I know of one public school where the students were all rather
suddenly given swipe cards. Then they started being 'stolen'
and the students then had to be fingerprinted.
It all happened recently and very quickly.
This I heard from a 16 year old....in a fee paying school in the west of England, hardly given RFID cards and fingerprinted because these students might 'lose' library books or cards. What's more, how absurd to live in a culture where it is of more concern that you lose your library CARD than lose your library BOOK. So much so that your library card is protected from loss, it's your fingerprint. (Now, where did that book get to????)
In light of the above incident I would suggest that John Naughton is actually, sadly, wrong, and naive.
It would be tempting to interpret this latest triumph of information technology as part of a sinister plot to soften up British youngsters for ID cards and electronic tagging. Tempting, but wrong. In fact, the fingerprinting system provides a graphic illustration of how institutions and companies attempting to solve a practical problem - the infuriating tendency of school kids to lose or mutilate their library cards - can opt for a technological solution which thoughtlessly erodes privacy and infringes civil rights.
This paper reports that gummy fingers, namely artificial fingers that are easily made of cheap and readily available gelatin, were accepted by extremely high rates by particular fingerprint devices with optical or capacitive sensors. We have used the molds, which we made by pressing our live fingers against them or by processing fingerprint images from prints on glass surfaces, etc. We describe how to make the molds, and then show that the gummy fingers, which are made with these molds, can fool the fingerprint devices.
A further threat to the system comes from a study that has shown how easy it is, using cheap ingredients available from supermarket shelves, to literally cook up 'gummy fingers' (Impact of Artificial "Gummy" Fingers on Fingerprint Systems), which students can use to register absent classmates. Imagine the surprise of a teacher facing a class of twenty, when her electronic register claims there are thirty present.
But these are minor inconveniences compared to what happened to the VeriCool system earlier this year. Says one student, "if it stops working, the computer system crashes." And indeed, as another student reports, some three weeks before the Easter break the VeriCool system crashed, taking the entire school computer network with it in an information blackout. As a consequence, teachers had to revert to taking manual registers, if they took any at all, IT lessons became meaningless, and students could not borrow books from the library (somewhat ironic, as VeriCool claims that the system leads to increased borrowing). In the whole school there was only one computer that was available to the 1500 students. It took a further week after the Easter break to get the system running again.
IVC is actually one of few schools who asked parents for permission. But this turned out to be a meaningless gesture, as parents who withheld their permission quickly found out. The parent of one student says that the school handled parents who objected as dissenters.......
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