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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.
-The icons overlapping the title -The lack of 'Read more' or 'View comments'
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.
I'm sure it will soon. There are some potential benefits: noticing that a diabetic student is buying a frosty milkshake everyday, or that a child with seafood allergies is buying fish sticks every week, or that a morbidly obese student or builimic student are buying 5 servings of ice cream every day might all be useful to the parents and the school. And the usefulness of such information can be used to justify monitoring _all_ students.
I recently encountered this sort of thing at a university where the IT department implemented extremely detailed tracking of wifi use. They would report to the parents, without notification to the student, where a student's laptop was last detected and what wifi access points they normally used at certain times of day. The nominal reason was "so the parents could contact the student". I was quite surprised, though not shocked, at their casual approach to privacy, especially since the same system monitored staff, visitors, campus police cell phones, and the personnel at the ROTC and military research facilities on their campus
... 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.