What do you think of this? Trading biometric data & face scans for food

[Getahobby]

Food banks using face scans

I'm really shocked by this.
The people using the food banks don't even have much choice. They're there because they need to be and many have no other option. For everything else you can usually opt out or just choose not to use the service/product but for this they have no choice.
I think it's awful.

I'm not sure I even understand "It allows the charity to give people shopping tokens rather than food parcels, which helps the already stretched food bank to meet rising demand without having to find staff and volunteers to manage its own supplies."

Is the concern that tokens will be sold on and not used for food? Who is holding the biometric data? It sounds iffy on the face of it.

God! That's much worse than taking other biometric data, eg fingerprints, as identifiers, because your fingerprint can't be picked up and identified by a CC tv camera or random Ring doorbell beaming data back to the mothership.

Don't even have the energy to go into this one, but there is no explanation for this that leads anywhere good.

Wtf

It looks like the company have identified a vulnerable population - people who can't even afford to buy food - and targeted them to harvest data.

Feels free at the point of taking the data... but takes us somewhere potentially very bad.

Call me a bleeding heart liberal, but it would be much simpler and more ethical to just give vouchers and trust that most people will use them for food, for themselves.

If there are, for example, parents selling the vouchers for drugs money and failing to feed their children, well that's got to be a minority and we have child protection services for that. Food banks aren't statutory, so why the paranoid policy?

Maybe that's naive, IDK.

I think it is appalling. The food bank users have no choice but to agree if they want the food and surely there should be enough checks in the referral to be sure the people are in need. What fraud are they talking about anyway? What about the dignity of the food bank users, never mind any data being harvested.

@JeandeServiette I think the tokens are some sort of voucher that users can spend at supermarkets. The chief executive of the food bank said, not word for word but basically "it's true we could look at the receipts, but we don't, we're too busy" so I assume they are holding the data.

I'm probably a bleeding heart liberal/naive too then because I don't think majority or even half, probably a small percentage, are going to sell vouchers on and let their children go hungry. It's no different to the minority who will spend benefits cash on drugs instead of feeding their children.

Yes @PerkingFaintly especially as this is in London, where they've started using facial recognition in CCTV already. They also say a potential "benefit" to keeping users data and receipts is that if somebody is buying too much confectionery they can be given "advice"

@kafkascastle totally agee. I also worry because often these things just become more widespread. Just like how much of our info companies already have nowadays. It's become more and more over time.
I think the fraud is they think people could sell supermarket vouchers on instead of using them themselves.

I wonder if there's any connection to this thread today:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/4834092-childs-school-asking-for-biometric-data