The rights and wrongs of using radio frequency identification (RFID) tags on humans have been debated since the tracking tags reached the technological mainstream. Now, school authorities in the Japanese city of Osaka have decided the benefits outweigh the disadvantages and will now be chipping children in one primary school.
(http://news.com.com/Japan+school+kids+to+be+tagged+with+RFID+chips/2100-1012_3-5266700.html?tag=st.rc.targ_mb)
What are your thoughts on this?
My view:
As long as the kids know that they will be tracked (and I’m sure they do…I know about it, you know about it, surely they know about it), I have no problem with it. I am a big fan of RFID. I think it will change the way companies and people track and take account of their belongings.
I hope that RFID technology becomes simple enough for normal people to use on their own things such as a wallet or keys or something that could easily be misplaced. You can add a small RFID sensor to your pets (extreme example!) I know Gilette and HP use them in their products, and retailers like Wal-Mart use them a lot also.
I look at RFID tags as the real-world equivalent of cookies that Amazon.com uses to help improve it’s online store. The downside is you lose some of your privacy (same with cookies), but in my opinion, “How can you lose what you never really had?” Security cameras at an airport/wal-mart/etc. are a bigger invasion of privacy than something as cool as RFID tags
While I do agree that its nice if we can use them for everyday things, but tracking kids and human beings is I think going too far.
Personaly if someone told me at any age that I would have a chip and me and I would be tracked, I would go find the closest fork and dig it out of me. And there could be psychological fallout from all this that we might not know about it, privacy is more than just comfort, and with kids its also about teaching them responsibility and I think tracking them at all time never stops the feeling of being babysitted, while this might be completle false, we still don’t know the problems that might be in the end.
I agree with RussianBeer. While there are cameras at Walmart and stuff, those don’t go into the privacy of one’s house. Microchips do. That’s going beyond the line of how I define privacy.
And I wouldn’t want my child to do what Schwarzie did in Total Recall. That’s a big no-no.
They’re not putting the chips in the kids, they’re putting them on a nametag or backpack, which would (i assume) only be worn during school hours. I invision like a pin or something that goes on their shirts.
IMO, this is a slippery slope, that could only end in a bad way…
Surely the public is wary of getting a microchip implant, so the external RFID tags will suite fine, for now… The problem is, if a child is kidnapped, all the kidnapper has to do is seperate the child from his/her RFID keychain, and it will become useless. (Or in the case of keeping children in school, the kid who ditches just has to make sure that his keychain is traveling with a friend who is at school) The only obvious option at that point would be to embed the chip into the body. And im sure the temptation to make that chip like a credit card, in order to do away with cash, and cash related crimes, would be far too great to deny… You see how dangerously close this comes to the ‘Mark of the Beast’ System (no man can buy or sell, save that he has the chip) fortold in the Bible… Now this might be an extreme example, but i really do believe that this technology was created for that purpose, and is headed in that direction. Honestly, to not see this agenda, and understand its ultimate objective, is naive.
“The threads of life are torn, there ain’t no way the rip will fix /
beware the microchip that replaces the triple-six” - Chali 2na
yup, I’ve seen something on TV yesterday night (on the news) that seemed pretty close to that already.
There’s a discotheque (??) in Spain that implants in 5 minutes with the help of a seringe, a microchip no bigger than the size of a grain of rice. It’s implanted in the arm, somewhere under the shoulder muscle and it’s used by the VIP bouncers to check who’s allowed in the VIP box or not. They use a little scan device that reads the chip, and if it is recognized by the program, a picture and name goes on the screen. Then the person with the chip is allowed in.
What’s more, is that those VIPs give money to replenish a virtual wallet, and the waitresses use that same scanning machine to deduce the amounts of the drinks…
So, yeah. I guess the technology is badly going down the mercantile slope…
for those french-speaking people… http://videos.tf1.fr/video/news/lesjt/ > journal de 20 heures, 21 juillet, reportage intitulé “une puce pour rentrer en boite de nuit”
I find this so disturbing… when they say that it cant be stolen, what stops criminals from doing a little gheto surgery. Well, I see the problems with it… but still.
Businesses and some universities use cards like that to allow individuals to gain access to doors that would otherwise need to be manually unlocked. There would need to be some sort of a universal language that all supermarkets can use so that you won’t have to have one card for Wal-Mart, another one for Sears, etc.
It’s a great idea, and I’m sure that will happen sometime in the near future.
T-0!!! :sigh: , i think it’s a good idea, as long as they are not implants…but external, the bennifits out weigh the negatives by so much, increased safety in schools is great, and in todays world you can never be too careful…
[ot]i sound like an old person
[/ot]
What benefits? If it’s external, I see no benefits whatsoever. If it’s internal, I definitely see benefits, but they are outweighted by the negatives imo (imo being the key words here). So please, tell us, old man …
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