Chip your kids, continued

We understand the safety concerns that are prompting it, but it seems hardly a day passes without some new report in Japan about schools fitting children with RFID tags to track them in one way or another. The latest concerns a primary school in Wakayama prefecture that is planning to not only fit RFID readers at the school gates to log students' comings and goings, but to install them at "dangerous locations" so that the school and parents can be pinged if students go near. Sure, deterring children from hanging around near red-light districts should lead to an improvement in their safety, but does the "education" have to be so Pavlovian? (Go near brothel, Mum gets email to cellphone; on returning home, get slapped upside head.)

Knowing Japan, there will probably be a "fact-finding mission" by local politicians to find out exactly how dangerous some of these places are by sampling their services first-hand.

[Read: School to put electronic tags on students to monitor safety]