Quote Originally Posted by BBC
Pupil Hernandez, who refused to wear RFID, loses appeal

A Texan student who refused to wear a badge with a radio tag that tracked her movements has lost a federal court appeal against her school's ID policy.



The radio chips track attendance, which in turn helps secure school funding.

But Andrea Hernandez, 15, stopped wearing the badge on religious grounds, saying it was the "mark of the beast".

After John Jay High School suspended her, she went to court and won a temporary injunction to continue her studies at the school, without the tag.

The federal court ruling overturned that, saying if she was to stay at the school, she would be required to wear the badge. Otherwise, she would have to transfer to a new school.

The new identification policy at the Northside Independent School District (NISD) in San Antonio, Texas, began at the start of the 2012 school year.

John Jay High School is one of two schools piloting the programme, which eventually aims to equip all student badges across the district's 112 schools with radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips.

The badges reveal each student's location on their campus, giving the district more precise information on attendance.

The daily average of the attendance is related to how much funding each school receives.

But Miss Hernandez said the badge was the "mark of the beast", as described in chapter 13 of the Book of Revelation in the Bible.
Biblical idiocy aside, anyone else feel uncomfortable about this?

A good friend of mine whom I employed as a contractor a number of years ago was one of the first to pilot the software behind the interface for tracking and monitoring RFID tags. The main business he had for his RFID software was for baggage at airports, prisoners in prison, and firemen in burning building situations.

Now things like tracking baggage have an obvious benefit with RFID, tracking firemen in emergency situations is another obvious benefit, and I have no issue with tracking the movements of prisoners in prison - they have waived their normal rights.

But I do feel uncomfortable with tracking kids in school, just as I would tracking workers in an office/factory. I'd hate for my every action to be tracked; toilet breaks etc.

Perhaps this is inevitable? One day this will be the norm? It could be argued that it isn't too difficult to track ones movements anyway, through the proliferation of usage of electronic travel cards, credit cards, CCTV etc?