Tag Archives: GPS tracking

The agenda to RFID track your child, giving away free chips

Posted on January 5, 2016 | Leave a comment

In November 2015 Richmond Sausages, a subsidiary of Kerry Foods, spent £3 million on an ongoing campaign to distribute 200,000 Bluetooth tracking chips, free RFID chips, to be claimed via packs of sausages. The aim of the Sausage and Chip campaign is to make meals times less stressful if a children’s toy, teddy, has gone missing… and this would sell their sausages why?

I have to say as a parent myself a child losing a toy at meal time (whether or not sausages are present) has never been an issue and I can never recall any conversation with another parent where losing a toy has been an issue, especially at meal times.

The company supplying the Bluetooth GPS chip is a company called B-on who lists the Amigo watch, for tracking children, amongst its three products. The watch can set up geo-fencing ‘safe-zones’ incorporating a pedometer to track your child’s activity.

B-on also supplies other tracking devices for adults, health monitoring and fitness tracking. Having said that I cannot find the Amigo Watch for sale anywhere online. Apart from a few articles published last year by Wired and TechCrunch the Amigo Watch has virtually no online presence apart from the B-on website where there is no facility to buy.

Maybe the Amigo watch never got off the ground and the company now has to give away their product in another form because there is no market for it? Perhaps B-on made a few hundred thousand watches that haven’t sold, and to lure the unsuspecting public into using a tracking product… ‘needing’ a tracking product, they have ‘repackaged’ the watches into tracking chips to hang round a child’s loved toy.

It is a nudge, especially for a young child. The message? RFID tag the stuff we love.

You can imagine the conversation “…but why don’t you tag me Mummy? You love me as much as I love Teddy don’t you?”. Clever.

So why would Richmond, a sausage manufacturer, spend millions of pounds giving away free RFID tracking devices essentially aimed at children? Splashing out £3million is a hefty amount of profit margin from sausages sales to recoup, plus 200,000 RFID tracking chips. It just seems odd?

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Posted in 2.45GHz, GPS, Privacy, RFID children, RFID Tags, RFID tracking, RTLS, Tracking children, Wifi

Tagged GPS tracking, Real Time Location System, RFID children, RFID tracking, surveillance, Tracking children

RFID make kids safer apparently

Posted on September 21, 2013 | Leave a comment

Over the summer break some schools in the US have treated themselves to RFID location systems, one school district seems to have excelled itself in the level of intrusion of it’s students while other schools it seems are only tagging staff with RFID using the school’s existing wifi.

Here in the UK we had one college, West Cheshire College, that looked at using active RFID over it’s existing wifi to track students, staff and assets but found that using an ultra wideband RFID, tagging 5,500 students, saved them $400,000 – $600,000 – that’s a lot of money. However wifi based RFID is being used in the US to track staff, not students yet, at very aptly named schools called Skyview and Grandview. A third school to use the active RFID using wifi is Patrick Henry School in Virginia. Patrick Henry was a brilliant orator and a major figure of the American Revolution – best known for his quote “Give me liberty or give me death“.

Liberty – the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one’s behaviour or political views.

Is liberty compromised by RFID tagging and tracking humans, in this case children, with authority knowing your every move, behaviors and peer group association? In the case of Belleville Public School District in New Jersey it seems liberty certainly may be compromised here. As reported in the RFID Journal the school district is “implementing an active radio frequency identification [RFID] solution to locate students and faculty members within its schools, as well as students on its 21 buses… cameras with built-in analytic software, and a new phone system—as well as the posting of armed officers and a new director of security”. Is is that dangerous being at school? That sort of security is only afforded to inmates in prison but the technology in prisons is in place to stop people from getting out whereas at school it is there to stop people from getting in (with a massive added bonus of vast data harvesting).

Is it worth sacrificing privacy and liberty for this perceived improvement of safety as the above examples in the US cite? And at what point does society put it’s foot down and say enough, we need our privacy. It is doubtful the next generation will do that, being normalised to this high level of surveillance from school.

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Posted in Civil liberties, Debate, Ethical, GPS, Person Tracking Cameras, Privacy, Real Time Location System, RFID children, RFID school, RFID Tags, RFID tracking, RTLS, School travel, Tracking children, USA, Wifi

Tagged children, education?, GPS tracking, Real Time Location System, RFID, RFID children, RFID school, RFID tags, RFID tracking, RFID wifi, RTLS, school travel, Tracking children, West Cheshire College, wifi

New Jersey schools using person-tracking cameras, RFID and geo-tracking for students

Posted on August 19, 2013 | Leave a comment

Martin J. Okun, Vice President of Security & Life Safety at Clarity Technologies Group

“As we see more and more violence in schools every day, we strive to find ways for our children to learn without fearing for their own safety,” Clarity Vice President Martin Okun. Okun believes the security measures will a model for other districts concerned about security.

(If schools are that dangerous, more dangerous it seems than any other area of society, perhaps the simple solution is not to go to school and home educate.)

Person-tracking cameras, geo-tracking throughout building facilitates including transport, electronic access control, armed law enforcement and RFID tagging the occupants. Sound like a prison or high security military base? No.

This is a school district in New Jersey and this is Belleville School District’s reaction to the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary school, Newtown, Connecticut as reported in NorthJersey.com and Belleville-Nutley Patch.

Belleville School District seem to be the first school in the US, and possibly globally, to utilize cameras to tracking people in an educational environment. The only hi-tech surveillance technology missing here is biometrics but actually the above surveillance just about covers the complete erosion of students privacy in this instance.

According to the Belleville-Nutley Parch, Clarity Technologies Group are supplying the RFID – and the person-tracking camera system to be used on the students is demonstrated in this Clarity Technologies Youtube clip:

…”more and more violence in schools every day” as Martin Okun states. Maybe the root of this violence should be addressed rather than trying to use technology as a sticking plaster to cover over the more serious issue of criminal disturbance in schools, rather than the student population have to be subjected to such invasive surveillance .

Maybe there are a few of issues at play here. Are schools that dangerous? Or is another ‘education’ taking place? Perhaps this is even a good opportunity to road test a new technology on a student population?

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Posted in Civil liberties, Ethical, GPS, Person Tracking Cameras, Real Time Location System, RFID children, RFID Tags, RFID tracking, School travel, Tracking children

Tagged education?, GPS tracking, person tracking camera, Real Time Location System, RFID children, RFID tracking, RTLS, surveillance, Tracking children

RFID for pupil attendance not fit for purpose

Posted on July 17, 2013 | Leave a comment

Northside Independent School District (NSID), San Antonio, Texas, have scrapped the 433 MHz active RFID tracking technology used to log students in school. It was claimed tracking children with RFID would improve attendance. In reality it made virtually no difference whatsoever. “student attendance increased by only 0.5 percent on the high school campus where the program was tested. Results at the middle school campus were even lower, at 0.07 percent.”

What it did do was made for a good exercise to see how tagging kids with 433MHz – the same frequency used by the Department of Defense, Homeland Security and NATO to track their assets around the USA – worked in a civilian population.

With Skyview (aptly named) High School recently installing active RFID tags for staff and students working with wifi 2.4GHz for “safety” reasons, on the back of Sandy Hook, and knowing that RFID to improve attendance is a dead duck in the water, maybe the focus on perceived and totally unproven safety aspects of RFID at NSID may com into play – lets hope not.

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Posted in Civil liberties, Consent, Ethical, Privacy, Religious, RFID children, RFID College, RFID school, RFID Tags, RFID tracking, RTLS, Tracking children, USA, Win

Tagged children, college, GPS tracking, prejudice, Real Time Location System, refusal, religious, RFID, RFID children, RFID school, RFID tags, RFID tracking, RTLS, Tracking children, win

Corporate sponsoring of RFID GPS tracked children

Posted on June 3, 2013 | Leave a comment

A school district in Northern California is to start tracking children on and off schools buses via RFID and GPS technology. The system is free to the district, taxpayers and parents with local businesses sponsoring the messages sent to parents phones to tell them their child is safe at school.

The company East Coast Diversified Corporation (ECDC), the parent group of StudentConnect, is enabling this RFID tracking technology to be financed using adverts sponsored by local businesses.

According to ECDC this tracking of children “creates a unique opportunity for businesses to demonstrate a policy of corporate responsibility toward student safety in communities they do business with“. Advertisers can engage “the brand loyalty of parents out of appreciation for receiving safety notification regarding their children.”

This just sounds bizarre. What shop would want to sponsor tracking a child? Eroding that child’s privacy. Are society’s ethics and morals to be discarded for “corporate responsibility” – trading safety messages about location tracking of our children in exchange to be advertised at? Do we not trust the bus driver, schools and society to show a collective care for our youngest?

Yes, there are random acts of violence that defy logic or reason but when statistics are scrutinized both from the industry selling this technology and real risks that do exist, possible perceived scenarios – that involve compromising children rights more than they do protecting their safety – arise offering a financial solution to a situation that is not that urgent and disproportionate to the reported transport crisis.

There is money to be made in tracking children, that is for sure.

“Good morning. Your child has arrived safely at school. Oh, and by the way, your local hardware shop is offering 99% off sledge hammers to a crack nut with”

We should have more faith in society to care for our children collectively. All members of society, community, family, corporate, faith based, all aspects should care for all. We should not rely on a money driven system to take responsibility for our children, nor be led into believing that that is where responsibility lies.

Surely as a society, whatever country or community you live in, we should all take a part in looking out for each other and not be driven in this supposed care for our children from a financial incentive.

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Posted in Civil liberties, Consent, Ethical, GPS, Privacy, Real Time Location System, RFID children, RFID College, RFID school, RFID Tags, RFID tracking, School travel, Tracking children, USA