Everything that is stored on a computer is stored as a number. An image of the Mona Lisa, a movie on a DVD, a Word document. So when you make a high quality scan of the Mona Lisa, you merely store a number, which can later be printed as a high quality image of the Mona Lisa.

And as far as encryption is concerned, your child's biometric data needs to be kept safe for their entire lifetime. With today's rapid advances in computer technology, no manufacturer can credibly make such a claim. The state-of-the-art Enigma code used by the German navy during Wold War Two was cracked in 1941; today it can even be decrypted on a standard home PC. And even the 1976 state-of-the-art 64-bit Data Encryption Standard (DES), developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the US, can now be cracked on today's supercomputers.

The official US National Science & Technology Council's Subcommittee on Biometrics contradicts this claim. "There have been studies where pseudo fingerprint images have been reconstructed from the fingerprint template."

To return to the analogy of a drawing (fingerprint template) and a photograph (fingerprint), it is certainly possible to recognise an image from a drawing. You don't necessarily need the original photo.

Many people believe that emptying the recycle bin will delete a file forever. This is not true, when you delete a file and empty it from the recycle bin, the file is in fact still on your drive. There are many examples of inexpensive software that can be used to recover these files with a single mouse click. On 9th February 2007, the Information Commissioner's Office issued the recommendation that "schools must also dispose of the data using professional data cleansing companies once the child has left or if it no longer of use." We feel it would be reasonable to expect schools to do this promptly, particularly if a parent changes their mind and asks for their child's data to be removed halfway through term.

Most schools 'forget' to inform parents of this fact unless there are specific complaints.

This is simply not true. See the answer above. The file remains on the hard drive until it is overwritten by another file. This could take years. Even then, there is a chance it may be recovered with specialised software.

A good way of avoiding trouble while earning millions of pounds as our children are fingerprinted. The same manufacturer used to claim it had never received a complaint from a parent. Now we know why.

This does not mean the software is uncontroversial, merely that the DfES are failing in their duty to safeguard the interests of our children. The ever-changing 'spin' they have come up with, which you can read here makes it hard to take seriously any pronouncements they give on the subject.

This is an old letter from 2002 and has been superceded by recent events. Further, in the UK there is no such person as the 'Data Protection Commissioner'.

You can read a letter from the DfES here which includes the sentence "I should stress, of course, nothing in this letter constitutes a commercial endorsement of this particular software or of your company in general". Nonetheless, it would appear that the existence of such a letter is used by at least one manufacturer to promote their school biometric system. You can read a letter from the Information Commissioner here.