School begins using biometric facial recognition
for school dinners. This rapid growth is down to the efforts of “enterprising small companies”, according to Simon Fance, project officer at the United Kingdom Biometrics Institute.
Because biometrics are a useful way of controlling access, the technology are being adopted by other organizations, such as nurseries. At U.K. borders, passport officials are being replaced by cameras that check travelers’ faces against the image held in their passports. One of the concerns for civil liberties campaigners is the blurry line between access control and surveillance: in Newham, east London, face recognition has been used in conjunction with CCTV as a means of identifying criminals in a crowd.
The dystopia envisaged by campaigners is one where the state holds increasing amounts of data on its citizens, which can then be easily matched to unique biometric identifiers. David Clouter, a parent activist from the pressure group Leave Them Kids Alone, regards the use of biometrics in schools as “a disproportionate response to a nonexistent problem” and believes it is a “giant softening-up exercise for the next generation to accept biometric identity in some form.” Children will get so used to offering their fingerprints or staring into a camera that they won’t challenge it when the state asks them to do it: “Every traffic warden, every minor official, will go round fingerprinting everybody. And people won’t see it as out of the ordinary, which it most certainly is.”
The other issue worrying Clouter is that schools hold large quantities of data on children — not only names, addresses and dates of birth, but information on attendance, library-borrowing habits and attainment, raising the possibility that a single biometric could be used to access huge amounts of personal data held on different systems, including ones held by other authorities: “The more biometric information floating around in insecure places like schools, the more chance there is of it being left on memory sticks or sent somewhere on a CD and lost,” he says.
Carr Archer argues that security concerns are misplaced when it comes to the system used by St Neots. Even if the encryption were to be broken, he says, Aurora’s method of taking measurements is proprietary, so the data could not be used elsewhere (although that could of course change if the Aurora technology becomes widely adopted). Preston is equally confident: “The box is a one-stop shop. There is a network connection that enables you to produce reports, but in terms of getting into the data and misusing it, you’d have to take the box off the wall.”
If the St. Neots pilot is successful, Aurora will market it to other schools, though they have yet to decide a pricing model. Currently, the units cost a hefty £4,000 each (though St. Neots is not being charged anything). In the meantime, schools’ enthusiasm for biometric technologies shows no sign of abating. Clouter and his colleagues can expect to be busy for some time yet.
