After Orwell
by John Craig
There was controversy recently when David Blunkett announced the latest pilot into tracking offenders. However, it seems that this debate is likely to shift rapidly. While a school in the UK has temporarily abondoned the use of iris recognition for pupils entitled to discounted meals (to avoid them having to ask), one in the US uses RFID tags so that class registers are obsolute and students can be tracked for the entire school day. In commercial settings, use of RFID tags is already being proposed by a theme park and one jilted lover has already used a GPS mobile phone to track and ambush his former girlfriend. One international agency is even pushing for RFID tags to be in every passport by 2015. It will be interesting to see how the proliferation of tracking technologies affect views of their use by the government.