14 DAY TRIAL // ARCH, Action on Rights for Children, released a public report concerning the biometrics in schools, revealing that using high-tech solutions might harm children's right and what's more important, may have serious consequences. Using a fingerprint scanning technology, the kids might provide several details which can be used by any malicious person in the world. But the Minister of Schools and some other officials defended themselves by saying the fingerprints are not stored on a computer and cannot be rebuilt from templates.
"The Minister for Schools, the Information Commissioner, biometric vendors and schools themselves have repeatedly claimed that fingerprints cannot be reconstructed from templates, but even if this were not open to debate, it is a red herring. If a biometric template can be correlated across systems, then there is no need to reconstruct the fingerprint. Many academics, in any case, disagree that fingerprints cannot be reverse-engineered and have published plausible evidence of the reconstruction of images from templates," Arch wrote in the report published a few days ago.
Moreover, the Action on Rights for Children organization stated that sometimes, the fingerprint technologies are used without parents' approval and even without notifying them about such a thing. In addition, ARCH said that the United Kingdom is the only country which introduced biometrics in school and uses it in a high percent since Ireland reduced the usage of such solutions.
"It is not enough to say that a system is relatively secure now: nobody can guarantee that it will remain so. As biometrics are increasingly used for security-critical functions such as passports or ID cards, so will the market develop in illicitly-obtained biometric data. This not only places a heavy responsibility upon adults to guarantee the security of children's data; it means that we should also be instilling in children a sense of the importance of biometrics and discouraging them from giving them up for low-level purposes," ARCH continued.
For the complete report released by 'Action on Rights for Children,' please visit this link.