UK School Slam With Reprimand for Illegal Facial Recognition

UK school violates UK GDPR by using biometric face scans for lunch payments, raising privacy concerns and highlighting issues with student data protection.

A high school outside of Essex violates the GDPR regulations in the UK.

If you used to bring lunch money to school, you might be alarmed to learn that children can now pay for their meals using biometric face scans. However, as controversies involving businesses like Clearview AI have shown, biometric data collection may quickly become a privacy nightmare. For this reason, any use of face recognition technology must, by default, be opt-in under the UK GDPR. Additionally, parents at this high school may only choose to have their kids not use technology.

In the meantime, there has been discussion about using biometric scanning in schools for years in the US. To reduce school shootings, the Denver, Colorado, public school system looked at the possibility of implementing facial recognition technology in 2019. However, this prospect caused controversy because students’ privacy is jeopardized by this safety measure, which may not even be effective.

Legislators in the state of New York debated this issue as well, ultimately concluding that the hazards of this technology outweighed its advantages. Thus, the employment of this technology in schools is currently prohibited in New York.

Therefore, it is not a bad idea for these youngsters in the UK to bring cash to school to pay for lunch.