US judge rules for Texas school district in RFID tracking case - biasmustionown

Northside Independent School Dis

Tracking teenagers at school with piping-tech chips has come to a principal in Texas.

A federal evaluate there last week subordinate against a adolescent who had been suspended from senior high school for refusing to wear a radio frequency ID chip some her neck.

The case highlighted the intersection of applied science and issues of religious and personal freedom as well as the right to secrecy.

Last fall, as part of a trial that could someday include 112 schools and nearly 100,000 students, Northside Independent School District in San Antonio issued students at two of its campuses unused badges with an embedded RFID give order to track their locations.

Unlike passive chips that air data only when scanned by a reader, these chips have batteries and broadcast a ceaseless signalise soh they fundament track students' locations on civilis property. Andrea Hernandez was one bookman who took issue with the badge, saying she had religious and privacy concerns and refused to wear it. Since and so, her case went to motor inn just now a judge has ruled against her.

The school had said in modern months that Hernandez could wear a chip-inferior badge, just her father same if she did thus it would come out Eastern Samoa if she authorized of the program, which she does not.

"The First Amendment does not protect such concerns," U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia wrote in court documents (PDF). "The accommodation offered past the District is not only tenable IT removes plaintiff's religious objection from collection examination all in concert. Complainant is not likely to succeed on the merits of her free exercise claim under the First Amendment."

Money was a primary reason the school district implemented the tracking badges. The 2 schools have a alto truancy rate and by proving kids are on campus the district can garner an extra $2 million in body politic funding by cracking refine connected truancy.

On that point's no doubt that education will be much effective if more students are attending class. Also, if state fiscal livelihood remains high, the district certainly has more resources with which to educate students more effectively. And the Northside website that provides info about the "'Smart' Student ID Cards project" makes a reasonable detail. "Our students' parents expect that we always know where their children are in our schools," it says.

Yet multitude cover to voice privacy and legal concerns.

In August, several privacy advocacy groups put across out a aide-memoire (PDF) that argued that RFID tracking in schools violates students' rights to free speech and association because the technology tracks not only an singular's location, but it can monitor people who congregate together.

The paper also maintains that mandating that students wear RFID chips conditions them to accept a Oversize Brother world.

"Young people learn roughly the world and prepare for their futures while in school. Tracking and monitoring them in their development may specify them to take constant monitoring and tracking of their whereabouts and behaviors. This could usher in a society that accepts this good-hearted of treatment every bit routine rather than an encroachment of privacy and civilized liberties," the paper says.

Today, RFID chips are enclosed in a variety of things, including passports, security passes, and store inventory, and can be wont to do things the likes of data track livestock.

According to the Land Civil Liberties Union of Texas, the school district's effectuation of the RFID badges constitutes "stalking."

"We have safety device and privacy concerns about use of RFID engineering on students in schools," Dotty Griffith, the ACLU's populace education director, same in a statement. "The technology was originally planned for shipping goods and cattle, not taking roll at schooltime, thus RFID chips make the perfect still hunt device. Because the technology is easy to evolve, IT is vulnerable to hacking which could allow someone extracurricular the school to monitor a student's remove-campus whereabouts if they obtained the student's tracking number."

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/456440/radio-frequency-id-chip-case-ruling-favors-texas-school-district.html

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