School district has suspended its palm scanner program after public outcry.
A Maryland school district has suspended its biometrics program after receiving pressure from the public and a civil liberties group.
The superintendent of Carroll County schools said the new palm scanner program is dividing the community and that's not his intent.
The Rutherford Institute called on the school system to drop the program.
More than 50 school systems in the country use biometric scanners. The technology identifies students using physical characteristics, like fingerprints.
Khaliah Barnes, open-government counsel with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told The Baltimore Sun parents should have been allowed to opt their kids out of the program.
"With students, this presents unique privacy threats," Barnes said. "We're talking about elementary school students, and that type of technology can make children less inclined to the rights of privacy."
"Imagine being tracked from age 8 to age 16, and then a university continues to use it, it becomes old hat and makes them less inclined to recognize privacy threats," he added.
The Rutherford Institute calls them a "stealth move on the part of corporations and schools to further entrench the surveillance state."
“The scanners will continue to be used in the ten schools where they have already been installed until a decision has been made about which input method to use in the place of the palm scanners.” The Rutherford Institute has been vocal in warning school officials and communities against prioritizing the interests of governments and corporations over the privacy rights of students and families.
“While this is a significant development in pushing back against the encroachment of the surveillance state in the schools, the battle is far from over—in this school district and everywhere else these tracking and surveillance programs are being implemented,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead. “Communities need to hold government officials accountable to representing their interests, rather than marching in lockstep with programs aimed at enriching the schools and their corporate partners that don’t make the schools safer or help students learn more but merely advance the surveillance state.”
Palm scanning identification devices are becoming increasingly common throughout the country, and can be found in over 50 school systems and 160 hospital systems, spanning 15 states and Washington, DC. Public schools in Carroll County, Maryland, have implemented a biometric lunch program which involves scanning the palms of schoolchildren in order to allow them to purchase food. School officials claim the devices are intended to make cafeteria lunch lines more efficient and safeguard student meal accounts. The biometric palm reader takes an infrared picture of the palm’s vein structure and then matches that image with stored information to identify the child.
The Rutherford Institute, which has opposed many scanning and tracking programs being implemented in schools throughout the country, was asked to intervene after Mike Webb, the father of an elementary school-aged child in the Carroll County public school system, objected to his son being forced to participate in such a program. In calling on the Carroll County Board of Education to cease its implementation of the program or, at the very least, only allow students to enroll in the program with express written consent from a parent, John W. Whitehead warned school officials against making government tracking and surveillance ubiquitous in the schoolhouse and, in the process, desensitizing young people to threats to personal privacy when used in broader contexts.
As one corporation that sells biometric technologies to school districts confirmed, “Once finger scanning is being used successfully in one part of the school, the idea migrates and is embraced in other areas as well.” These include the school’s front door, the classroom, the nurse’s office, the library, buses, athletic events and dances. Another company eagerly touts the fact that wireless biometric technology is in development to assist large schools with “hallway monitoring.” https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/on_the_front_lines/victory_maryland_school_district_agrees_to_cease_implementation_of_biometri
http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2012/December/School-District-Drops-Palm-Scanners-after-Outcry/
Student location tracking has troubling implications.
School districts in Texas and California have implemented a real-world version of the Marauder’s Map: some schools are tracking students’ precise locations on school grounds using name badges embedded with Radio Frequency Identification (or RFID) chips.
The program earned national attention recently when a student at a science and engineering magnet academy in San Antonio refused to wear the badge (either with or without the tracking chip); after she was removed from the school as punishment, she and her parents sued. San Antonio is just one of many school districts that use the program to claim precious state dollars based on attendance; using the chips to track students on school grounds, they can report students as present even if they are not in the classroom.
There are a number of troubling implications of this tracking plan. The first is the risk of training young people for a police state. Secondary school administrators and teachers have a critical responsibility for keeping their young charges safe, and the First Amendment rights of elementary and high school students can be curtailed in ways that would not pass muster in college and beyond. But a school is not a prison. Its obligations include educating the next generation of competent participants in our democracy: future taxpayers, voters, elected representatives, and judges. Teaching students at a young age to be cautious about whom they associate with, where they seek a quiet moment, and what student groups they join, lest they be remotely identified at the touch of a button, is a poor lesson for the future leaders of a democracy.
Unfortunately, evidence suggests they are already learning that lesson. The San Antonio district’s RFID program supplements the magnet school’s 200 already-existing surveillance cameras. “The kids are used to being monitored,” district spokesman Pascual Gonzalez told Wired magazine.
This civic burden is ultimately likely to fall most heavily upon poor and minority communities. As others have noted, chronic underfunding of public schools is a genuine crisis, and schools have a responsibility to recoup every dollar they can. And indeed, schools in poor communities may face security challenges that militate in favor of more stringent student oversight.
But wealthy parents who object to acclimating their children to a surveillance state have other options: they may choose private school or intervene with their school board or legislature. Parents in poorer communities, by contrast, will inevitably have far less capacity to seek other alternatives or to advocate on their own behalf. With the “schoolhouse to jailhouse” track already well documented, it is perhaps cynically brilliant to prepare already marginalized students for their future lives as prisoners.
Moreover, any time our sensitive personal information (and information about where we go isincreasingly recognized as being among the most sensitive) is available to an arm of the government, the next question should be: what happens to the data?
A letter from the San Antonio school district introducing the program explains that the cards will automatically transmit students’ location (via a randomly-generated serial number) to electronic readers. Neither the letter nor the district’s dedicated website describes whether or how location information is saved in the system. And while the letter adds that students will not be tracked off campus, the parameters of the current system are no guarantee of thecapabilities of a future system. (This is setting aside the additional concerns about how easy the system is to trick or override in a variety of ways.)
This capture and sharing of information is already playing out in a variety of realms. State departments of motor vehicles hold a wealth of valuable biometric information; as facial recognition technologies improve, the DMVs are under increasing pressure to share that information with the FBI for its own biometric databases. Similarly, both states and federal agencies are establishing networks of license plate readers that track the movements of drivers on public roads; there are no consistent retention rules for that information, at least some of which is funneled to federal fusion centers. And another kind of location information – that gleaned from the cellphones of both criminal suspects and the innocent people in their vicinity – is increasingly accessible to law enforcement, with rules about its collection, retention, and sharing only spottily available and often inconsistent from state to state.
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/13293-student-location-tracking-has-troubling-implications