From the Article:
Big Brother is joining the battle of the bulge.
A group of Long Island students will soon be wearing controversial electronic monitors that allow school officials to track their physical activity around the clock.
The athletics chair for the Bay Shore schools ordered 10 Polar Active monitors, at $90 a pop, for use starting this spring. Thedevices count heartbeats, detect motion and even track students' sleeping habits in a bid to combat obesity.
The information is displayed on a color-coded screen and gets transmitted to a password-protected Web site that students and educators can access.
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Teachers use hand-held computers to collect data from each student's wrist monitor during cl@ss then upload the information to the school computer system for storage and long-term tracking.
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"I didn't even know it was going on, and I'm active in the school," said Beth Huebner, of St. Louis.
Her son, a fourth-grader, wore a Polar Active monitor in cl@ss without her OK last fall at Ross Elementary School.
"We have gotten no information about the Web-site security or where the data will go," Huebner said.
"When you get into monitoring people's biological vital signs, that's a pretty intrusive measurement," said Jay Stanley, of the American Civil Liberties Union. "There are key privacy interests at play."
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A program like this should only be voluntary. Nobody should be forced to reveal biological indicators," he said.
"It's all about secondary use," said Virginia Rezmierski, an expert on information technology and privacy at the University of Michigan.
"Does the data pass along with the child from school to school? When will insurance companies want to get access to it? Will a school want to medicate a child that the monitor identifies as hyperactive? It's potentially very dangerous ground."
Full Article: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/schools_spy_on_fat_kids_HpPAgsKXPYjt1EWFfaNp9K?CMP=OTC-rss&FEEDNAME=
So, it's not enough that some schools now ban parents from packing their childrens' lunches, but now they want the ability/right to be "involved" with students outside of school hours?
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