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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?"
I've used biometric scanners like this in the past. Whatever it stores to recognize your fingerprint never leaves the machine. I don't know if that's what's going on here, but it seems perfectly reasonable.
Start looking for another job..
I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of how awesome I am.
Its a time clock. Many jobs have them along with your address, phone number, date of birth, and social security number. Welcome to the working world. I could just as easily steal your fingerprints from your car door handle or the can you threw in the trash. After this fiasco don't expect the job offers to roll in.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
As long as you are assured that your privacy is protected...this is a huge non-issue. Fingerprint scanners are the best (In terms of ease of implementation) way to prevent people from clocking in and out for each other, even though they are obviously easily defeated by anyone sufficiently motivated.
I checked into these before. The scanner records a description of your fingerprint, not the image. The description is used to match. It's a form of message digestion.
Most scanners of this type do not even record enough detail to qualify as evidence. Those that do must have their data shared with law enforcement, making them a hard sell as a biometric time card.
Same as the old one... My wife's workplace has this system. Works terribly but somehow it got past some CxO. Not sure if the privacy issue is a big deal however. You train the system in the system (if it's the same one). The print doesn't go out to the big Gov.
Not saying that they couldn't do that, but you do realize (being an aluminum foil shielded card carrying Slasdotter) that 'they' can get your fingerprints, DNA and bog knows what else without much of a problem these days.
Hell, at least it's pretty unlikely to show up on Facebook.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
And friends, somewhere in Washington enshrined in some little folder, is a ,just walk in say "Shrink, You can get
study in black and white of my fingerprints. And the only reason I'm
singing you this song now is cause you may know somebody in a similar
situation, or you may be in a similar situation, and if your in a
situation like that there's only one thing you can do and that's walk into
the shrink wherever you are
anything you want, at Alice's restaurant.".
Use acid on your finger tips to remove the prints and use that for ID. The only problem is that you are now linked to hundreds of crimes where no traces of fingerprints were found. But at least they wont be able to identify YOU when they find your actual fingerprints somewhere.
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.
Apparently what it is storing is a statistical summary of the biometric information (if that's not redundant). It doesn't store the fingerprints themselves anymore than an operating system will store your password. With the password, whatever you type in has to have a hash which matches the hash associated with your account. With the scanner, the summary generated each time you plop your hand on the scanner has to match (to a significant degree) the summary on file.
But, yes, if someone finds your fingerprints somewhere else, and they have access to this data, they can be reasonably certain it is you.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
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.
Not many posts yet but I already see a LOT of posts pushing the idea of not working for this employer. This is not a solution. If we don't fight it and win, it will be adopted by more and more employers until it snowballs into something too big to fight. If we think this is a bad idea, it needs to be fought now while it's still in its infancy.
I am in the process of contacting the local newspaper...
Are you for real? Other than than the fact that they likely won't give a rats ass about this, you are treading on very thin ice. I'm not sure what it is you're planning on doing after graduation, but being labeled a well-known whistle-blower isn't going to do you much justice when you're out looking for a job.
...that the next time a pompous administrator says in public "nobody has complained about that," you know that he is lying. Settle for not just knucking under without saying anything at all. Settle for knowing, if you do know, that your complaint has reached someone who sets policy and that you're not just making things hard on a bunch of other ordinary workers whose job is to keep things running.
This is not nothing at all, but it's a small thing.
You can't change the world through indignation. You really have only three choices. First, be docile and do nothing at all. That's often a good option by the way. Second, make sure your concerns have been heard, even if they are dismissed. Or, third, be prepared to devote at least a year or two of your life to the cause of fighting this thing.
If you feel that spending a year or two toward the goal of getting the university to stop using fingerprinting gadgets for access to work-study jobs is worth it, and is what you want to do with that chunk of your life, you can probably achieve your goal. I dunno how. Work through the union if there is one? Start a union if there isn't one? Make appointments and personally talk to one administrator after another, calmly, until you figure out how to get the policy changed? Personally work out an actual proposal, including costs and benefits, for alternative security, so you're presenting them with something positive and their work all done for them, instead of just saying "don't do what you're doing?" Find a faculty committee that's interested in the question that you can swing to your side? I dunno.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I installed these at a client.
The issue was the employees would take an afternoon off to go to an appointment, and get buddy to clock them out at the end of the day - The emplyoee would then get paid for an afternoon they didnt work.
The time clocks have a fingerprint scanner. You place your thumb on the device as you punch out. Now buddy cant swipe out for you, and you cant defraud your employeer.
They also had biometric locks instead of prox cards on the doors. Much more convieient then having to remember a card the few days when i was on site.
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.
Deleted
To login BonesSB would present a finger, the same information points would be measured, then hashed then the two hashes compared.
I am not saying that they did go to that extent, but they could have.
The purpose of this device is to keep people from cheating on their hours. You can get all Big Brothery all you like, but there is one and only one technology that can reliably ensure that people come to work and do the jobs they're paid to do.
It's called "management". The way it works is, you know your employees' names, you stop by their workstations, both to help them with problems they're having and to check to see that they're doing their jobs. You build up a culture of trust, so that when they need to leave work they *tell* you, and you arrange for them to make up the time.
Or you can treat them like condemned criminals, and let them be monitored by machines while you sit in your throne of an office eating donuts and browsing bmw.com. It's really up to you.
I am on federal work study right now and I have not had to submit my fingerprints for anything. You have a few options.
Accept that this is the way they track work study hours.
If you can afford it and the privacy concerns are too compelling, decline the work and let them know why in a formal letter. It may go directly to the waste bin but at least you made your reasons known.
Lastly, you can try to change the policy. Contact your student senate for some backing as they're the most likely to listen, although not the most likely to have power to change it. A couple of suggestions: Switch from bio-informatics scanning methods to plain old bar code badges, RFID chips or paper timecards.
My school does work study timecards on paper. It's probably the most likely to be abused, but it is convenient for everyone. I'd be more than happy to use an RFID token or bar code badge for clocking in and out. Wouldn't work very well for my specific job, considering I work from home, but in theory I would accept either.
Your ability to change the policy by force is pretty limited. Employment rights(especially regarding privacy) vary by state when it comes to work study. You could try to contact your local department of labor but it's unlikely they will give you anything other than a headache.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
I know this will surprise many slashdot readers but using your fingerprint as described by the poster for the purpose of clocking you in and out of work would be illegal in many countries accross Europe (with the possible exception of the UK). In France, for example, you can actually get fined by the data protection authority for doing so.
It's true that most of these devices don't store an image of your fingerprint but rather a "template" : a description of some special features of your fingerprint. But that doesn't change the problem.
Indeed, many data proctection authorities accross the EU consider that biometrics pose sevreall security and data protection issues and must therefore be used with caution. Fingerprint biometrics are of special concern, in particular when the biometric data (templates) are stored in a central database. The big problem with fingerprints is that we leave them everywhere, on all objects we touch. Someone can pick up your fingerprint and test it against the templates inside the database. (Sounds crazy or technically impossible ? It's much easier than you think : i've tested it myself, that's part of my job). There are other issues whith fingerprint biometrics that I won't detail here.
In the end data protection authorities in the EU consider that the use of a central fingerprint database is excessive if your only objective is only clocking people in and out. Instead, they encourage the use of a smartcard to store the biometric data : you show your finger to the biometric reader and it gets compared with the data stored in the smartcard. This solution offers the same benefits in terms of security but you keep control of your biometric data.