Japanese university tracking students via free iPhones

Wow, is this a violation of your rights! Hello Big Brother! And people still deny the New World Order, even though all of the globalists have been talking about it...

TUAW: yesterday's news today!

this is the beginning of Battle Royale ...

You people are not thinking.

Why is attendance so important? Because in Japan, poor attendance means you don’t graduate. This is why the students try to work the system. So why would you turn off location services? YOU WANT TO BE LOCATED SO THE SCHOOL KNOWS YOU’RE IN CLASS. Disabling GPS HURTS your attendance record.

How many of you would give your phone to someone else (even if it were only to record attendance). YOU DON’T WANT A BACKGROUND PROCESS if you’re the school, because you want the students to LOGIN and (probably) run an app that sends your location to the mother ship. I am not giving my screen lock code to anyone. Ever. Period.

Stupid. Continue to skip class with your free iPhone. Continue to use your friend to sign you in. Just make sure you turn the iPhone off when you're not in class. When they say (if they do) that they could not verify that you were in class, you just tell them that you were there, but your battery died.

Kids have been cutting class as long as there has been school. They will always find a way.

You can turn off location services, but the carrier always has the ability to remotely activate the GPS services for emergency reasons. Or if you agree to give the carrier that access -- e.g. AT&T will enable this feature for your account for $10 a month. Track all iPhones your family uses no matter what their settings are...

The only way to get around this is to turn the iPhone "off". No battery means no radio signals are sending/receiving, and no access to the A-GPS chip.

Cheers & thanks for the free iPhone :)

I believe they are using my application called "FindMyI" (findmyi.org) We provide a jailbreak application that can run in the background and track your phone. Though we have had no contact from anyone regarding this.

The iPhone does not allow background applications. So how should it work to track students with the iPhone? (You can switch off location services too)

This is old news - reported by Mainichi Daily more than a week ago and was picked up by other tech blogs then. It's also a bunch of nonsense, because it won't work. Students don't have to be in class (they can snooze in the library) for the gps to indicate they are present.

Most Japanese undergraduate students don't care about their grades - they only want a 'pass' because their job opportunities are not correlated with their grades, only their connections and sucking up. So, in order to keep up appearances, some schools think free iPhones will improve attendance that most students care less about.

Fat chance.

So... I read this everywhere else already. No big deal. But.. it's been weeks ago. TUAW is really, really slow nowadays.