Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Ousedale Secondary School, Newport Pagnell, is planning to use biometric fingerprints from it's pupils to access to canteen. The MKNews reports that the school "has received a string of angry, anonymous letters of complaint about the scheme"

One 15-year-old pupil who contacted the paper by email said: "The Government is so insistent on snooping on us all to a point where they are fingerprinting us to buy our lunches. They are treating us like criminals."

5 comments:

Bev said...

Very interesting thank you. I think people have had quite enough of all of this nonsense.

To quote a 13 year old from a message board I was reading today:

"I'm 13 and I live in the UK and I've heard rumours of fingerprinting coming to our school and believe me when they ask for my fingerprints I'm walking right out of the school and never going back"

Pippa King said...

Good for that child - I just hope the school allows them to exercise their right to say no. Absolutely the school should do but pressure can be put on the child nevertheless...

Anonymous said...

It seems to me only a matter of time before these databases are linked together in a central database (if they are not already).

Then it is a simple matter to link it to the police database.

Before we know it everybody in the Uk who has been through the school system has had their biometric info stored on a police database. By which time all the police databases in europe will be linked (and possibly the U.S and other such countries).

This is how governments implement systems like this. One bit at a time. Nobody knows whats going on until it is to late to do anything about it.

At which point newspapers like THE SUN start spouting the "Nothing to hide nothing to worry about" line. Then of course all the brain dead (which make up a lot of this country)) start regurgitating this nonsense over dinner.

Of course if the ruling class's want this then it will happen. Until we start taking direct action as a nation then nothing will change. Voting does nothing. All the main parties are funded by the same people. Talking about it does nothing. The politicians will pretend to listen to keep you happy.

Any Mp's who have morals and are not just trying to get into the cabinet will be outvoted by those that have been "whipped into line".

The fact is that labour have said time and again that they support high tech industry in this country.

That means passing laws or policies that mean hi tech's can sell their stuff to public institutions "for our benefit"

Between 1 and 2 million people marched in ,ondon against the war in 2003. It was the UK's biggest ever demo but we all know what the outcome of that was.

This system will happen. People cannot keep their children away from school because of the missed education for the child and the fact that people need to go to work.

All that can be done is for people to tell their children to actively boycott the system and give them every support in doing this.

I fear there will be to many people who are ether too stupid to realize whats going on or stupid enough to believe right wing scare tactics printed in the The Sun.

Rob D, Hull

Graeme said...

**WARNING TECHCIAL POST ***

I would like to point out that the government are laying to the students. Today on the local news they say that the fingerprint reader only record a 64 bit hexadecimal number used to identify the student using the device. This data however is used as a pointer to information that is stored on a remote server. This is how they track the student spending over the week. The only way data can be stolen is from the remote server.

Pippa King said...

Thanks Rob for yor comments

Many others share your views on this and I can see biometrics, in the long term, used in all aspects of our children's lives in their future - which is why they need to be educated and aware of why, what and where they use their biometrics, NOT for trivial use for low level administrative purposes in schools...

One could say the education they are getting with their current use/experience of biometrics is "educating" them to be casual with their biometric identity and have no real regard as to who uses it and what information is stored again it.

Educating both adults and children is needed, and hopefully this is what this website does in order to counter balance some of the biometric vendors unsubstantiated claims in order to sell systems.

Biometric technology is a tool - like a hammer - it can be used for good or bad... us humans don't always have a good track record of using tools well!