Weird parent pay situation

[user1471537877]

I'm not new but one of the many who lost their name in the hack last year

We have a fairly uncommon name, at my DS school the handful of people with this name are all related though not for a number of generations

Tonight DS mentioned that when using his thumb on parent pay another child with the same family name comes up

DD who previously attended the school said that this also happened to her with a sibling of the child coming up on her thumb print

Having briefly looked at research it appears finger prints can indeed be familial

I will be mentioning this to school but wondered if anyone had come across this problem before

I assume the finger print scan on parent pay is not as sophisticated as legal ones but am slightly concerned that this service is not as secure as they would have us believe

Surely the most likely reason is an admin one?

I'm guessing the school have connected the wrong info to the wrong children. Give them a call and get them to change it. I doubt your children have the same fingerprint as anyone else in the school.

There are 4 children in total connecting, different years, addresses went on the system separate years and it's activated by thumb no names are input when used

Oh and it doesn't happen often, mostly they get the correct account

Ah I thought you meant that it happened every time, and was surprised that you seemed so unconcerned that someone else was paying for your children's lunch 😂

That's crazy, I've never heard of that before, it sounds like they need to update their scanners.

DS didn't use when the wrong name popped up on display of the drinks machine as he's a very honest soul

He never uses in the lunch hall as he is a coeliac and school don't provide gf food

It may have come to my notice sooner if they used it regularly but generally he takes safe food and drink with him

Finger prints are unique? How could there be any crossover at all if there wasn't also a link to the names?

Flogging molly, if you google familial finger prints there is research that shows families can inherit similar patterns

Parent pay do not use a full finger print apparently, and not to the standard of legal tests thus it is possible that similar finger prints cross over

As I've said, all the children went on the system in different years, names are not input only thumb prints when buying

The families live in different villages, there are no obvious connections and it happens irregularly

Last summer I logged on line to top up DDs account and saw that she'd been buying lunches and snacks every day for the last few weeks. She takes a packed lunch so i asked her what was going on and she promised she's only bought a few snacks recently (which were also showing on her account).

I contacted the school and they told me another child's account had been accidentally linked to hers (a boy in a different year with a completely different name apparently). Every time he bought anything the payment was deducted from my DD's account.

The school refunded me the money and took both DD's and the other boys finger prints again and so far we've had no further problems.

DD also says that often the machines don't work and they just tell the person on the till their name and year. She said you could give any name and they'd be charged instead of you so I do check her account regularly. I certainly don't think it's a foolproof system and clearly it can't cope if two children have very similar finger prints either.

This is news to me, I've never even heard of this system before.

I would be getting the school to raise it with ParentPay and raising it with them yourselves. And if possible get the others with the same familial finger print to raise it with them too - if it can't cope with them then it's not secure enough to be such a widely used system.

If they ignore you I'd then raise it with them via social media so they can't ignore you.

Given that there is a known thing about familial fingerprints, they can't just fall back on statistics to say that it's unlikely to happen - fingerprints used for ID are different from fingerprints used to identify criminals. In places like schools where you have known populations and where there are likely to be siblings and cousins and wider family members in the same school, their fingerprinting needs to be good enough to cope with it!