UK School Introduces Facial Recognition

Penguin_me writes "A UK school has quietly introduced new facial recognition systems for registering students in and out of school: 'HIGH-TECH facial recognition technology has swept aside the old-fashioned signing of the register at a school. Sixth-formers will now have their faces scanned as they arrive in the morning at the City of Ely Community College. It is one of the first schools in the UK to trial the new technology with its students. Face Register uses the latest high-tech gadgets to register students in and out of school in just 1.5 seconds.'"

Comments

For the watchful...

[yibble]

Great, so we now have a picture of the student demoing the machine, and her PIN (6447). What did we learn today?

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am aware of no law that requires them to ensure attendance. Can you quote which law it is?

Education is compulsory until 16 in the UK. It increases to 18 in 2013 iirc.

I'm pretty sure that even if they are now required to note who is present/absent they are not required to ensure attendance as that would be outside of their remit.

Re:I wonder how it copes with twins?

[Big Hairy Ian]

RTFA it scans the face using infra red. You are right about twins though also how will it cope with beards/Mustaches/Sun glasses. Not such an issue at a 6th form college I know plus this a voluntary system which I'm sure the students support because it saves them about 40 mins a day sitting their whilst a teacher goes through the register.

Fire in the server room.

[Martin_Stevens]

"Only today (Thursday, 05 March) we had a fire alarm test and the administration staff were able to quickly and effectively print data off from the system showing who was on site." You gotta say it's lucky that there wasn't a fire in the server room. I can just imagine getting a tech support call during a fire saying "my printers not working"

Re:I wonder how it copes with twins?

[Ashriel]

Most facial recognition systems can determine the difference between identical twins - there are small differences, y'know.

Actually, if you pay attention, you should be able to tell one twin from another yourself, assuming you know a pair. I've known a few, and I've always been able to tell the difference. One dead giveaway is when one twin has a slightly slimmer face than the other.

Re:Misleading summary (shock!)

[Plunky]

If by "quietly" you mean, "telling everyone about how good it is and getting it in the press" then yes I guess so. Ahem. Did the submitter actually read the article they submitted?

There is a difference between 'quietly introduced' and 'announced its launch'

You can scheme quietly to make something happen that you know will be controversial, then implement it and announce the fait accompli. The amount of objections to cause a deinstallation will be vastly more than the amount of objections needed to prevent its installation in the first place.

Re:Why do this?

[Xest]

I've been to schools where ID cards have been used for toilet access and to monitor where kids are in the school with the aim of making sure kids aren't spending too long in the toilets avoiding lessons or to make sure they're not elsewhere in the school they shouldn't be.

How well does your monitoring work? The schools I covered were all attached to the Yorkshire and Humberside Grid for Learning which is effectively an ISP for all schools connected in that region. They offered filtering which was pretty ineffective because it'd take 24hrs or more to get a site blacklisted. Some schools used their own filtering solutions on top, usually Censornet. There was certainly no problem kids getting round most censorship regardless but certainly many teachers getting wound up about it when the end result of the kids getting where they wanted anyway had questionable negative effect regardless.

The problem is that as with the real world and CCTV cameras, monitoring to stop bullying and such merely just moves the problem elsewhere. It doesn't deal with the core issue, it just hides it away better.

I wouldn't argue kids should have the right to view porn, they should certainly be taught it's not accepted behaviour to browse stuff in public places, but I would question what the actual problem is if they do look at that kind of thing. I mean, how many kids have mobile phones now anyway that can access the internet and browse stuff like that if they really want to? Monitoring seems like a futile band aid that just hides the problem. It does have the side effect of discouraging people from using the internet in case they run into something that may get them in trouble. A lot of kids also just used proxy sites to bypass filtering, if required, using another kids password or even in the odd case, getting hold of the teacher's.

Of course, you can blacklist everything and whitelist what is required but again this just ruins the internet for the kids, there'll be little point to it for the most part. Even Wikipedia has content people might not want kids seeing and you either go through trying to block every questionable page or you let them have full access. You then do that for every site you allow.

Re:I wonder how it copes with twins?

[mdwh2]

In my sixth form, I don't think anyone bothered turning up for registration :) The teachers didn't care. It's not like this is compulsory school, if you don't turn up it's your loss, not theirs. (US readers may not be aware - 16-18 is optional in the UK, and my experience was that they treat you much more like an adult student at University, rather than still a school kid who has to follow rules. Although some colleges may be stricter than others.)

Re:You guys are missing the point...

[sootman]

I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that Cory Doctorow's awesome book Little Brother is a great read and can be downloaded for free from the author's site.

The first order of business were those pesky gait-recognition cameras. Like I said, they'd started out as face-recognition cameras, but those had been ruled unconstitutional. As far as I know, no court has yet determined whether these gait-cams are any more legal, but until they do, we're stuck with them...

Your personal, inch-by-inch walk is yours and yours alone. The problem is your inch-by-inch walk changes based on how tired you are, what the floor is made of, whether you pulled your ankle playing basketball, and whether you've changed your shoes lately. So the system kind of fuzzes-out your profile, looking for people who walk kind of like you.

There are a lot of people who walk kind of like you. What's more, it's easy not to walk kind of like you -- just take one shoe off. Of course, you'll always walk like you-with-one-shoe-off in that case, so the cameras will eventually figure out that it's still you. Which is why I prefer to inject a little randomness into my attacks on gait-recognition: I put a handful of gravel into each shoe. Cheap and effective, and no two steps are the same. Plus you get a great reflexology foot massage in the process (I kid. Reflexology is about as scientifically useful as gait-recognition).