The Badger Herald, campus newspaper of the University of Wisconsiin at Madison, reports that an Arizona university is chipping its students to monitor classroom attendance.
Classrooms at Northern Arizona University will be equipped with detectors that will pick up students' university ID cards, recording when they're actually at class.
Students are calling it an invasion of privacy. Administrators say they're just taking attendance.
Adam Kissel, of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, told the Badger Herald if the school is using it only to take attendance, there's probably no harm. But with enough detectors, he said, administrators could monitor where students are at all times.
“One thing that we find here at FIRE is that if the rule is there or the technology is there, the university will probably use it,” he told the BH.
Funding for the project, BTW, comes from the U.S. stimulus spending program.
What is it with Arizona and civil liberties these days?
