How does RFID work in schools?
First of all, RFID – Radio Frequency ID – is a generic name for a technology with many practical, legitimate applications. A lot of people are already carrying RFID tagged cards in their wallet without thinking twice about it: contactless access badges for offices are examples, as are the London Underground’s Oyster cards. One of the issues that are causing a lot of concern among privacy groups is the lack of access control to the contents of the cards. E.g. it is not illegal to purchase / build a card reader and start reading passing tags’ contents. Even if the tags only tell you “I’m an ID card for company 7543 and my card number is 345678998433”, this information can be stored and retrieved for example to identify returning customers, then used for marketing / data mining (for good and for bad: “every day badge 13456789765 has been to the store, we’ve had items missing” etc). Basically, tagging people (physically or by making them carry tagged items) results in less privacy and open
