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UK School Introduces Facial Recognition

Posted by timothy on from the excuse-me-while-I-register-my-delight dept.

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.'"

9 of 214 comments (clear)

  1. Wearing a berka sounds like a good idea, by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    don't you think?

    1. Re:Wearing a berka sounds like a good idea, by ShieldW0lf · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Wearing a berka sounds like a good idea, don't you think?

      You make a good point.

      This "school"... it has high-tech security, guards, biometrics, no one learns much there and they call it an "institution".

      What makes it different from a prison?

      You know there's a huge push on to try to get kids into elderly care? They'll throw money at em, pay for their school, pay em a salary to go, and yet, the kids don't want to have anything to do with it. It's a real crisis, cause there's not enough kids to wipe all the elderly assholes' assholes, so to speak. Final result of all this womb-poison being shoved down peoples throats, I guess.

      I told my folks and their friends this was going to happen when I was 17, and that it was inevitable that we would abandon our parents generation to die without care because there weren't enough of my generation. Man you want to see some pissed off people with a sense of entitlement.

      But I'm starting to think maybe I was wrong. With shit like this being done to children by their own parents in their own nation, abandonment seems a little too turn-the-other-cheek to be realistic. The way things are going, demand for retribution and revenge seems inevitable...

      --
      -1 Uncomfortable Truth
  2. I wonder how it copes with twins? by adnonsense · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Or just someone holding up someone else's photo?

  3. Bloody idiots by ledow · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I work in schools, in the UK, in IT. This is just incredibly stupid.

    You are now RELIANT on that system being accurate to safely evacuate the building in an emergency. That automated system is NO GOOD for that purpose - and you're relying on it with little to no manual backup. You WILL get students with photocopies of their friend's faces (and/or other similarly low-tech solutions to allow the automated system to recognise and register them) in order to get out of lessons, lectures, etc. that they are made to attend. Then when you have a fire, and they are actually somewhere else (or vice versa, logged out of the system but actually still on the premises) you are going to put people's lives at risk. Seriously, give me a week, and I could probably find a way around it that a sixth-former could manage.

    Not only that, you are opening yourself up to enormous DPA issues, because this is a irrevocable biometric - much like the UK government and education in general currently condemns and advises against fingerprint recognition systems in schools. It's also completely unnecessary, extremely expensive, probably quite unreliable (any identical twins go to that college, or even just two people who look alike?), potentially discriminatory (What if someone's face isn't recognised? What if they have disfigurement? What if they deliberately obscure their face or object to the system? Do you allow a bypass to that system for them?). The cost of implementing and *maintaining* and *renewing* that system probably far outweighs an hour or so a day at minimum wage for a member of admin/support staff who has some free time, before you even consider the future problems you've opened yourself up to.

    Tell me... did the head of the school come up with this idea? I very much doubt it was the staff who were handling the registration systems in the first place.

    1. Re:Bloody idiots by peterprior · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Not only that - but who has the time to "quickly and effectively print data off from the system showing who was on site" when there is a bloody fire alarm. When I was in school we were told to leave everything and get out, not wait for a laser printer to warm up or an epson stylus to clean its printer cartridges.

  4. Re:Why do this? by montyzooooma · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Besides which, when I was at college (in the UK age 16-18 normally) they didn't take register - If you didn't turn up, that was your own problem; the lecturers took it up with you when you finally did turn up for class.

    Except when you get hit by a bus the college then gets into trouble for not knowing where you are when you're supposed to be under their care. We're a nanny state, remember.

  5. What problem, exactly, is solved by this? by jonaskoelker · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Sixth-formers will now have their faces scanned as they arrive in the morning at the City of Ely Community College. Face Register uses the latest high-tech gadgets to register students in and out of school in just 1.5 seconds.

    Erm... what problem is being solved by this?

    If you want to know whether the kids are in class, as opposed to in school, you have to look in every classroom. Except that it doesn't really work; you have to look where the students are supposed to be, which the system may not know (or be able to adapt to).

    Is it fire safety and evacuation? So you have one of these machines at every exit, and it can perfectly well identify everyone in a screaming running horde of people?

    It doesn't seem to solve any useful problem. Does anyone know what it's intended to accomplish, and whether it actually accomplishes anything?

  6. Re:Why? by rarity · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why solve a social problem with a technical solution?

    You're misapprehending the problem. If the problem was "how do we know who's in class?", then there's nothing wrong with the simple signing of the register. The problem that this is designed to solve, though, is "how do we collect facial-recognition data on as many people as we can while they're still to young to do anything about it?"

  7. Re:You guys are missing the point... by diskis · · Score: 5, Insightful

    >It is ONE school.

    It's the FIRST school.