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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.”

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

(I jest)

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.

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.

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

Or raging paranoia.

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