LTKA - More about primary school fingerprinting (against schools fingerprinting our children)

"It seems crazy that we shouldn't accept fingerprinting for adults but go along with it quite happily for children." Kim Thomas, freelance journalist and writer

"I consider that this was an infringement of my son's civil rights and a breach of trust on the part of the school. This should not have been done at all, and certainly not without our consent." A mother from London, speaking to the BBC

"Words escape me. I am appalled. Even if the system is used just for library books, whatever happened to recognising children by their faces?" Vicky Schueller, via We're All Neighbours

"We continue to receive regular complaints from young people and parents about the use of thumbprints in school libraries." Action on Rights for Children in Education

"We do not see this as necessary and we are concerned that this technology may well invade people's privacy without providing any noticeable gains." Doug Jewell, spokesman for civil liberties group Liberty.

"The UK government is urging the industrialised world to deploy biometric technologies." The International Biometric Group

Biometric data is being used for trivial purposes. Children are being taught by example to regard such data as being of little importance when they should be learning to protect it carefully.

"At best, the technology is overkill and a waste of taxpayer money. At worst, it sets a dark precedent, conditioning students at a young age to embrace the idea of Big Brother-style biometric tracking. If ever there was a generation that would not oppose a government system for universal ID, it's this one." Chris Hoofnagle, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington DC

"We enjoy working with our new thumb print scanner on the PC. We are going to Toynbee after the summer holidays, but we are glad because they have the thumb print machine there too. Other year groups use it as well as us and we are getting used to it now." Chloe (pupil, Fryern Junior School, Eastleigh, Hampshire)

"Getting kids hooked into treating biometrics capture as a standard thing sends a chill down my spine, and smacks of a long-term attempt to bring in the process for everybody." Richard Leyton

"At the beginning of term, the new students were queuing to have their fingerprints put on..." Ann Jones, Manor Foundation High School, Wednesbury, West Midlands

"Such a process has the effect of softening children up for such initiatives as ID cards and DNA testing... This is a bleak moment for privacy in Britain." Simon Davies, director of Privacy International

"I'm alarmed at the figure in the press that 'hundreds of thousands' of schoolchildren have already been fingerprinted by this system; it seems to me to have the effect of acclimatising children to biometric surveillance before they're old enough to worry about it." Parent, St Matthew's Primary School, Cambridge

"If these measures are allowed to go forward and the principles they represent are accepted... we will all be fingerprinted or retina-scanned by the government, and this biometric information will be placed on compulsory national ID cards that we will have to produce to police on demand." George Radwanski, Privacy Commissioner of Canada, January 30, 2003

"The issue, for me, is two fold:
(1) socialising children into the benign effects of technology on their existence (look also at the permeation of the mobile phone);
(2) encouraging technological developments that are apparently trivial, even unnecessary, and, in the process, creating an atmosphere of their acceptability when those engaged in these developments are extremely wary of their effects and deny that they are necessarily benign or, indeed at the moment, even controllable." Professor Emerita Leone Burton, The University of Birmingham, visiting research fellow, Cambridge University

"Give me a dozen healthy infants ... and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select" John Broadus Watson (1878-1958)

"The more we use technology in the interests of efficiency, the more we alienate children from a fundamental understanding of agreements, promises, contracts and bargains." Dr James Atherton, learningandteaching.info, via email

"Education, Education, Education" Tony Blair "Consent, Consent, Consent" Parents

We are campaigning to have the widespread use of biometrics in schools debated in Parliament, & henceforth strictly regulated & closely monitored, with a statutory requirement for explicit parental consent wherever biometrics are used.

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