How would you feel if your child returned home from school and told you that they had just been fingerprinted?
If this has already happened in your family, you’re not alone. New research from Big Brother Watch has found that more than one million children, in approximately 40% of schools, have been fingerprinted in a single academic year - part of an increasing trend towards using biometric technology as a means of identification when buying school lunches, registering attendance or issuing library books.
So what’s the problem? Well, approximately 31% weren’t consulted or asked to give consent for this to happen to their child.
The new research follows the 2012 reportThe Class of 1984,which highlighted the fact that there are more than 100,000 CCTV cameras in Britain and that - shockingly - more than two hundred schools are using cameras inside bathrooms and changing rooms.
For some parents, the use of biometrics within schools will be a perfectly acceptable use of resources and technology - part of the trend towards the use of increasingly sophisticated technology in the classroom. Others, though, will be profoundly uncomfortable that their child has been asked to part with personal, identifiable, simply in order to ease the administrative process. Wouldn’t you like the opportunity to make the call?
Fingerprinting children and tracking their movements and activities might save some admin work - but the risk is that pupils begin to believe that it’s ‘normal’ to be constantly tracked. Going to school should not mean that children are taught that they have no right to privacy - especially at a time when we are sharing more data about ourselves than ever before. On the contrary: schools arguably have a responsibility to fully explain issues like data protection, privacy, fraud and the use of biometrics as part of the education process. Many schools, however, appear to be failing to fully educate pupils about these increasingly important topics.
Schools need to be transparent about what data they collect and how it is used, but for many schools this is far from standard practice. This research was carried out after a spike in complaints from concerned parents who had either been provided with a vague letter, or had received no information at all, about plans to fingerprint their child. Giving consent, for many, simply did not come into the equation. In some cases, those that protested, or questioned the motivation for using the technology received a rough ride from school administrators.
It is this confusion about what information parents should have received from school and whether consent should have been sought that provoked the Government to pass the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012, which came into effect in September 2013. This legislation has created an clear legal framework which states that parents and pupils have a legal guarantee that no fingerprints should be taken without the school gaining explicit consent (written from parents and oral from pupils) - and that an alternative must be made available if they did not wish to participate.
The full extent of school surveillance is far higher than most people would expect, and will come as a shock to many parents. Schools need to come clean about the surveillance systems they use - and local authorities need to be doing far more to reign in excessive surveillance in their areas, and to ensure that resources are not being diverted from more effective alternatives.
Parents will be rightly concerned to hear that so many schools are not seeking permission to fingerprint children, while pupils may not have been made aware they now have a legal right to use a system that doesn’t require a fingerprint to be taken. The Government was right to change the law - but, sadly, it looks as though it’s going to be up to parents to make sure the law is being followed.