Town Freaks Out over RFID

According to recent reports, the town of Sutter California is simply not ready for the Twenty First century – one wonders if some of the more vocal inhabitants there were even comfortable with the Twentieth. This small town surrounded by farms about an hour north of Sacramento made it onto the map recently when parents rose up to shield their town from a new fangled technology in the form of high tech student ID cards. Concerned parents were horrified to learn recently that the school board (there is only one public school in the town) had decided to try out new ID cards for the students with imbedded RFID tags containing the student’s ID#.

RFID tags are small passive computer chips that can be powered up by a special coded radio signal and exchange small amounts of data with the reader. They are rapidly proliferating in every corner of the globe because they are cheap, need no batteries because they are passive devices, and are perfect for ID cards, inventory tags, and may eventually replace bar codes on boxes of cereal. In this case, the school principal’s plan was to require all students to wear the ID tags and install readers at classroom doors to make it faster and more accurate to take attendance.

Apparently the thought of each child having an electronic chip in their student ID card was just too scary a proposition to comprehend for this town of 2,885. Most of the ensuing uproar, which ultimately forced the project to be abandoned, was centered around privacy rights. Some even voiced concern about possible health effects of wearing the ID tag. News crews came from far and wide, interviewing the irate parents as they picketed the school. The ACLU even came, adding their usual rhetoric to the privacy debate, claiming that the badges made every child a “walking homing beacon to stalkers with scanners.”

Never mind that the badges contained an encrypted 15 digit ID number that could only be read by the school system. Never mind that a scanner that would work at a distance would be so bulky that that the “stalker” would stand out like a sore thumb. Never mind that thousands of companies around the world use the same system for their ID badges and also in smart cards that people carry in their wallets.

Clearly this was no longer a reasoned discussion – it had rapidly devolved into an emotional reaction to technology. Some parents even quoted passages from the bible.

But maybe the tone of this uproar is being misinterpreted. Surely these parents aren’t worried about the school knowing where their children are when they are at school. And for a small school such as this, chances are that most everyone knows each other anyway. I’d be willing to bet that if you asked 5 people at random, you could find out what your friend had for lunch.

Maybe the parents are really not so worried about stalkers in their neighborhood, and maybe most of these people are not really worried about walking near the scanner any more than they are worried about passing through the metal detector at an airport or the scanners set up at the entrance to clothing stores and drug stores. Maybe it’s something else.

What if they are really worried about the future and not the present? What if they are really worried that their next drivers license issued by the state of California will have such a chip imbedded in it? What if they are more worried about being tracked themselves as they go about their day?

Maybe an innocuous ID badge for kids is seen as the first small step toward a society where your every action is recorded by some system or another and each person is profiled and logged and tagged and tracked wherever they go. Now I’m freaking myself out.