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School Lunch Program Scans Student Thumbprints For 'Tracking Purposes'
schwit1 writes with news that a school district in Pennsylvania is providing free lunches to schoolchildren as part of an initiative to improve nutrition. Instead of providing the lunches to all students without question, they made the program opt-in. Since not all students get the lunches, they needed a way to track who was getting them. Officials decided the best way to do so would be to invest in biometric software that scans students's thumbprints every time they pick up lunch. The data collected by these scanners goes not just to the school district, but to the federal government as well.
What's with the scare quotes? Of course the thumb prints are for tracking purposes. What else could they possibly be good for? A collage?
Perhaps they use thumbprints as opposed to swipe cards that students lose? When I was in elementary school we had the cards for our cash accounts and a friend lost his almost every week. Yes, thumbprints sound a little scary, but even if they gave them ID cards they would still be tracking them.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
First, there's only one aspect to that is really objectionable--that the federal government gets the data with no limitations. A fingerprint scanner isn't a bad idea for something needing low security where you're dealing with forgetful preteens. They're inexpensive although the software/system isn't.
To be honest, I don't really understand the objection to being tracked in the first place. It's just an extension of tracking food stamps. The government makes no secret that if you're going to be the recipient of funds, you're going to be tracked (unless you're a multinational corporation). All that needs to be done is explicitly state that the data will be anonymized (which is likely to be done anyway as this involves minors) and there's minimal issue here.
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The school systems are often the first entry point for the prison industrial complex. Some schools already have metal detectors and armed security guards that treat students as prisoners and/or future criminals. After passing thumbprints into the federal database, don't be surprised if full prints and DNA samples are next. The sooner that the government identifies a future criminal, the sooner someone can get them into the prison pipeline to make money off of them.
... that there is no such thing as a free lunch.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
OK, here is the privacy concern: The company sponsoring this now has thumbprints of all the students in the program on record. With the thumbprints, the student can then be impersonated at other establishments that use fingerprints for authentication. Get it? If not, see slashdot articles about fingerprint readers at Disneyland.
A simple magstripe card would have provided the same information, and it's unlikely that it would be used anywhere else.