February 02, 2005

"Akron gives fingerprint meal system high grade"

A controversial cafeteria system that identifies Akron Public School students from their fingerprints has proved beneficial for the district, school leaders say.

More middle-school students who are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches now are taking advantage of them. That helps both the students and the district.

``What we've accomplished is taking that stigma away,'' Debra Foulk, coordinator of the Akron schools' Child Nutrition Services, said last week.

The high-tech system, dubbed iMeal, is being used in every Akron middle school [and three high schools...]

Further on, we learn they spent $700,000 on this system. Students can use a PIN instead, but only 4% have chosen that option. To add a capper, the more free lunches the school gives away, the greater their chance of receiving federal money.

And, we're told that the original prints are discarded, and only a "template" of "binary numbers" is kept. Even middle schoolers could see through that, but neither that reporter or the AP reporter of the next report did. If that "template" is detailed enough to distinguish between students, it's basically an electronic fingerprint. It might not be as detailed as a very high resolution scan of a fingerprint, but it's still an electronic fingerprint. Ergo, a print found at a crime scene at the school could be "templatized" just like the original prints of the students in order to find the perpetrator or at least narrow the search. And, a rough fingerprint could no doubt be recreated from the "template." Sell it to someone else.

The AP report on this is here. They go the extra inch and get this quote:

"Fingerprinting is for felons, not for 5-year-olds," said Christine Link, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio. "We're setting up for children that surrendering your fingerprints or other parts of your identity for school lunches is a good idea."

Suspiciously, many of these privacy related stories involve children: retinal scans or fingerprints to get lunches or ride the bus and so on and so forth. Could this be part of a broad plan to get our citizens of tomorrow used to reduced personal liberty?

Posted to Privacy at February 2, 2005 12:04 AM

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