Mum’s thumbs down to Big Brother lunch
Sep 25 2008 By The Stirrer
GEORGE Orwell’s sinister Big Brother is alive and keeping a watchful eye on the classrooms of Birmingham, according to one anxious city mother.
Sybil Ruth is alarmed that pupils at King Edwards Camp Hill for Girls in Kings Heath will soon be using fingerprint technology to pay for their school meals.
Youngsters at the grammar are being encouraged to store their unique biometric code on a database run by an outside catering firm.
The new scheme is being heralded as a means of cutting queues, encouraging healthy eating and reducing the risks associated with carrying dinner money.
But for Sybil, whose daughter has just started at the grammar school, it smacks of worst excesses of our snooping surveillance society.
“The fingerprint recognition technology was originally developed to aid the detection and/or prevention of serious crime in adults,” she said.
“So why are we using it in schools on children, who are doing ordinary everyday activities like eating their lunch?
“Of course some schools have difficulty ‘through-putting’ children at busy lunchtimes, but whatever happened to employing more catering staff, or extending dining areas?
“I don’t buy the argument that I can keep an eye on what my daughter is eating either.
“That smacks of control freakery when we should be encouraging trust between parents and children.”
Sybil argues that schools should have no role in “softening up” youngsters for the collection of data by official bodies.
She thinks their job is about encouraging children to question why confidential information is being gathered about them in the first place.
There’s also a question mark about the security of the stored data – especially after recent lapses by the government and Revenue And Customs.
“Schools are not the right places for sensitive personal data to be stored,” Sybil said. “They are in the business of educating people, rather than being a wing of the security industry.”
Her concerns are shared by parents in the United States where there’s been an outcry against the growing practice of “kiddyprinting”.
The campaign is also gathering momentum in the UK thanks to a website called Leave Them Kids Alone.
They quote a senior Microsoft designer Kim Cameron who warns: “People have to be stark, raving mad to use conventional biometrics to improve the efficiency of a children’s lunch line.”
Drucilla James, head of King Edwards Camp Hill, insists: “The proposed system is optional – there is a PIN number alternative.”
And she adds: “The biometric option works on a numeric reference which cannot be reconstituted as a fingerprint.”
Sybil counters: “There are experts who insist that you can use this information to recreate a fingerprint.
“Identity theft is already a problem, and I don’t want to put my daughter at risk.”
