Fingerprint Requirement For a Work-Study Job?

BonesSB writes "I'm a student at a university in Massachusetts, where I have a federal work-study position. Yesterday, I got an email from the office that is responsible for student run organizations (one of which I work for) saying that I need to go to their office and have my fingerprints taken for the purposes of clocking in and out of work. This raises huge privacy concerns for me, as it should for everybody else. I am in the process of contacting the local newspaper, getting the word out to students everywhere, and talking directly to the office regarding this. I got an email back with two very contradictory sentences: 'There will be no image of your fingerprints anywhere. No one will have access to your fingerprints. The machine is storing your prints as a means of identifying who you are when you touch it.' Does anybody else attend a school that requires something similar? This is an obvious slippery slope, and something I am not taking lightly. What else should I do?"

Comments

Modern Fingerprint Scanners dont keep prints

[Tepshen]

The way that most modern fingerprint scanners work is by using matching algorithms. They scan your fingerprint and translate that into a numeric value and then store that. Not a copy of your fingerprint itself. This numeric value cannot be used to recreate your fingerprint but it can however be used to match the output that only your fingerprint will produce when scanned. To be perfectly candid its far easier to steal your fingerprints by stealing something you own than it is to take them from a fingerprint security/tracking system.

Re:You're dumb

[Midnight Thunder]

Solutions like this are often used to prevent someone clocking-in for you. I used this type of solution at a sports club which used to go to, where you would enter your member number followed by you finger print. Chances are this is another closed system, so it the finger prints probably won't get much further than the database.

It's all stupid, and for stupid reasons

[gerf]

Apparently if you visit Brazil, Europeans and Brazilians go through one line. Americans, we can all step over here to get fingerprinted, retina scanned, etc.

Why? We do it to them, so they do it back. F.

Re:It's all stupid, and for stupid reasons

[aylons]

Yes, that is right. This is due to Brazilian Constitution, which says that all diplomacy must be reciprocal. E.g., for every country which demands a visa from Brazilian people, Brazil demands a visa for their people to get in Brazil. If the government, the Federal Police or the airport authority decides to do any different, they will get sued.

They don't store your actual fingerprint

[Colin Smith]

Not the image anyway. They store the relative positions of specific details of your print. 2 minutes on Google would have told you this.

The question remains though whether you want them to hold a representation (of any kind) of any part of your body on file.
 

Re:Non-issue?

[Macfox]

Ask if the unit is FIPS 201 certified. If it is then you can be certain that no reproducible image leaves the unit. There's no more identifying data than a password or PIN that leaves the unit.

There are cheaper units on the market that centrally process the finger print image to speed up matching, which is open to abuse.

Disclaimer: I previously worked for a fingerprint / time-clock manufacture that produced FIPS compliant devices.