Facial recognition used to take payments from schoolchildren.
On Monday 18th October 2021 , Sky News released an article stating that nine schools in North Ayrshire have implemented the use of Facial recognition technology to automatically identify each student.
This technology is aimed at speeding up transactions during lunch break and hence speeding up lunch queues.
This implementation can be very effective where you have a twenty five minute window to serve one thousand students, and on average each transaction was only taking five seconds at the till and Point of Sale.
Some of the parents and campaigners were concerned about this initiative and that they were not adequately informed about these changes, they also warned that exposing children to biometric surveillance can lead to Privacy risks and breaches.
According to the North Ayrshire Council 97% of children or their parents have given consent to the use of facial recognition in their Schools. it was also stated that the department of education does not monitor the use of technology in schools.
Similar practices in American schools have banned such as the sate New York. If there is a safer and a less intrusive way then it should be used said Fraser Sampson, the Biometrics Commissioner for England and Wales , as facial recognition technology is not covered under the same laws as DNA and fingerprints.
Silkie Carlo, the head of Big Brother Watch finalised and stated that children do not need to be exposed to the (Airport style technology) to get their hand on their lunch.
The use of facial recognition stretches back to 2015 where has been implemented in Donnington Park during a festival, later Campaigners have been complaining that this technology exposes people in crowds to potential arrest without reasonable cause. Despite all of this the technology has been, and still being used in places and environments like E-Gates at Airports through to Notting Hill carnival.
Studies and reports from the Metropolitan Police found that this system is 81% inaccurate.
My Opinion
I fully agree with facial recognition even on children, the matter of the fact is that thanks to this implementation if a child is lost in a busy park or even worse kidnapped ,with the help of private and public CCTV cameras can be identified and tracked more easier by the police.
From my point of view I see that alot of people are not seeing the bigger picture of this technology , where it can be more useful in general than harmful , some honourable mentions that we can point out are illegal littering in the streets , riots and vindictive acts and so on.
The only the thing that we need to understand is that while the use of AI and technology had become a necessity and commodity, we still need to be vigilant and be smart to how we build the infrastructure around it, because if it falls into the wrong hands by means of hacking and data breaching , can lead to long lasting repercussions.