Earlier this year, the ACLU launched Free Future, a new blog dedicated to protecting civil liberties in the digital age. It’s become a fascinating place to find insights and analysis into new technologies and the various constitutional issues they raise. In just the past month there’s been coverage on human gene patenting, cell phone tracking, license plate scanners, and even the free speech rights of computers. (That last one is perfectly emblematic of the exciting and intriguing approach taken by Free Future.)
On Friday, my interest was piqued when the blog took a look at the proposed use of RFID chips in student IDs. A public school in Texas is planning to use the chips to monitor students’ location on school grounds for the stated purpose of attendance gathering and safety. They would allow school officials to track all students wherever they go on campus from one central computer. While RFID chips have been around for a while and make all kinds of contactless technologies work, they are a generally insecure technology and certainly quite intrusive when used for surveillance purposes.
Coincidentally, last month I taught a lesson at Oak Hill Middle School on the Bill of Rights in general and privacy rights in particular. The article discussing this plan to install chips had just been published, so I decided to discuss it with the students. Apart from being a good discussion topic, I was genuinely curious what seventh and eight graders would think of such a plan.
Not surprisingly, there were a lot of concerns raised. Some students thought the plan was an outrageous violation of their privacy. Others said it was unnecessary and would invite misunderstandings, or possibly worse. Of those who supported the plan (and there were several), the reasoning seemed to be that the school already tracked them wherever they went anyhow, so what was the difference?
There’s no doubt that tracking technology has become a big civil liberties issue. What was once the stuff of science fiction is now commonplace for law enforcement, and we must make sure that our privacy rights don’t continue to suffer as a result. But we also must keep an eye out for plans like the one in Texas. Attendance taking is an important function for any school, but a measure as invasive as tracking chips on every student seems like an overreach – not to mention all the concerns about a safety breach or the potential for misuse.
We want our schools to be welcoming places – just as we want our society as a whole to be – and imposing tracking technology in this way makes that goal significantly more difficult. Thankfully there appears to be little appetite for such an approach around the rest of the country. But as anyone who follows technology will tell you, the world moves fast. We must remain vigilant against all threats to our civil liberties, but we also must think broadly about what our policies do to the people who grow up with them. As one Oak Hill student said to me last month: “This idea is creepy. It would feel like we were always being watched.”
