I see that another school has opted to join Nanny's "Take Children's Fingerprints" scheme:"Apparently my kids' school is introducing thumb-print readers in the dinner queue, as a means of checking who's entitled to a dinner and who isn't. The deal is that you send a cheque up front to pay for your children's dinners, and the school takes your child's thumb print. Wrong thumb print --> no dinner.
Why do I get the nasty feeling that this is the start of something really sinister, and a back-door way of getting everyone's dabs onto some sort of national database ? Why do I worry about the security of the data? Why do I worry what else about my children the State will be demanding?
Have I been living too long under ZaNu Labour?"
Source Wombleontour
Given Nanny's "ability" to lose data, I wonder quite how safe the database of prints really is?
I also wonder what Nanny will try to do with them, aside from merely checking to see if the kid has paid for his/her lunch?
Parents who are concerned about the fingerprinting of pupils in this manner should at the very least ask the school to prove that the database is secure, that the prints will only be used to verify lunch payments and to confirm that the prints are deleted as and when the kid stops having lunches.
The bottom line is that the state cannot be trusted, and the more information (seemingly harmless) that it collects about us the more it will be tempted to use it against us.
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I think you're absolutely right.
ReplyDeleteIt's simply a back-door method to introduce a national fingerprint database. The Thought Police are encroaching ever-further on our civil liberties, as mentioned below:
http://dungeekin.blogspot.com/2008/11/watching.html
http://dungeekin.blogspot.com/2008/10/next-step-thought-police.html
http://dungeekin.blogspot.com/2008/11/doubleplusungood-rewrite-upsub.html
I stand by my original assertion that we'll see the Civil Contingencies Act invoked about a month prior to a GE, to ensure that this bunch of totalitarians keep hold of their desired power over us.
Love the Blog - keep making people aware!
Dungeekin
Easy solution. Refuse to allow your kids to be finger printed and give them a pack lunch (healthy of course, something Jamie would approve of), these things will only work if we are compliant, sadly it seems to me the vast majority of the UK are spineless when faced with the demands of the state
ReplyDeleteI mentioned on here a few months ago that local nursery schools, have introduced finger print scans and readers, not just for the pupils, but also for parents to gain access to the site inorder to pick their kids up.
ReplyDeleteThese scans and the storage of these scans are being carried out by a private company on behalf of the school....My question in relation to our local schools and the one in your editorial Ken, is this;
Who has access to the data and could the company handling the said data, assuming it is not already one of Nanny's contractors, be compelled to hand the data over to Nanny and who else has a "right" to ask to see the data?
Of course one of Nanny's coverall justifications are being used to make parents accept this;
a) Elf'n'Safety
b) Security threat from terrorism
c) Child protection
I wonder if anyone can guess which of Nanny's prefered excuses is being used?
In case you can't, the answer is (c)
Sooner or later they will want DNA - just to confirm.
ReplyDeleteI never thought that I would be defending a left wing NuLabour system that seems to take away our Civil Liberties but you guys seem to think that all "information" is held in an un-encrypted state. I used to work in a school where they tried different methods to stop the 'dinner money racket' changing from hard cash to using plastic swipe cards. The amount of kids who 'lost' their cards was astounding, and at £3:50 for a new card it was financially counter productive. The scheme where the kids’ thumbprints are taken is NOT nefarious as the scans are not held as images, but as a hashed algorithms (random numbers) associated with each individual thumb scan. There is no way for the government to be able to convert these random numbers into a readable image of anyone’s thumbprint. Sometimes all the facts need to be known before a judgement can be made.
ReplyDeleteIts just the thin edge of the wedge, yes they may hold this information in an encrypted way (i have no idea how these things work), however what you are seeing is the begining of the conditioning of young people into handing over this information without question.
ReplyDeleteWhat is wrong with money?