Chinese Schools Are Using 'Smart Uniforms' To Track Their Students' Locations (theverge.com) 95
"It's as dystopian as it sounds," opines The Verge:
Chinese schools are now tracking the exact location of their students using chip-equipped "smart uniforms" in order to encourage better attendance rates, according to a report from state-run newspaper The Global Times. Each uniform has two chips in the shoulders which are used to track when and where the students enter or exit the school, with an added dose of facial recognition software at the entrances to make sure that the right student is wearing the right outfit (so you can't just have your friend, say, wear an extra shirt while you go off and play hooky). Try to leave during school hours? An alarm will go off....
There are additional features, too, according to a report from The Epoch Times: the chips can apparently detect when a student has fallen asleep in class, and allow students to make payments (using additional facial or fingerprint recognition to confirm the purchase). The uniforms are being used in 10 schools in China's Guizhou Province region, and apparently have been in use for some time -- according to Lin Zongwu, principal of No. 11 School of Renhuai, over 800 students in his school have been wearing the smart uniforms since 2016.
There are additional features, too, according to a report from The Epoch Times: the chips can apparently detect when a student has fallen asleep in class, and allow students to make payments (using additional facial or fingerprint recognition to confirm the purchase). The uniforms are being used in 10 schools in China's Guizhou Province region, and apparently have been in use for some time -- according to Lin Zongwu, principal of No. 11 School of Renhuai, over 800 students in his school have been wearing the smart uniforms since 2016.
Now THAT... (Score:5, Funny)
Now THAT is what you can truly call -
SpyWear
Re: Now THAT... (Score:2)
Next step is (Score:5, Insightful)
mandatory tracking implants.
No implant? No food, no travel.
If/when you're detected, you'll probably be detained at a "police" station until you're moved to a nice relocation site under a death sentence.
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No implant? No food, no travel.
Placing the implant on the right hand or the forehead would be a nice touch.
A real working slippery slope (Score:1)
Dog collars are next. It's only logical. A mere 'alarm' is no fun. Ain't authoritarianism sexy? Bunch of dirty old men running the government
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Why stop there, shock collars for the win! If you're going to control your populous, you can't stop at half-ass.
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Do you have these gruesome thoughts on and off, or are you just generally a psychopath?
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Yes, I was assuming the electronic kind.
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Quite a few of dirty young men and women of all ages like this too. Somebody does enable these "dirty old men", you know.
intestinator. (Score:2)
intestinator.
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That's what authoritarianism is, a fetish.
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Why isn't the West standing up and saying WTF?
Isn't this the pinnacle of human rights violations?
Coming to a city near you as soon as they take your money away and force you to use electronic funds.
Re:Must've been that one kid (Score:4, Insightful)
More than one. Apparently about 30% of US citizens find authoritarianism pretty cool if it is presented right to them. Explains a lot. Not that the rest of the world is much better. Dark times.
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Ah, yes, the myth of the "noble leader". One of the main ways authoritarians justify their deep desire to dominate everybody and to force everybody to live like them. Here is news for you: It is not true. Such leaders do not exist or rather the people that could be such leaders have no desire at all to be leaders. Hence leaders self-select for being non-noble leaders. The thing authoritarianism then adds is a lack of checks and balances.
In other words: People like you are part of the problem. Sorry.
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Oh, yes. Of course, those with hunger for power learn early that they need to be able to pretend to have leadership qualities.
So while there certainly are people among us who would be great leaders, even though they would likely have to be forced into it, we have no process identifying them and for keeping that selection process non-corrupted. If we had that, we could finally get good leadership. But we do not. Hence any form of authoritarianism will have somebody or some clique on top that is really bad. A
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Scary as f*ck ... (Score:5, Insightful)
... the way the Chinese are taking the concept of an orwellian state further to unseen depths on a biweekly basis, is it not?
Folks we're going to be in some super-bizarre global Cyberpunk society in 2 decades from now if this catches on globally and it ain't going to be half as cool as in a roleplaying game, a Stevenson/Gibson novel or some bladerunner movie sequel - it will just plain suck, big time. I don't want this and neither do you. Talk to you folks about this, we are the opinion leaders when it comes to IT and we need to wake up as many as possible before it's too late.
My 2 eurocents.
Re:Scary as f*ck ... (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess this is like 1984 as seen from the Eastasian point of view... except it’s really happening.
Man, this is scary stuff.
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Re: Scary as f*ck ... (Score:2)
Some of them may operate with the idea that these troves of data can exist indefinitely with none of the parties involved ever tempted to use or sell it... I'm not sure what gave them that impression.
The impression that I get is that Eastasia's constitution could use an Information Age Bill of Rights; an amendment enshrining the rig
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toll tags only tack places that have readers and on cars that have an tag
Re:Scary as f*ck ... (Score:5, Informative)
... the way the Chinese are taking the concept of an orwellian state further to unseen depths on a biweekly basis, is it not?
Don't kid yourself that this is only in China, although yes it is scary as fuck.
RFID tags in clothing has been a thing for roughly a decade now.
https://rfid4u.com/rfid-for-uniform-and-laundry-tracking/ [rfid4u.com]
The UK has done it
https://www.engadget.com/2007/10/21/uk-secondary-school-tests-rfid-embedded-uniforms/ [engadget.com]
Brazil has done it
https://www.zdnet.com/article/uniform-computer-chips-track-student-locations/ [zdnet.com]
India has done it
http://www.childsafetyindia.com/ [childsafetyindia.com]
The US has schools that have done it too
https://www.wired.com/2012/09/rfid-chip-student-monitoring/ [wired.com]
Those are just the ones I remember reading about. I have no doubt plenty of other places are doing it as well.
Re:Scary as f*ck ... (Score:4, Insightful)
I know you're uncomfortable with our forward progress, but you need to think of the
*shuffles flash cards*
"Terrorists."
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If you consider universal government tracking "progress", you are the single dumbest person on the internet.
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* the parents demanded it in some schools, here in Brazil (it was not an school-only demand: parents demanded more control over his children...) - yes, I think it's scary as f*ck!
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>"When kids are at school, you want them to be tracked. Kids have been tracked and monitored at school for decades."
There is a difference between taking attendance and tracking every moment of a child. Watching if they are awake. Watching who they associate with. Watching everywhere they go. Oh, and "watching" also means "storing for future reference." Where does the tracking end? What is next?
This is bad for anyone but perhaps especially harmful for children- if they grow up thinking they are alwa
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Where does the tracking end?
As soon as they leave school (the sensor area), or put the RFID chip in aluminum. These chips don't have a very long range.
What is next?
Now this is a slippery slope fallacy. Just because schools use RFID in uniforms doesn't mean you're going to be implanted with RFID.
This is bad for anyone but perhaps especially harmful for children- if they grow up thinking they are always being watched by people not there,
You already think you're always being watched by people not there. This is not "Always being watched" it's "being tracked at school."
Re:Scary as f*ck ... (Score:4, Informative)
but it is already happening globally to some extent think smartwatches and smartphones. they all have gps tracking. then you have your cars and smart homes.
Re:Scary as f*ck ... (Score:4, Insightful)
The former is an expansion of your choices. You can eschew the new options if you don't like them, like I refuse to use Facebook.
The latter is a reduction of your choices and freedom.
Re: Scary as f*ck ... (Score:2)
While I mostly agree, is not having a phone really a choice today? Soon you won't be able to buy a car that doesn't have its own connection. We have choices today, but they are disappearing fast.
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the next time you hear about the US playing world police, remember articles like this one. it will be so, so much worse if the chinese supplant the US as the global super power.
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No it won't. Chinese society will explode sooner or later and the bureaucrats running the asylum will be first up against the wall. They have an example to work from.
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Uniforms are part of that Communist culture.
Then who got into the mil, who was politically trusted to travel to the West.
The Social Credit System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Now the Communists want to know where all their trusted people are.
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... the way the Chinese are taking the concept of an orwellian state further to unseen depths on a biweekly basis, is it not?
Others are doing it as well. Read the Snowden stuff for examples. The only difference is that the Chinese are doing it openly. In some twisted sense that makes it more honorable. The world is really going to hell.
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Onward and inward (Score:2)
I can't help but think that China is creating a guaranteed market for applied AI with their surveillance state the same way the U.S. created a guaranteed market for all sorts of supporting technologies during the cold war.
The result of this will be lots of innovation not just in the AI itself, but in the hardware, and theoretical space as well.
Plus China's AI will be working against people who don't want their Social Credit (or whatever) diminished. In the U.S., AI will be working to figure out when you are
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the Orwellian model is more economically viable and therefore will out-compete the individualist model
I very much doubt that's the case, for any normal definition of "viable" - at least for the long term. The centralized nature of an authoritarian economy is advantageous for single large scale pharaonic projects, where a lot of resources can be focused on some goal, with no concern about costs. This is how Russia managed to get the hydrogen bomb so quickly, and how they launched the first satellite and sent the first man in space. But in an Orwellian economy there is no incentive to improve efficiency. The
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the populace still cannot rebel no matter how unsatisfied they become with the status quo
The ruled will always outnumber those who rule. An oppressive, controlling, authoritarian regime can only survive as long as it takes the ruled to realize they have nothing to lose by overthrowing the regime.
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It's not that creepy. (Score:4, Informative)
I work at a perfectly ordinary school in the UK. We issue all students with chips - in the form of identity cards. These cards contain a photo of the student and a simple RFID chip. They serve as passes to open doors, as identifiers for paying for lunch, as their library card, and for identifying themselves to the printer-copiers. They are also supposed to be an essential part of our safeguarding procedures, because without these cards any teenager could wander in and pose as one of our students - though in practice this doesn't work so well, because students are constantly losing, forgetting or defacing their cards. The girls in particular often hold the view that their photo is the ugliest thing ever taken, and will scratch it off of their badge rather than allow anyone to glimpse their shameful image. Students also routinely body-slam the doors to force the magnetic locks open, or loiter outside waiting for someone else to come through, because they left their badge at home or lost it. Issuing RDIF badges is a very common practice - schools have been doing it for years.
So some schools in China put the ID chips into the uniform. It's the obvious next step: An identifier that, hopefully, the horrible creatures won't lose or destroy within a week.
The only thing we don't use the cards for is attendance. Too easy to defraud - if we did that then any student could bunk off for the day and just lend their badge to a friend to beep them in. I suppose facial or fingerprint recognition could fix that, if you can get it working reliably.
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at least those RFID cards don't have gps tracking as the chinese uniforms supposedly have.
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I doubt the uniforms really have GPS tracking. Simple issue of battery life and cost. More likely it's just a long-range RFID tag, and a bunch of readers dotted around the school that pick up every time a student passes by. Explains why they aren't tracked outside of school.
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China does its own thing (Score:1)
Their society has rules and if a citizen abides by the rules they progress. If you do not you will be crushed. If you wish to change the rules, then you work within the system to make it happen. In short, state governance operates much like how a company works. Witness the pace of change in China; it can be far more efficient than a multi-party Western democracy.
Only time will tell if it is a better than a Western democracy. However, it's hard to imagine at the moment that any Westerners, Europeans with th
Only news because China. (Score:2)
The 1 Child Policy Didn't work. (Score:1)
Freedom (Score:2)
Regarding red light cameras I frequently say that if you're automatically caught for any infraction then you are not truly free. I'd say the same here except that in China that's already a given.