Warwick Academy to scan fingerprints
A private school is to scan the fingerprints of hundreds of secondary students in order for them to be able to get hot lunches and take out library books.
Warwick Academy confirmed yesterday it was introducing the “totally voluntary” system this term, mainly to ease lunch queues, and said full fingerprint information would not be retained, only a set of unique points identifying each student.
David Horan, head of secondary at Warwick, told The Royal Gazette: “It’s all coded. It’s all binary. It is nothing that can be used by a forensic service. It’s not fingerprinting.”
Students were told about the scheme at an assembly earlier this week and an e-mail was sent to the parents of 462 pupils on Wednesday.
“We had seven who got back and opted out of it,” said Mr Horan. “Most said they just wanted to research it further. One changed their mind and a number are reviewing the initiative.”
The e-mail, shared with this newspaper by Mr Horan and principal Maggie McCorkell, told parents to get in touch with the school if they felt their child should not be part of the initiative.
“The software scans the finger for unique features,” said the letter. “It does not store a copy of the fingerprints. Instead, the software creates a template of the unique fingerprint characteristics.
“These templates are stored in the school’s database with the same high level of security of all of your child’s records. When your child graduates or is no longer enrolled in the school system, the templates are deleted. At no time is a fingerprint image stored.
“No fingerprints can be created/recreated or delivered to any agency (governmental or otherwise) nor can it be used for forensic investigation.” Mr Horan said “serious issues” with queues for lunch and lost lunch cards had prompted the introduction of the technology. If it works well, it could be extended for taking out library books, as lost library cards are another problem. “That’s as far as we want to go with it,” he said.
Mrs McCorkell said: “The thinking about this initiative came out of a whole school survey we sent out last term in which parents voiced concerns about our lunch queue and the lunch ticket system. This was echoed by students and staff.
“Right now it is only to be used to help fix our lunch queue problem. We felt this would be a good place to start the initiative. Parents can opt their child out; it is totally voluntary.
“Whilst new to Bermuda, the technology is widely used in the UK and USA. The figure we found was that 40 per cent of schools in the UK use this type of technology. This is thousands of schools.”
Biometric finger scanning authorisation programmes are used by schools around the world but have not been without controversy.
In the UK in 2013, the Department for Education ordered schools to obtain parental permission before taking fingerprints and other biometric data.
At the time, according to the Department, about 30 per cent of secondary schools and five per cent of primary schools were using fingerprinting or face-scanning systems for reasons including recording attendance, checking out library books, paying for school meals or accessing certain school buildings.
At Warwick, it will initially affect about 120 students who have chosen to have hot lunches. The primary school is not involved.
Warwick Academy is using identiMetrics software to scan and store biometric data on students.
According to literature from the company, a student has a finger scanned by a biometric finger scanner and the software then develops a grid of intersection points from the swirls and arcs of the scanned finger.
A template is created by the software showing the intersection of the unique points on the finger and the fingerprint image is destroyed.
The template is converted to a binary number and the binary number is encrypted and stored.
When the student returns to be identified, the finger scanner again scans the finger. The computer software now compares the new template with the other templates in the database. When a matching template is found, the student is identified.
According to identiMetrics, this identification and matching process takes under one second to complete.
The company uses flat images of two fingers to create templates and requires only a minimum of unique identifying points in order to make a match.
It says such fingerprint data cannot be taken off a computer and used to re-create a fingerprint as only unique points are stored. It says data cannot be taken from its software and used on another fingerprinting system as it uses a proprietary algorithm that only works with identiMetrics.
