You have no privacy to fingerprints…
My wonderful off spring are homeschooled, which to those playing at home either makes my wife and I out as ultra-conservative religious types or anti-government anarchists (closer) or perhaps nice, decent secular folk who don’t think the government is doing an adequate job of teaching our kids. (DING DING DING! JOO ARE THE WINNER!)
Alright, done with that. I’m not an alarmist, but this klaxon should have been hit years ago. My kids are part of a program that allows homeschooled kids to partake in a couple of days at a public school to get classes that would be hard to do at home. Art, Writing, PE and Science. This program exists because even though we decided not to partake in the local school district we are still paying taxes and that’s what funds this program. Anyway, they eat lunch at this school. Which is good. But apparently some outfit sold the school a ticket-debiting system that uses my child’s finger prints as an ID marker.
That’s right, they are using biometrics to avoid having to punch a lunch ticket.
Some of you may not be reacting to this as negatively as I did. Which is fair, and ok even, so let me explain why this is bad.
I don’t think this is the “mark of the beast,” so let’s put that to rest. What I do think this is, however, is a slippery slope. What is being unintentionally taught to my children is that it’s okay to get your finger prints scanned to get food. It’s making giving up finger prints a positive thing. So when they come to make a national DNA database, or your insurance company wants to do a DNA profile to base your rates on genetic predispositions our kids won’t think anything of it.
Well, my kids will. They were instructed not to give up their finger prints under any circumstances, and my wonderous wife went to the school and had the data deleted from their systems (hopefully they didn’t hood wink us). My kids will now be asked their names at the lunch line and their lunch account debited that way. When I was a kid we gave the lunch lady a ticket or she said “Hello Pwag, how are you?” and using a primitive form of facial recognition (meaning of course, she had to know who I was) pulled my lunch ticket out of a little box and punched it.
Apparently one of the outfits who sells this system went to China and sold it there. When the Chinese Mommies and Daddies heard about this they threw a fit and called it an invasion of privacy (it is) and the Chinese government responded by BANNING the collection of fingerprints of school children.
This was banned, in Communist-don’t-raise-a-fuss-or-we’ll-kill-you China as being an invasion of privacy…
Seriously. Great Britian has also banned this. One of the most stellar nanny governments in the world considers collecting the fingerprints of children by schools to be a bad idea.
But here in America you have no right to privacy where your fingerprints are concerned. The Fourth Amendment doesn’t apply to fingerprints. Because you leave them everywhere. So I suppose urine and stool samples and possible blood are open game under that logic.
Anyway, I’m rather worked up about this and would like to see the collection of ALL biometric data by government agencies outlawed. There’s no reason a free citizen should be required to give up that kind of information.
But then our government has taken the stance that it’s citizens are assets rather than it’s masters.
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