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>> Vital questions you need to ask your children's school about fingerprinting <<

"Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive." Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)

"Why do you have to go and make things so complicated?" Avril Lavigne

WARNING: Some computer security experts feel that in the future it will be possible for
the information stored on school biometric systems to be used to steal your child's identity

The truth about biometric systems used in schools (using verifiable references)

"People have to be stark, raving mad to use conventional biometrics to improve the efficiency of a children's lunch line." Kim Cameron, Microsoft's Identity Architect, 05 April 2007 (read more from Kim Cameron)

"If a child has never touched a fingerprint scanner, there is zero probability of being incorrectly investigated for a crime. Once a child has touched a scanner they will be at the mercy of the matching algorithm for the rest of their lives." Brian Drury, IT security consultant, 12 March 2007 (read more from Brian Drury)

Schools that introduce fingerprinting usually try to reassure parents by saying "the system does not store a fingerprint, just a number. It is not possible to reconstruct an image of a fingerprint from what is stored".

The short answer is that fingerprint templates are what is stored on these systems. These are the equivalent of fingerprints - rather like the difference between a drawing and a photo - otherwise the systems simply wouldn't work.
Police, the security services, and governments use fingerprint templates to identify criminals.
There are international standards to ensure that biometric templates from different manufacturers are compatible - so what's stored on one system can be read by any other, including government systems.
Where fingerprint templates are stored in an encrypted form, it is impossible for anyone to guarantee that this won't be broken during a person's entire lifetime. A PIN number can easily be changed. A fingerprint, and the template dervived from it, cannot ever be changed.
Moreover, the Government has the power to demand encryption keys from the system supplier, under the terms of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 Part III.
In the future, fingerprint templates will be used to authenticate passports, bank accounts, etc. Thus biometric templates are extremely valuable and need to be kept in a highly secure environment.
In addition, fingerprint templates can be used to rapidly link different databases and to build up a disturbingly accurate profile of an individual without their knowledge or consent.
The US government's official National Science & Technology Council says you CAN reconstruct a fingerprint image from a fingerprint template.
Government security experts have successfully hacked the fingerprint scanners used in schools.
Schools cannot possibly provide the level of security necessary to protect children's data.
A school might not even be aware that children's data had been compromised until it was far too late.

"If you want to find out who owns a fingerprint, just convert the fingerprint to a template and do a search for the template in one of these databases. Call the template a binary number if you want to. The point is that all you need to save in the database is the number. Later, when you come across a "fingerprint of interest", you just convert it to a number and search for it. Law enforcement can use this information - and so can criminals."
Kim Cameron, architect of identity and access in Microsoft's connected systems division, 09 May 2007

Read the long answer here, with verifiable references

"Education, Education, Education" Tony Blair (1996) "Consent, Consent, Consent" Concerned parents (2007)

We are campaigning for the widespread use of biometrics in UK schools to be debated in Parliament, strictly regulated and
closely monitored, with statutory requirements for explicit informed parental consent where children's biometrics are taken

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