RFID Tracking Pilot Program Ended in Sutter School
Victory for Students, Parents and Civil Liberties Groups
NOTE: This is a press release from the ACLU of Northern California that EFF is passing along for your information.
San Francisco - The Sutter-based company InCom announced last night, at a packed special school district meeting, that it would end its pilot program that required students to wear radio frequency identification badges that tracked the students' movements. The company pulled out when parents and civil liberties groups mobilized to end the program. On February 7, the ACLU of Northern California (ACLU-NC), Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) sent a letter to the school district urging the school officials to end the program after being contacted by the parents.
"We are pleased that InCom is pulling out -our children never should have been tagged like pieces of inventory or cattle," said Michele Tatro, one of the parents that fought to end the tracking program. "The RFID tags violated the students' privacy, they were demeaning, and it put them in danger."
"Monitoring children with RFID tags is a very bad idea. It treats children like livestock or shipment pallets, thereby breaching their right to dignity and privacy they have as human beings. Any small gain in administrative efficiency and security is not worth the money spent and the privacy and dignity lost," said C
