Chinese schools are using chips in uniforms to monitor students
GPS and ID chips combine with a facial recognition system to track kids (but only during school hours)
If you liked skipping classes or sneaking out of school, this would be your worst nightmare.
The uniform chips can supposedly alert teachers and parents through an app if students leave the campus during school hours -- and then locate them. One of the schools using the uniforms claimed to Global Times that they won’t track students outside of school hours.
The uniforms are also connected to a facial recognition system installed at campus gates, which records a 20 second-video of a student every time they pass through the campus gate -- just in case someone thought they’d get away with it by giving their shirt to a friend. It also means that parents can see the exact time their children enter or leave school, and even watch a video of them doing it via an app.
Guanyu Technology boasted to the Global Times that the uniforms can be washed up to 500 times. They told us that the uniform on the right in the above picture costs 158 yuan (US$22.80), and that most schools would ask parents to buy them.
But netizens doesn’t think so. “Are they raising kids or dogs?” another popular comment says.
High school uses facial recognition cameras to see if students are dozing off
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For more insights into China tech, sign up for our tech newsletters, subscribe to our Inside China Tech podcast, and download the comprehensive 2019 China Internet Report. Also roam China Tech City, an award-winning interactive digital map at our sister site Abacus.