Thursday, March 29, 2007

Fingerprinting in Bradford without parents consent

Over on Tarique Naseem's blog he's dealing with his child's school introducing a fingerprint scanner for library use without asking for consent from parents. He has now drafted a single page letter to hand out to parents at school informing them about biometric systems in schools for them to sign and hand back to the school. A couple of parents have volunteered to copy them and hand them out.

"I do not give authority for my child’s fingerprints to be stored on the schools computer systems and kindly ask that any data already taken be destroyed by an approved data cleansing company as required by the Data Protection Act."

The school have already fingerprinted the children, Tarique's child was not fingerprinted. The price of data cleansing per record can range from £1.25 to £2.25 (+vat). With an average of 26 children in a class, with at least one class leaving primary school every year, if not more classes, data cleansing will be an additional expense for the school to incur, but probably haven't even considered.

No comments: