Illegally fingerprinting
the kids

Big Brother Watch, the campaigning organisation that's keeping tabs on the people who are keeping tabs on us, has issued a press statement claiming that thousands of school kids in the UK have illegally had their smudges smudged by their schools.

Since September 2013, it's been explicitly against the law to fingerprint kids without parental approval.

Nevertheless, many schoolchildren are being routinely dabbed using biometric technology designed to monitor access to school meals.

So how many schools are we talking about?

Well, Big Brother Watch, exploiting the Freedom of Information Act, tell us that 807 UK secondary schools (1 in 4) were, at the start of the 2012-2013 academic year, deploying the smudging technology.

In the South East, 105,000 schoolchildren were regularly being monitored via their fingerprints. But the confusing statistics supplied (in a pretty hopeless press release) suggest that this region is the most proactive/invasive/intrusive (pick your word). The North East is the least active.

What happens to the information after it's collected (beyond organising school meals) isn't clear. But tens of thousands of parents, it seems, have little or no idea that this practice is going on at all, so if you've got sprogs, you might want to ask them about this, and then (if necessary) have a word with their school head teacher—and then do whatever you feel needs to be done (and we've got a few suggestions if anyone's interested).

Kids, we're told, do have a right to object to fingerprinting. But many don't realise this right and therefore need advising. Of course, it might all be entirely harmless. But with good reason, we've become a suspicious nation, and it can't hurt to check.

Meanwhile, it makes you wonder if maybe someone's also DNA-swabbing the cutlery before it gets washed up. Or is that too paranoid even for us?

— Big End