Article 1: Facial Recognition to take payments at school.
Nine schools have begun taking payment from children for lunch by using facial recognition software to automatically identify each student.
The system which the schools in North Ayrshire claim will speed up queues and reduce the Covid-19 risks of card payments and fingerprint scanners, is being launched today.
Similar uses in America schools have led to states such New York temporarily banning the technology. Fraser Sampson, the Biometric commissioner for England and Wales – whose predecessors have complained the facial recognition technology is not covered under the same laws as DNA and fingerprints- said if there is a less intrusive way for children to pay for their lunches, then it should be used. Despite the outcry following this event – that the technology was not regulated on an equal footing to other biometrics, such as fingerprints and DNA, despite potentially being even more invasive- no legislation had been introduced putting it on an equal statutory footing
My Opinion;
The usage of this technology is far for being safe, it has began as an application software by (Woody Bledsoe, Helen Chan Wolf and Charles Bisson) whose work focuses on teaching computers to recognize human faces. Then it has be evolved by (Takeo Kanade) publicly demonstrated a face-matching system that located anatomical features such the chin and calculated the distance ratio between facial features without human interventions. Later test revealed that the system could not always reliably identify facial features. In 1993 the ( Defense Advanced research project Agency (DARPA) and the Army research Laboratory (ARL) ) established the face recognition technology program (FERET) to develop “Automatic face recognition capabilities” that could be employed in productive real life environment “ To assissecurity, intelligence, law enforcement personnel in the performance of their duties”.
The list goes on who perfected the technology, the issue is that from something that has started from conception to be used for software application that today we are using as such as opening of laptops and mobile phones, the technology has been evolved for Army and Law enforcements. Which is good for public saftey but it is not safe especially when it comes to Children in schools. In the Data protection law, someone cannot post or make public a face of a minor on any platform due to predators or other dark individuals/organizations. My opinion is that in schools this cannot be happening, we should leave children as innocent as possible and not starting collecting data of face recognitions from a young age, which potentially can be leaked and used by predators or malicious organizations. It has to be legalized and monitored by law especially when it comes to private entities using this technology.