English nurseries fingerprinting parents "for security"

Two nurseries in Kent, England are fingerprinting parents as they drop off and pick up kids "for safety." Nevermind that statistically, your kids are far more likely to be snatched and/or abused by a parent (or someone who works at a nursery!) than by a stranger. On the other hand, giving out copies of your fingerprints to every weenie who's got a wild safety hair up their arse puts you at risk of having your identity snatched -- and the whole rigmarole just makes it harder for you to arrange for someone to pick up your kid if you're delayed, which makes your kid less safe too.

Ms Berryman said parents at the nursery were happy with the heightened security measures.
She said it made life a lot easier for parents when dropping off and picking up so that they were not hanging around waiting for their children.
"There is no actual information recorded, only the information that we've already got," she said.

My daughter starts going to a creche part time this week -- thankfully they're not fingerprinting us just yet. Link (Thanks, Imipak!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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Baldhead

#2… you’re missing the point. Protecting your child from harmful strangers is all good an well, bu the thing is… they aren’t out there. This measure may prevent 1 instance per year in the entire country. If that much. If you want to protect your child form abuse the safest thing to do is prevent any family member from ever seeing them, according to statistics.

Of course that would be construed as abuse.

Or you could make them wear water- wings every time they walk by a pool in case they fall in. You know, while you’re busy protecting them from things that aren’t likely to happen.
Anonymous

Miss Cellania (comment 19)

You’re better off with your kids in the affordable school where the staff watches for them. I worked on biometric systems, a while back, and they’re not worth a cent for real security. You can get past most commercial-grade fingerprinters by breathing on the glass. If you want to get really James Bond, you can go all the way up to Jello.

What these systems *do* provide, however, is a false sense of security. A staff that feels they are in a secure area is less likely to look closely at the people picking up your children.

A trained and security-minded staff that knows you trumps any technology.
~N
holtt

Were you talking about what Jr Mad Scientist said or about the fact that this nursery requires your fingerprint to pick up your kid?

Both.

I find it ironic that in order to fight the FUD we get abused with from anti-terrorist and other security paranoia, some people just revert to using FUD themselves. Fight FUD with FUD makes no sense to me.

I will admit though that as of late, governments and those “interested in our security” have been far more efficient about doing something with the FUD they generate. Cameras and crazy rules abound. Even the hero in Little Brother got out and did something. He didn’t just make vague scary hints about what could be or what happened and he didn’t just whip up the FUD – he actually did something.

Whipped FUD by the way is good on pie.
Miss Cellania

I couldn’t afford to put my children in the type of facility that has fingerprint readers. My kids’ school does the normal thing: You fill out a form specifying who can pick up the kids, with ID verification. Within a few weeks, the staff knows who is who. But now that mine are old enough, they will be walking home next fall!
The Unusual Suspect

As airship pointed out (@#8) someone who has your fingerprints can easily reproduce them in many ways.

I once did contract work for a Not-To-Be-Named Canadian gov’t department where my identity was frequently verified via my fingerprints. Stipulated in my contract was that I would not allow myself to be fingerprinted for any other purpose (except if required by police).

An appropriate level of security is for daycares to maintain an approved-persons list for each child. If someone shows up to collect a child but can’t produce photo ID to prove they’re on the list, the police are called.
closetpacifist

I don’t really understand what the person from the nursery is saying; how does getting fingerprinted keep you from having to wait to pick up your child? Are they taking fingerprints instead of checking ID or something?

And if they’re not getting any information they don’t already have, does that mean that they already had every parent’s fingerprints on file?
closetpacifist

Also, #18 is right; from the article:

She said in reality of the 11 million children in the UK, on average seven to 10 were abducted and murdered each year.

“But we don’t want to give children, particularly young children, the idea that the world is so dangerous that they can’t even go to nursery school without being scanned.”
slywy

I’m really confused. Do you have to go through fingerprint recognition to pick up your child?

I’d be hesitant to deal with a center whose staff doesn’t recognize someone who drops their baby off every day . . .

I think we should just have security implants that can’t be removed.

(TIC)
WeightedCompanionCube

If kids are more likely to be snatched by family, doesn’t it actually make sense to have their fingerprints on file? If the cops didn’t have the fingerprints in the system, the nursery could provide them.

That’s assuming the prints are kept in a format the police can use. Ink on a card is best. Often, when fingerprints are digitally enrolled, only the points used by that particular system are saved. You can’t reconstruct the exact print from it, and it’s not probable you can use that data to fake out a different system.
spazzm

Anyway, it’s easier to get the kids first, using the old *child safety* ruse. No one is going to question it for that reason. The real reasons are not being made public.

Yes, the wast conspiracy is only in its infancy, yet they have already secured the vital cooperation of this nursery.

Sigh.
Xopher

Takuan, I was right with you up until the ‘a’ in ‘spawn’. Then I was confused for several seconds before figuring out what you meant.
Takuan

you can imagine the complexity of our family law
noen

The Movie Minority Report gave us a pretty good idea of what the coming security state will look like.
Cefeida

#18, I’m not saying the statistics are wrong but that I don’t see the sense in quoting them here. Protecting your child from abuse by family members and protecting your child from being stolen from the nursery by a complete stranger are two different missions, and not the only ones a parent must face. Just because one danger is more difficult to prevent than the other doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take precautions.
imipak

(submitter here.) One data point: I’m not aware of a single case of a child being abducted from school, not in the UK at any rate. Someone up-thread suggested one case a year. I’d be really surprised if it was that many.

No need for any conspiracy theories, here, it’s just plain ol’ folks giving too much attention to FUD and others using security theatre. The answer is simple (but, unfortunately, rather slow) – however the good news is that it’ll fix ALL such nonsensical security theatre, including airports, crappy websites, over-enthusiastic security guards who believe it’s illegal to take photographs, or the UK cops (here’s today’s other outrageous yet under-publicised story) who ARRESTED 26 people for… allegedly… using BitTorrent to infringe copyright. (Note that copyright infringement in the UK is a civil offence unless it’s for pecuniary gain. So unless you’ve got a warehouse and a high-speed DVD duplicator you’re using to produce millions of fakes, you CAN’T be arrested for it.) The simple answer, which we can all help with, is to promulgate a meme that helps ordinary people spot the difference between snake oil and real security. It’s fairly complicated as memes go, requiring some concept of a threat and a control, and of the slapdown responses to such common cliches as “the innocent have nothing to fear”, “think of the children / terrorists / drug dealers”, and so on. Oh, and some notion of common failings of security systems, the law of unintended consequences, the hidden cost of false positives, externalities, and all that other good stuff you can read about it Bruce’s excellent books / blog / Crypto-Gram newsletter. I predict that we’ll end up teaching this sort of stuff to kids at school. I just hope we don’t have to go through a REAL 20th-century style authoritarian big brother state powered by 21st Century technology before the magnitude of the lossage is significant enough to cross the radar of the general public.
Anonymous

I have a hunch that this has far less to do with security than with the owners covering their arses. No doubt they have some arrangement where, should some horrid event occur, they can wash their hands of any liability (ESPECIALLY with the insurance companies) by “proving” how they had set up this Maginot Line.
mmbb

insert obligatory statement about people having their fingers chopped off in order to facilitate “identity theft” here.
oh, wait, not yet? i’m patient. it’s just data, much like facial recognition. wake me up when they ask me for a dna sample, ok?
Cefeida

“Nevermind that statistically, your kids are far more likely to be snatched and/or abused by a parent (or someone who works at a nursery!) than by a stranger.”

Statistically? If a stranger is trying to steal my kid from the nursery, he’s the bad kind of stranger. Always.

I think it’s very sensible of the nurseries to try and protect kids from being picked up by random people. Maybe they could do it in a simpler way than fingerprinting, but the idea itself is in no way ridiculous.
Ryan Waddell

How does giving out your fingerprint make you more susceptible to identity theft? None of my IDs or credit cards are linked to my fingerprint data. In fact, I don’t think there’s ANYTHING that links my fingerprints back to me… Other than my fingers.
protogenes

There have been several stories out of England recently, with this block and that block of people (airline travelers, criminals) being fingerprinted.

Again my feeling is they are working towards a society where you will be looked upon with suspicion if you *won’t* be fingerprinted.

Anyway, it’s easier to get the kids first, using the old *child safety* ruse. No one is going to question it for that reason. The real reasons are not being made public.
aixwiz

We have a couple of daycare centers in my community where they use a simple system. Each child has to bring a sealed envelope to school that contains a passphrase the parent has written on a piece of paper and signed. When the parent (or authorized picker-upper) comes to get the child, the passphrase they tell the staff has to match the one in the envelope. Also, the staff matches the signature in the envelope with the one they have on file to make sure the note wasn’t forged. If all is good, then the parent and child get to leave.
davotoula

If you are innocent you have nothing to fear!!!!1

(I jest)
Babau

Just security theatre. Albeit a particularly theatrical breed of it.
airship

Mythbusters did an episode where they tried to bypass various fingerprint-based security systems. Long story short: Just about everything they tried worked. They used a latex mold, got right in, etc. Even a photocopy of a fingerprint worked! So if your fingerprints are used for any kind of security access, you’re basically boned.

This information might come in handy if you ever have someone threatening to cut off your finger for security access. Tell them that a photocopy works just as well.
holtt

How can you steal someone’s identity with a fingerprint? It sounds like someone has fallen into the, “If we can think of it it could happen so we should do something about it before it does!” mentality. Hmm… where have I heard that before?
Junior Mad Scientist

Ryan @ #3 None of my IDs or credit cards are linked to my fingerprint data . . .

not yet, but sooner than you think.

Before you know it, every schizo with a fetish for security theater will be scanning our prints. I’m starting a job today where the time clock has a thumb print scanner. Why do they need it? To make sure you’re really, really, really the person who is punching in.

Pretty soon, biometric verification hardware will be the same price or cheaper than the regular tools. (Because nothing costs more than common sense.) Within the next five-to-ten years, we’ll need our thumbs printed, retinas scanned, or irises patterned to buy everything from lottery tickets to medical services.

For a couple of years, a Chicago area supermarket chain prided itself on its cutting-edge “Pay By Print” technology. Two months ago, the printing company went belly-up and yanked all the readers from the stores. What happened to all that personal info? The employees and managers don’t know and almost every customer who bought into the tech has shrugged it off, despite persons unknown having free-n-easy access to all that data.

So, keeping your prints to yourself while there are little (or no) data safeguards might not be a bad idea.
holtt

So, keeping your prints to yourself while there are little (or no) data safeguards might not be a bad idea.

Or raging paranoia.
bluesheep

GAH!

Fingerprints are not secrets, I leave mine lying around practically everywhere I go.

But lets look at this another way. If every Tom, Dick and Harry is using my fingerprint, then perhaps people will stop attaching importance to the stupid thing.

I predict the following future events:

- An emerging market for underground fingerprint readers
- An increase in glove sales
deweyeyed

In your case, Cory and Mrs., you have wisely added the security of “nobody picks up our daughter unless they know her entire name, and how to pronounce it correctly.”
Takuan

I always made it a point to be utterly memorable to any temporarily charged with custody of my spawn.
Chocolatey Shatner

“Lisa honey can you open the window…the cops have daddy’s prints on file.” – Homer
Jamie Sue

How many day cares do you know that have finger print recognition software? Finger printing isn’t making any one’s child safer.

The schools around here use an “approved” list. The parent gives a list of approved people who can pick up or visit thier child at school with a name and address for each. The school checks the photo ID of everyone that walks in the door. Your face, name, and addy don’t match? Get out.
Junior Mad Scientist

Holtt:

A wise man once said, “Just because you’re paranoid, don’t mean they’re not after you”.

(That might have been Mike Brady. Or Kurt Cobain. I’m not sure.)
remmelt

Or raging paranoia.

Were you talking about what Jr Mad Scientist said or about the fact that this nursery requires your fingerprint to pick up your kid?

There’s so much paranoia to go around. Everyone can have their fair share, pick it up for free at your local distribution point. This week’s portion sponsored by the UK government.
Belac

Biometrics are terribly security measures because they can’t be changed. Someone steals your credit card? Cancel it and get a new one. Someone steals your PIN? Change it. Someone steals your fingerprint? You’re screwed for life.

It’s similar to the Real ID. Lose your driver’s license? You can prove it’s you with your passport and get a new one. Lose your all-IDs-in-one-card? Good luck proving it’s you when you go to cancel and replace it.
Avram

Wait, Cory, have you considered that maybe they’re fingerprinting parents because parents are the ones most likely to abduct a child? This way, if a kid goes missing, the school can present the cops with the fingerprints of the most likely suspects.