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School Lunch Program Scans Student Thumbprints For 'Tracking Purposes'

Posted by Soulskill on from the there-ain't-no-such-thing-as-a-free-lunch dept.

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.

6 of 141 comments (clear)

  1. Scare quotes? by guises · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:Scare quotes? by geekmux · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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?

      And how many more Snowden events need to go down before you realize those quotes are pretty valid today?

      When it comes to collecting data today...ANY fucking data, you can rest assured it's being used for more than the "advertised" purpose.

      Don't be ignorant about it. It's how we got here.

  2. Devils advocate here by Chewbacon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  3. DICE, Please fix by itsenrique · · Score: 5, Insightful

    -The icons overlapping the title -The lack of 'Read more' or 'View comments'

  4. Just more proof by houghi · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ... that there is no such thing as a free lunch.

    --
    Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
  5. Re:Oh no, by freeze128 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.