Loss of Privacy

A Polish priest has installed a fingerprint reader in order to track the attendance of children at mass.

The pupils will mark their fingerprints every time they go to church over three years and if they attend 200 masses they will be freed from the obligation of having to pass an exam prior to their confirmation, the paper said.

The pupils in the southern town of Gryfow Slaski told the daily they liked the idea and also the priest, Grzegorz Sowa, who invented it.

“This is comfortable. We don’t have to stand in a line to get the priest’s signature (confirming our presence at the mass) in our confirmation notebooks,” said one pupil, who gave her name as Karolina.

Poland is perhaps the most devoutly Roman Catholic country in Europe today and churches are regularly packed on Sundays.

Get them while they’re young. Entice children with the ability to not take an exam for giving up their private, biometric data and they’ll never know what hit them. Just make it easily and they’ll line up like sheep to do whatever you want.

At the Highlands campus of White Plains Middle School in New York, students are now using finger scans in order to receive a school lunch. Tapped as a way to make school lunch lines move faster, many parents and privacy advocates are worried about the students’ identities.

“People were a little nervous, but they’re not in the cafeteria when we are trying to serve 373 students at a time — to get them all seated, fed and out for recess especially with the kinds of things they were using before,” the principal, Diana Knight, said.

In the end, only five of the more than 1,000 students opted out, and the family of one cited germs, not privacy abuses, as a concern, Knight said.

The rest of the students can now press a forefinger to an image pad to pay for their food. The older methods, swiping a debit card or entering a personal identification number, or PIN, also remain available.

The school is using technology from School-Link Technologies, which claim a fingerprint can’t be made of the information because the data is saved as a set of numbers. It remains to be seen as to whether the information can be reverse engineered to get the fingerprint.

Michigan and Iowa currently have laws prohibiting the use of biometrics among school students unless ordered to do so by a court of law. The United Kingdom currently has several schools using biometrics for lunches as well as in the library and for registration. The EU is using it to identify refugees. Hong Kong, however, has deemed the use of biometrics on students as too invasive and scrapped their program several years ago.

The New York Civil Liberties Union for the Lower Hudson Valley and the EFF question the use of such technology as a means of softening up children for eventual, ubiquitous use of biometrics as surveillance tools.

“It’s a new technology so people are a little bit uncertain about it,” she said. “But I think as it becomes more widely used — and they see that some of what they’re concerned about isn’t coming to be regarding privacy and how the finger scans are used — I think people will become a lot more comfortable with it.”

And this is precisely the point. If you force people to use these technologies when they are small and cannot understand the implications of said technologies, they will think it’s cool and not understand why others are so concerned. Biometric identification will become widespread, but only because it will become required, forcing those who wish to opt-out, no option at all.

An expansion is currently underway that will develop the FBI’s current fingerprint collection database into a new biometrics system that includes DNA, facial recognition, palm prints and voice scans.

The plan is to share this data with authorized U.S. and international investigative partners, as the agency does today.

The FBI’s current IAFIS database remains a workhorse; it processes about 200,000 daily transactions from its 370 million 10-fingerprint records, and it just crossed the 250 million transaction mark

The next-generation FBI database system is under design by Lockheed Martin, with MorphoTrak and others, and is expected to include DNA, iris scans, advanced 3-D facial imaging and voice scans among its multi-modal biometrics. Lower turnaround times for delivering information over wide-area networks are planned. The goal is to drop from a roughly two-hour response time for IAFIS urgent requests to less than 10 minutes.

The FBI is already moving into new areas, including setting up a palm-print repository and searchable databases for scars, marks and tattoos that it will be collecting.

The FBI, under the DNA Fingerprint Act of 2005, is now allowed to collect reference-sample DNA material for biometrics analysis purposes at the time of booking, Grever said. “DNA has become a powerful and timely tool,” said Grever, adding there are no “privacy or civil liberties issues beyond those associated with fingerprints.”

Given that DNA can be fabricated, how accurate is this new biometric database going to be?  Given that they’re tracking everything else about you, it won’t be long before whatever makes you “you” is in a database somewhere.

Rep. Neal Kurk, R-Weare has introduced a bill into the New Hampshire state legislature that would prohibit banks from requiring fingerprints in order for non customers to cash a check.  Currently, Bank of America is the only bank in the state that requires such action, however, Rep. Kurk wants to stop the practice before it becomes widespread.

“Even if the FBI is not involved,” he told The Telegraph, “the government could get that information. Not to mention, anyone could hack into that system and access that information.”

The American Bankers Association argues that fingerprinting is primarily used as a deterrent to criminals attempting to cash fraudulent checks. Apparently not sufficiently deterred by the fact that a camera is staring them in the face, recording their every move, these criminals are supposedly frightened away by the prospect of rendering a thumbprint.

In a November 2007 press release on check fraud losses at U.S. banks, the ABA reported that while attempted check fraud continued to rise, existing check fraud prevention systems, which for the most part do not include fingerprinting, kept actual losses significantly lower. In listing the most effective fraud prevention measures in the same press release, the ABA does not even mention fingerprinting.

It is amazing that a bank that is willing to give credit cards to illegal immigrants is now complaining about fraud.  Currently, the only thing Bank of America is doing is helping crooks and customers find other places to do their business.