Yesterday I received a letter from my children's school saying they 'require' the fingerprints of the children so that they can operate a cashless system in the canteen. Here is my response, please share far and wide:
Harwinn House,
Great Heck
DN14 0BQ
Tel: 01977 661430
Mob: 077233 81002
Email: dwvallance@yahoo.co.uk
Regd. No. 05967347
|
17
September 2015
Jean
Pickerill
The
Snaith School
Pontefract
Rd,
Snaith
DN14
9LB
Dear
Ms Pickerill,
I
am writing in response to the letter I received yesterday about the new
cashless system you are set to introduce for the children on October 12th.
I will certainly not be giving permission for my children to have their fingerprints
registered on your scheme. In fact I don’t even feel that I have a moral right
to give such a permission on their behalf if they are deemed too young to do so
themselves. They are not my property, they are people.
My
reason for writing to you is not my attitude to my own children but far more
importantly my deep concerns about the very existence of such a scheme in , of
all places, a school. First of all I would like to make clear that I do not impute
any sinister motive to the school in the implementation of the system. My
concern is that with the best will in the world and the most diligent application
of data protection rules the very existence of biometric records of school
children (I can barely believe I just had to type that phrase) is terribly
dangerous.
During
the German occupation of France during the Second World War, municipal and school
records which had been collected for legitimate reasons and carefully stored
away were used for perverted purposes by the occupying Nazis. Huge numbers of
people were deported, robbed, used as slaves, for medical experiments and
executed.
I
don’t doubt that as your letter states, the fingerprint is stored as an algorithm
but this is pretty academic. The fact is that unless it were possible to
recognise the child from his or her fingerprint using the system it would be
useless. Imagine the consequences for the entire cohort of children if this
technology and information were to fall into the hands of those who wished to
do down certain groups of them. Especially given that the school and other
State institutions routinely collect information about the ethnicity and
religion of the kids. (I don’t co-operate with that either by the way.)
It
is all very well that there is no public record of my Children’s race or
religion and that you won’t take their fingerprints but even so, the very lack
of this information in relation to a small group could, if the records fell
into the wrong hands, be used to mark that group out as trouble makers.
Furthermore
by implementing this system on a cohort of impressionable young kids you would
be conditioning them to give biometric information away willy-nilly before they
are old enough to consent to it themselves. We are already one of the most
routinely CCTV photographed populations in the World. Surely it is my job as a
parent and yours as an educator to warn children of the dangers of this kind of
intrusion. Not to soften them up for a life of being snooped on by the State.
I
have nothing against a chashless system in principle. They have been operated
in numerous workplaces over many years using a card and PIN system.
Therefore
I implore you to abandon this new scheme altogether, substituting a card and
pin system in its place or at least delay it so that the case against it may be
put to other parents who may not have considered these points fully before
giving consent. At the very least I would ask you to circulate this letter to all
parents giving it equal prominence to the letter I received yesterday.
I
shall also be writing to local MPs and media and I shall tell them as I tell
you now that other than on this issue I am very impressed with Snaith School
and that I would recommend it to anyone.
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