10-24-2007, 07:54 PM
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Scanning students' fingers hits a nerve
Scanning students' fingers hits a nerve
Quote:
With the federal government lagging behind on its plans to implement the use of electronic passports, identification cards and driver's licenses, biometric vendors are targeting a new market: schools.
But the use of biometric technology in schools, such as a system being used by Stayton Middle School's cafeteria, has some parents and privacy advocates condemning the move as outright Orwellian.
"This is biometric data collecting," said Jann Carson, the associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Portland. "It's the 'Big Brother' theory. The last thing we should do is teach parents and their young children to be casual about turning over personal data, like a fingerprint, just for the sake of speeding up a lunch line."
Feeling the lunchtime crunch, Stayton Middle School administrators last month installed a finger-scanning system to help expedite the cafeteria meal line.
To implement the new lunch account system, students' prints were scanned into a scanner to help identify them.
Jack Adams, the superintendent of the North Santiam School District, said the system does not take a student's actual fingerprint.
"It's a string, not a fingerprint," Adams said. "It's three mathematical pieces of information taken from a student's finger. It's stored on the school computer and can't be used in any other way."
But some parents are opposed to the finger-scanning of minors in schools. They say they're concerned that the prints their children register with the school could be stolen, misplaced or used for a form of fraud that hasn't even been invented.
Britta Hamshar of Stayton is one of those parents.
When Hamshar's 10-year-old daughter came home from school Sept. 24 and said she had been fingerprinted for the cafeteria's new account system, the mother was angry.
"They say it's not a fingerprint, but it is," Hamshar said. "I don't know that hackers won't be able to steal my daughter's fingerprints in the future."
Keith Butler, the district's director of technology, has heard the complaints.
"Some of the parents are worried the government will be able to access their kids' prints," Butler said. "But what they don't realize is that the actual image of the fingerprint is discarded and all that's used is a number."
The middle school's new scanner plots points on a fingerprint and then converts those points to an encrypted number, he explained.
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Well founded concerns or too much "sky is falling" rhetoric"?
I'm on the fence...
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