The First-Listed Benefit of Biometrics…
…in this article found on Kable–can you spot it? Reduced queueing for school lunches.
I’m sure there are some common sense reasons for fingerprinting and retina scanning little children. Indeed, the article does eventually mention one–preventing unauthorised access to school premises (don’t fingerprint the criminal, get the innocent and then exclude… a little scary). But really, biometric collection and storage and identity management system and end of lifecycle data protection considerations… for shorter lunch queues?
July 25th, 2007 at 10:56 am
(status: “Devil’s Advocate” mode engaged)
Mmm - “don’t fingerprint the criminal, get the innocent and then exclude”.
Isn’t this just the same as the One True Way to write firewall rules - “allow foo from a to b, allow bar from c to d, allow baz from e to f, deny all and log”?
July 27th, 2007 at 1:15 am
David C at leavethemkidsalone has been documenting the many and varied ways that schools are using biometric systems. So far, he hasn’t found any good reason for them to do this - and many reasons why they shouldn’t. He points out that government is tending to encourage the use of biometrics in schools by providing funding for buying such systems (but not for alternatives). My own theory is that it’s the Plan B if the ID card fails now - these kids, in 20 years, will be so used to being biometrically checked and identified that it will never occur to them to protest.
Of course, kids have a way of turning out differently than you expect…
wg
July 27th, 2007 at 4:56 am
Well guys, not sure but I liked this article from a lady Ms.Nancy Williams http://www.articleset.com/Education_articles_en.htm . The topic is Are Biometrics, Childrens new toys and it was welly said about this whole current issue. Actually in American alot of schools have also adopted to this system of using biometric technology and me as a parant I had issues too. But on this article there was company refrence name M2SYS who are leading providers of biometric technology in schools infact both in the U.S and U.K .
I had called them up and had a pretty big discussion and I think I was satisfied with the answers I got.
Well, then sombody from my neighbor had actually told me if our governments really wanted to track us, they dont need to fingerprint us, they can use a whole alot of other ways and they dont need baby fingerprints to keep track of us. If anyone has watched the movie ENEMY OF THE STATE then you would really understand our governments without telling us can tap our phone calls, check on us and put bugs every where. But do understand with all of you guys on this blog, but to my opinion we should just wait and watch and see what happens. I mean so far my children school its been over 3 years and there has been no more complains and everyone is use to it and happy with it. But surely you need responsible school administration to handle such type of technology.