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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.
Does it also report what they eat? Mine's a supersized FROSTY!!!!!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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?
It just occurred to me that this kind of thing would provide useful data to fast food companies, if used in the general population. Imagine something like "Google Lunch", which would provide a free meal to people who swipe their thumb. One would think that the data on where, what, and when people prefer to eat would be worth some serious money to those companies.
A republic cannot succeed till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.
The school and the federal government might find out which students are getting a healthy and nutritious meal and when. This is unacceptable. I get that this is a bit silly but I don't exactly see the privacy concern.
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.
Get the children used to this type of tracking technology and life will become easier for the communists, ahem...Democrats, who want to take over our government.
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.
Providing a lunch for students regardless of need is fine (notwithstanding the biometric tracking issues), but is the food still crap? Last I heard, schools were offering really non-nutritious fast food type lunches because it was cheaper than hiring cooks and servers to provide regular meals.
No. They offer unappealing "healthy" food that mostly is thrown away.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
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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.
Good way to load up on other kids' germs just before eating. Would you like some hepatitis with that?
Because nobody told me and I've been leaving it literally everywhere I go.
And boy do I feel like an idiot -- I had a cup of coffee the other day (without my tinfoil gloves) in the breakroom and left a good looking print on the shiny mug. Then I realized that I didn't wipe clean my thumbprint off my shiny car! And I definitely read the newspaper at the park the other day and just left it there for the next reader instead of securely incinerating it! To make matters worse, I let a nice lady borrow my pen and maybe she lifted it too!
... that there is no such thing as a free lunch.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
is the thought that a large organization (public schools) could potentially have finger prints for every single person in the country with the exception of a few rich kids who go to private schools where room and board are included in the crazy, crazy fees.
Couldn't we just stop being petty bastards and just give out free food to kids at school? Food is not expensive in America. All this bitching about budgetary constraints is just another example of the middle class and poor at each other's throats...
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ISTR a few years ago some other school tried this (for similar reasons: the kids won't get beat up for their lunch money if they aren't carrying any, "ease of use", blah blah). The parents told them to fuck off and spend the money on important shit like textbooks and classroom supplies.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
Is the fingerprint data going to the federal government or any other government entity outside of the school district food and nutrition department, or is the fingerprint data simply being used as a form of authentication, and then the data associated with the student's meal logged with the student's student information system tracking number?
In my experience with student information systems like SASI and Edupoint, there's a lot of information that the software tracks for the school district's purposes that isn't part of the export to the state reporting agency or to Title I or anything like that, and those systems usually don't even have DB columns for things like thumbprints. I expect that the IT department does an SIS export to the F&N department of enrollees, then the F&N department inputs thumbprints after importing the records list, so that when the kid puts their thumb on the scanner it looks up the record and confirms validity and notes the meal, then later exports the student number and meal, to either be sent to the SIS or to the state or federal agency. I very much doubt they're sending thumbprints between systems, the exports would take too damn long.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Imagine a world where Wesley Snipes cuts off your poor innocent child's thumb to get a free lunch, instead of stealing their social security number and taking out a loan for a house, or something!
Actually, imagine a world where children are effectively indoctrinated from a young age to assume an unreliable and insecure technology is a valid means of personal identification, and therefore fail to question the validity of its pervasive use in later life.
Kinda like bank cards and PIN numbers, or using your credit card at Target, or assuming that chip-and-pin will fix all avenues of fraud and abuse.
"Sorry, Timmy... we see here that you were eating unhealthy food in 3rd grade which, even if we didn't know it at the time, was later determined to be a primary cause of hepatic liver failure 35 years later; under the provisions of the ACA 17.3, we're sadly going to have to deny you that new liver. If only you'd eaten the lime, instead of the cherry jello..."
Suppose you had been at the place of crime just before the crime happened, and suppose your fingerprints are in the government's database. They find you using the database and you have to prove you are not the criminal. Maybe you succeed at that, maybe not. But I can guarantee you, in such a situation, you would wish your fingerprints were not in that database.
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.
A little privation does wonders for a kids tendency to "lose" things...
Just sayin'.
They're trying to boil the frog, to slowly implement Beta... It never went away they're trying to fo
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It's clear you don't get it. It's probable that you're too stupid to get it. I'll lay it out for you since you seem incapable.
It doesn't matter that they can't reverse it. The fact that it can identify a thumb print is enough. Basically, they're starting to profile people they believe will later become criminals from childhood. Obtaining your thumb print is traditionally something the government does when you become a criminal. Now they're basically doing it for no other reason than you're poor. Meanwhile, those with enough money get a free pass.
This is unacceptable. Not only because the Fed should have nothing to do with this. And not only because the gov really shouldn't need to track which people are participating or even possibly what they are eating. But because the gov should not have fingerprint registration data (which will be horribly abused) .
Stand up for your rights, people... and the rights of your children. Once you give this data to the government (or big business), it will NEVER be erased or restricted, regardless of claims or laws- it will go into huge databases and shared between all agencies and used however they want for as long as they want.
There is only one safer and practical biometric I know of- that is deep vein palm scan. That registration data cannot be readily abused. It can't be latently collected like DNA, fingerprints, and face recognition can. You have to know you are registering/enrolling when it happens. You don't leave evidence of it all over the place. When you go to use it, you know you are using it every time. And on top of all that, it is accurate, fast, reliable, unchanging, live-sensing, and cheap. If you must participate in a biometric, this is the one you should insist on using.
Example: http://www.m2sys.com/palm-vein...
But we also need to realize that IT IS NOT EVERYONE'S BUSINESS WHAT WE ALL DO. The first step in securing freedom is privacy. When you are tracked, you are losing your freedom, whether you realize it or not.
Let's play devil's advocate here. I've given up my fingerprints to Japan upon entry as a tourist. I did the same for the USA. Oh well. Fingerprinting is so routine nowadays that anyone who travels internationally will fall foul of it eventually. Like it or not, sooner or later it'll happen to you. Does it have to be bad?
This sort of scheme has been done in the UK too, for secondary schools. The biometric systems replace ID cards which get lost, stolen and so on. There is another argument that biometrics hides who gets free school meals which prevents bullying. The key point here is that these systems do not record your fingerprint in the same way that law enforcement do. They take a temporary image, create something like a hash (it's not a hash, but it's a similar concept) from some characteristic features and then compare that to whatever is in the database. While that certainly identifies you and you're now explicitly linked to the food you bought, it's not something that could then be used to forge a national ID card. Is the 'hash' from this system interoperable with a competing system? Who knows, probably not. At most you could forge an input to that particular biometric system.
So they feed back this data to the government. What is the data? Is it a scan of the finger that would hold up in court? Or is it just some hash identifier, linked to the student's name and the food they bought. In which case the privacy risks are questionable, but the scheme is opt-in for now and the same issues would be there if a standard RFID card was used instead.
They should have expected this. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
there's a lot of information that the software tracks for the school district's purposes that isn't part of the export to the state reporting agency or to Title I or anything like that right now,
FTFY.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
My children have to enter a PIN when they buy there lunch. Extra charges are always showing up on our account because other kids can't remember their pin or mis-type it and there's no check. This way, with the biometrics, the charges (OK, the article is talking about free lunches...) would end up on the correct account.
Why do Yanks have to do every fucking single thing in their schools in a maximum privacy-invading way with overly convoluted use of technology?
Because the end goal is to make people acclimate to the idea that they do not and should not have privacy and that they should submit to authority. The free lunches are just a carrot to lead them around.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
We signed a sheet of paper with our names for reduced price lunch. The school lunch person who stood there got to know the kids with reduced price lunch and knew that if suddenly some kid that she never saw before put his/her name down, they would check another sheet of paper to make sure they were on the list.
Not sure what's changed in the lunchroom since then that requires such elaborate identification methods.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
The little beggars are going to grow up to be criminals so we might as well fingerprint them, get them in the "system," and start tracking them now.
The linked article is pretty vague about what kind of data is being stored and tracked. Most-likely the system is a simple gatekeeper and doesn't have the ability to monitor what a child is getting at lunch. Also, the data sent to the government is not defined, it likely has no personally identifiable data, just usage statistics (124 kids got lunch on Wednesday), but I'd like to see the data sent. It could very well be sending private information in plain-text across the internet, by design or incompetence...