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Privacy advocates are unhappy about a controversial program being piloted by Head Start in Richmond California: RFID for preschoolers.
The Head Start program is testing the use of RFID to help pre-school teachers keep track of their students. It cost fifty thousand dollars for two hundred children, although the equipment is re-usable if the program is kept. Head Start officials have assured the public that there is no child-specific information on the RFID tags other than the child’s name. On top of this, the RFID tags are swiped at the end of each day, and even that small amount of information is erased. In Head Start programs, attendance is taken hourly, and automatic RFID attendance taking represents a substantial savings in effective classroom teaching time. The RFID attendance program is fully optional, and parents in the school have been extremely supportive of it.
The ACLU is opposed to the program, saying that RFID technology is insecure, invasive, and intrusive. They emphasize that RFID tags can be read at great distance (a hundred meters, for the chips being used in the program) without anyone knowing. They also emphasize that RFID is extremely insecure, and chip signatures can be copied. Potentially, someone could copy a child’s chip and place it on the school grounds, so that the child would be automatically counted as present an not searched for when they had been abducted. This scenario seems unlikely, given how much easier and less expensive it is to remove a jersey from a preschooler than to duplicate an RFID tag.
Over all, it comes down to a question of weighing risks to benefits. Of course, of course it is important to protect children from abduction. However, it is also important to provide them with a good education, particularly early in life when they are learning things they will never learn as well any other time. Unfortunately, much of the negative reaction to this program is a knee jerk reaction to the general lack of security in RFID applications, rather than thoughtful analysis of what appropriate application of the technology might be.