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California RFID Tracking Device Is in Use for Preschoolers

A federal grant is giving money to California’s Contra Costa County to track preschoolers using RFID chips. These RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) chips are a device that tracks the exact location of the item the tag is on. This is used all over on items such as CD’s, electronic devices, clothing and more. It helps to prevent theft by alarming the doors if someone were to walk out with an item not paid for or not “de-magnetized” at the check stands. These chips can also be used for tracking people’s behavior through their personal items. The George Miller III Head Start program in Richmond, California is the first school to adopt this new technology here in California. This controversial chip is not placed inside the human body, but worn attached to a Jersey that the children will have to wear. These jerseys will have a RFID chip inside of it and every door at the school will automatically check them in. This helps them cut cost and keep “inventory” of the children.

A lot of controversy has come along with these chips. Even though they seem harmless because they are worn outside the body, parents wonder why this type of security and monitoring is needed for preschoolers. This seems above and beyond any type of monitoring needed for children under the age of five. What the county is hoping to benefit from the chip are the children’s movements for data collection, automatic attendance and tracking meal schedules. According to a county official; they are implementing this to reduce the cost of teachers manually tracking this information so that they can better serve the needs of their students and have more time to teach them. The question is… how much time does it actually save? Do the benefits of this device outweigh the risk and cost/upkeep? What if someone forgets their jersey at home or a chip starts acting up and the system fails? Then it would do more harm than good, taking the teachers attention away for an even longer period of time trying to fix the system and manually count the kids who forgot their jersey.

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County gives jerseys with tracking microchips to preschoolers

California bars mandatory human RFID implants

Written by Alan Bellows on October 14th, 2005 at 2:09 pm
From DamnInteresting.com

RFID chipIf you’re the type to be a bit bothered by the privacy-breaching potential of shopper loyalty cards, then RFID tags should make you pretty twitchy. Short for Radio Frequency IDentification, these transponders come in sizes as small as a grain of sand, can be manufactured for dirt cheap, and hold the potential to expose uncomfortable levels of information about you to whomever is interested in finding out.

From the Boston.com article:
Why is this so scary? Because so many of us pay for our purchases with credit or debit cards, which contain our names, addresses, and other sensitive information. Now imagine a store with RFID chips embedded in every product. At checkout time, the digital code in each item is associated with our credit card data. From now on, that particular pair of shoes or carton of cigarettes is associated with you. Even if you throw them away, the RFID chips will survive. Indeed, Albrecht and McIntyre learned that the phone company BellSouth Corp. had applied for a patent on a system for scanning RFID tags in trash, and using the data to study the shopping patterns of individual consumers.

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Verayo RFID Chips Use ‘Electronic DNA’ to Make Them ‘Unclonable’

Here’s a challenge to hackers everywhere if I’ve ever heard one–a company named Verayo claims to have created an RFID chip that’s completely unclonable thanks to a type of electronic DNA technology called Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF). Unlike basic passive RFID chips, where data can be easily copied from one chip to another, Verayo’s PUF-fy RFID chips use a series of challenge-and-response pairs to make counterfeiting nigh impossible (or so they say.)

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