary restraining orders or dorm arrests as a disciplinary mechanism in colleges, for example?

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RFID has no built in power. It's passive and power is radiated from the reader. So, yup, you could easily put it on a sticker (in fact I believe this is what most RFID enabled stores do).

Re:Cost

RFID being used to track people is just plain stupid.

There's an argument being made that it can help firefighters rescue people in fire-engulfed smoky buildings -- rubbish. Sure, there may be someone in the building needing rescue; but, what if the person is nothing more than an RFID ID card that's been dropped in the hustle to escape a fire? Now the fire-fighter is NEEDLESSLY endangering himself and others to rescue a piece of plastic and silicon.

Besides, power is cut to buildings that are on fire to mitigate further risk of electrical shorts that might have caused the fire in the first place and to prevent electrocution when those wacky fire-fighters start throwing water around. OK, forget the water. The power's been cut. Where exactly are these RFID towers again? Do they have power? Was the grid taken down to facilitate putting out the fire? Two towers still up so I have an idea where some RFID *tag* is *someplace* in level 2,3 or 4 somewhere in a 40,000sq ft building?

Great job, Angelo Lamme, from Motorola - Keep up the good work.

And, yes, I used to write software that used RFID technology.

There's also the idea of dropping said device into someone else's possession - I'm sorry, who are you tracking again? The suspect exited stage right while RFID card went left.

On the other hand, using RFID to track equipment is a very handy use for RFID. There are huge RFID readers that span entire docking bays than can read some kinds of tags and accurately report the contents of dozens of boxes' contents with ease.

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for some geek student to hack in and stalk a cute target.

You got it all wrong, Geeks are socially adjusted. Nerds are the ones that wouldn't go up and talk to someone cute, and even then they wouldn't have the courage to follow them. You're just talking