I'm willing to bet that the increased attendance is not due to the use of fingerprint recognition technology as such - it's the back-end 'we will contact the parents if the child isn't present' stuff which does the trick. In other words, you don't actually need the biometrics at all, you could just enter the rollcall into a computer and have the system do its stuff from there. As a bonus, you get interpersonal contact with the teacher every morning.

Vmax says in his post, above, that there are alternatives options to biometrics, which presumably afford the same benefits. So why use fingerprints at all?

I would be interested to know: what are the health implications of hundreds of people all touching the same spot, one after the other, in a food consumption area (lunch scanning, mentioned above)? Are the units sanitised regularly?

Lastly, this is a relatively small, local scheme. What do you think the reaction would be if the government said that every child should now have their biometric data stored in a database? Maybe one, centrally administered database. Think how much time that would save - for example if they ever moved to a different part of the country. Why have lots of separate systems when you can have just one? Think of the benefits.

What about every adult too - why not? It would save time and money to scan everyone into a central database to avoid duplication in lots of smaller schemes. I wonder how well that would be received. I wonder.

What's the policy on disposal of the data when a child leaves school? Is their biometric data erased from the database? How about from the backups?

Vmax has said he won't respond to me, so perhaps someone else knows? Surely there is a detailed document out there, listing all the important points, which is given to parents before they decide whether they want their child enrolled in this scheme. Is that available online somewhere? Or does it exist at all?

Sounds like there'd be more excitement watching prairie dogs ride a Roomba (that does sound familiar). Oh well, at least as far as 'safe for kids' goes, you can't argue about one thing: it's good clean fun :|

Okay, except for the 'good' part. And the 'fun'.

This article in The Guardian provides more analysis and information about where things are (or might be) heading, and highlights many of the concerns of parents:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jun/09/schools-surveillance-spying-on-pupils

Vmax, Just to add that my understanding of the accuracy of the data comes from the article's text: a 60-digit passcode would surely not give duplicates, given that you would only need 10 digits to give a unique number to every person on the planet.

Alex, I'm definitely trying to be civil, but I do have strong opinions on this subject :)

Vmax, if you get duplicates in less than 500 samples how on earth does that make this kind of tech useful in a school of 3000-4000 students (your figures)? So each fingerprint might actually be one of 5 or 6 other kids, and you can't actually tell for sure because it's not accurate enough? Please tell me that's not what you mean, and/or explain how this can possibly be of any use if the data is so imprecise.

As for your 'conspiracy' comment, please read some TSA-related stories if you think that enhanced security measures are all about the benefits they can provide to law-abiding citizens.

Unfortunately I wouldn't expect you, freely admitting to having a personal stake in this technology, to be anything other than 100% biased - systems architect and programming director of the company is about as one-sided and closed-minded as it gets.

If you're happy with contributing to a society edging closer to more and more 'tracking' and 'enhanced security', so be it, but don't pretend you don't know that this kind of tech has great potential for misuse.

Ted, I agree with the examples you give, but you don't seem to explain why the use of fingerprint scanning machines would be any more effective than a simple register of who's in the class. How did you cope with a family emergency five years ago when this technology wasn't available? And if you call the school and the kid hasn't been scanned in at all, what then? The only knowledge you have is 'child is present' or 'child is missing'. If he/she is missing, what then? You have no way of knowing where they are.

This system is a way of recording who has used the scanner, not where in the world those who haven't used it might be. So when (as you say) 'the current way of doing things is not working', and fingerprint data is 'the current way', will you want constant GPS tracking of children?

Meanwhile, with this system you have a lot of fingerprint data of children, which can be used (potentially) as I describe in the above post.

Regarding civil liberties, perhaps this Benjamin Franklin quote may be appropriate:

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety"

Once you give up one freedom, it's much easier to give up others - you can lose a lot of freedom if you give it away one piece at a time.

Vmax, you say 'the data can't be reversed to get a print'.

I'm quite sure that's the case. However, each code stored for each user is unique and can only be created from one person's print. The fact that you don't have the visible lines and swirls of a fingerprint is irrelevant - what you've stored is data which can ONLY be obtained from a particular fingerprint. All you need to use it to match with another print is similarly encoded data for that other print.

Most people would say that the school data differs from the fingerprint data stored by government crime/security agencies, from the data associated with convicted criminals. This is because you couldn't find a fingerprint at a crime scene and visibly compare it with the prints in the school database - there are no prints stored, only encrypted data.

Right so far?

However, what is to stop someone finding a fingerprint at a crime scene and encrypting it in exactly the same way that the schoolchildren's data is encrypted, and then comparing THAT data with the contents of the kids' database?

You see, you don't need to store the full representation of a fingerprint in order to have something which can be used against you. You just need a unique identifier (the encrypted version of the print), which can be compared with other similarly encrypted identifiers.

If it's unacceptable to store the fingerprint data of innocent people, and most people would be of the opinion that it is, then it's unacceptable to store the fingerprint data of children, even if it's encrypted, because it can still be used in some of the ways that criminals' data is used.

If you can compare a live child's fingerprint with the school database to get a match, you can compare the contents of that same database with prints found at a crime scene, or with the whole of the criminal database, purely by encoding those prints in the same way.

Therefore by taking a child's fingerprints at a young age, you have the potential to store, for life, identifying data which can be used in the same way that the criminal fingerprints database is used.

Are parents made aware of these possibilities? I doubt it. Or if they are, do they trust the government not to misuse such data? Governments aren't know to be great at storing information and NOT using it for other purposes are they?

This is NOT a good thing.

Vmax, there are levels of security which are simply too high - if you go beyond a certain point you are impinging on a person's freedoms, on their civil liberties. What reassurance does fingerprinting give a parent that their child is at school? If the child decides not to go to school at all, do you know where they are? If they didn't use the scanner, no, you have no idea.

Do we then want to insist that all children carry GPS tracking devices? Then we'd know where they are at all times, right? That's the next level of security. But of course the child could just leave the tracker somewhere, so perhaps we'd need some way to avoid that, because we need to know exactly where that child is at all times... don't we? Embedding a tracking device inside a child: the next level of security. Now THAT would work, and finally the parents are fully reassured.

I've taken the examples to extremes, but you see how we'd gradually move from one system to the next, from a system which relies on simple head counts, to fingerprint tracking, to GPS tracking... etc. All because the previous level of security was considered imperfect. All the time you're trying to fix a problem which doesn't need fixing.

Would anyone be okay with GPS tracking devices permanently attached to the bodies of their children? Or failing that, cuffing them to their desks? Because that's what it would take to KNOW where a child is at any given moment. That's what it would take to prevent a child who decides to leave the school just walking out and going, should they wish to do so.

We do not need to know with 100% certainty where a child is. What we do need to do is trust in people, and trust in the idea that children do not just disappear - even if they truant from school they invariably turn up. If it's fear of abduction (which is a TINY risk, statistically), well it would take a lot more than fingerprinting to prevent such a thing - you'd have to send kids to high-security camps for that.

Can I imagine calling the school and having them not know where my kid is? No, because I cannot imagine ever calling a school and demanding to know where my kid is at any point in time. Why would I ever do that?

And let's say that I did need to find them, for whatever reason (are there enough reasons to justify installation of a $22,000 scanner?)... couldn't I just send my kids a text message and ask them to call me back?

I think people have missed the point here. It doesn't matter if the data can't be reversed to get a fingerprint, it's the fact that the data is used to track the child's movements which is the issue. Widen that out to other areas of life and pretty soon it becomes surveillance. The more places you are required to put into a database that you are at point A, B, or C at time X, Y or Z, the easier it is to track your movements. It's a privacy and personal freedom issue. And as I said before, using it with kids gets them used to the idea that this is normal.

Vmax, the fact that full body scanners are used at airports is not a justification for a seemingly less-intrusive scanner at schools. We should be outraged by BOTH, rather than saying 'well they do X at airports so we shouldn't worry too much about Y at schools'. That just leads to people thinking that because Y is okay for kids, Z (a more intrusive tech than Y, whatever that might be) is okay for adults in other situations. It's the gradual build-up of such intrusive technologies, rather than a sudden loss of freedoms, which is the issue. Parking attendants demanding a fingerprint? How dare they... oh wait, they do it in schools so what's the problem? And so on.

The more that kids become accustomed to such Orwellian practices, the easier it becomes to take away their freedoms when they become older. We are sleepwalking our way into a society in which our every move is recorded, monitored, tracked, traced and, ultimately, can be used against us by the people who (they tell us) are only doing it for our own convenience. Parents can sign a waiver. If they ALL (or a majority) sign a waiver, the school will have to rethink this stupid policy.

Only because Mouserz started this:
One more customer has bought the iFarm

The Spanish Inquisition can't go without a mention, but isn't really associated with one name, given that it lasted so long. 'The Pope' is probably as close as you'd get in that sense.

Several Popes, and the Catholic Church as a whole, have been spoken of as evil, particularly around the time of the Reformation... and in many cases with good reason. Obviously from the Catholic perspective those opposed to the Pope were viewed with similar contempt.

You could go further back and list many of the Roman Emperors - usually the ones who were assassinated tended to be reviled, Caligula being perhaps the one which still sticks in the minds of most people.

This is the first prototype of Occam's Razor. Later models were simplified and had only one button. Less successful was Occam's Vajazzler, but after the court case nobody talks about it. Ever.

Support Cloning (large, black)

The default setting for the lock is the raising of the middle finger, which works after you've tried every other gesture and finally gave up in frustration.