Keeping Track of the Kids

This is an era in which many devices are watching us. We carry about wireless phones that tell our service providers exactly where we are. Surveillance cameras blink down from corners and storefronts. Advertisers follow us effortlessly around the Internet. Still, plans in Contra Costa County, Calif., to tag preschoolers with radio frequency identification chips to keep track of their whereabouts at school seem to go too far.

The concern that school officials would use the ID chips to keep tabs on children’s behavior — and tag them perhaps as hyperactive or excessively passive — seems overwrought. County officials point out that the tags will save money and allow teachers to devote less time to attendance paperwork and more time to their students. And the chips, which will be randomly assigned to different children every day, according to a county representative, will not carry personal information that could be intercepted by others.

We just worry that we are all becoming a little too blasé about our scrutinized lives. Americans’ enthusiasm for technological solutions typically has been balanced by a mistrust of technology taking over our lives. The demons of “I, Robot” and “2001: A Space Odyssey” always lurked somewhere beneath the surface of our dreams of high-tech futures.

Part of the reason we now accept the continual observation of our lives is that we are at best only vaguely aware it is happening. Surveys have found that most Americans believe, incorrectly, that many common techniques used by corporations to keep track of their online activity are illegal. Though it may seem innocuous to attach a chip to our preschoolers’ clothes, do we really want to raise a generation of kids that are accustomed to being tracked, like cattle or warehouse inventory?

The New York Times