Schools in Rome, Georgia, are implementing a system that lets children "pay" for their school lunches with a fingerprint scan. Previously, students had to enter a personal ID number to access their lunch accounts.
Some parents are uneasy with having their children's fingerprints scanned, and wonder about how well the information is secured.
"It may be perfectly secure, but my daughter is a minor and I understand that supposedly the kids have the option to not have their prints scanned, but that's not being articulated to my daughter," said Hal Storey, who's daughter is a 10th grader at Rome High.
Reader comment: Greg Whitehead says,
The biometric finger scanner technology that I'm aware of doesn't actually record anything like a fingerprint that could be used to identify you by latent prints.
Natch says,
This comment is adding to the problem, which is that normal people are being asked to accept onerous privacy-invading technologies, and they are living in a world which increasingly takes that acceptance for granted. There are other problems with the comment, such as the fact that it comes from Joe Random Reader whose fingerprint technology credentials we don't know, and the fact that he bafflingly refers to the ability to link to "latent" fingerprints as though that is the only threat. Although I lean toward the Scott McNealy camp: "You have no privacy, get over it" I don't think it's necessary or right to force this thinking onto children. Giving them an opt-out that makes them into social black sheep in their school environment is also not a good option.
Matt Parker says,
Greg Whitehead's comments are extremely misleading. He is correct that fingerprint scanners do not generally store an image that can be used to reconstruct an entire fingerprint. They do, however, store a hash value which is based on the image of the fingerprint. So now, someone with a database of unidentified full prints need only need run this hash algorithm before they can use the records on file in this situation to positively identify you. And that's the best-case scenario, assuming that you trust the manufacturers of the (presumably closed-source) device to implement a proper one-way, collision-free hash.
Keith Irwin says,
If it stores enough information to match your fingerprint against the stored information, then it also stores enough information to match a latent print against that information. They system may not initially be set up to do so, but you could either extract the information from it or, as they demonstrated on mythbusters, use the latent print to build a fake finger.
Mark Ingram says,
My first thought when I saw this story was how often are they going to clean this thing. It seems to be a great way to spread disease around a school, have everyone touch the same surface right before eating. It would probably be more sanitary to have them lick a toilet seat (a toilet seat is actually quite clean, as demonstrated by Penn&Teller on the Bullshit! episode Safety Hysteria, and I think on Mythbusters too).
