SALT LAKE CITY (ABC 4 News) - You may use it to get into secured buildings and it's already imbedded into most of your credit cards being scanned every time you swipe. The technology is known as radio frequency identification system, or RFID, and it's soon going to be used at some schools across the country to track students’ whereabouts.
When asked her thoughts, one Salt Lake City mother couldn’t believe it. “Excuse me?” said Kaelyn Grant. “They want to microchip my children, like I do with my dog or my cat?"
Yep. Students will be microchipped, at least their identification cards will, allowing administrators to track students’ whereabouts when they should be in school.
Officials at Northside Independent School District in Texas will begin putting microchips in their student ID cards next year. The move is designed to increase revenue - the more students schools can prove are in class, the more money they get from the federal government. A 1% increase in enrollment can mean more than a million dollars for the district.
Many we spoke with fear the technology comes with another cost. Calvin Lewis said, "Once we do one step they can say let's plant them inside this person and stuff like that. It's going too far. It's unconstitutional."
"Sandra Bullock had the movie called ‘The Net,’” Grant pointed out. “It's still really far fetched."
Not all that far fetched actually. In 2004, the Food and Drug Administration approved an implantable microchip that can be used to confirm identity, blood type and medical history of a patient.
