August 23, 2022 - 7:15am
It started with fingerprinting our kids in schools in the early 2000’s for library book withdrawal in primary education. Two decades later we have evolved to ‘mood indexing’ children in ‘experimental hybrid learning rooms’.
In plain English: there are systems in UK classrooms that log pupils attentiveness using biometric face and bodily data, aligned with artificial intelligence, to index a student’s lesson engagement within the classroom. This is a completely disproportionate and unfair balance of exchange for accessing an everyday, essential activity in a school. It desensitises children to the use of their biometrics — the most irreplaceable data they will ever own. The only other country to use this type of monitoring in their schools is China.
The EdTech community boasts that their ability to data scrape from students in education exceeds that of Google using data from search engines and their other products. The EdTech apps that a child uses, in the physical or online school environment, can relate how quickly students turn pages in an e-book, which areas of maths they move slowly on, plus meta data such as the times logged onto apps and when homework was e-handed in.
Following the Protection of Freedoms Act in 2012 schools were required to ask for parent’s consent before taking student’s biometric data. The UK was the first country to introduce such legislation, but then we were one of the first countries to adopt biometric technology in schools.
Fingerprint and facial biometric systems are sparsely used in the US. Data regulators in Sweden, France, Bulgaria and Poland are banning and fining schools for using fingerprint and facial recognition biometric systems.
GDPR, which was codified into our Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA), confirms the unbalance of the biometric data relationship between school and child — yet our data regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), has not taken similar steps to equivalent regulators in Europe.
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SubscribeI wasn’t even aware that children were having their fingerprints taken, I find this shocking. They may be children, but they shouldn’t be treated as criminals, they have broken no laws.
Thank you, Pippa, for drawing our attention to this totally unacceptable practice. It’s unbelievably sad that the UK is not following the example of other countries and banning such surveillance. To continue with it can only end badly for our children.
I find this horrific. It is an invasion of a child’s privacy. It is not the business of schools to attempt to read children’s minds in any way at all.
School children are there to be taught the skills they need to live and work, and acquire some understanding of the world and the various people in it.
If older students eg, 16+, want to take part in things like “mood indexing” that should be voluntary.
“In Matthew 5:45 (NKJV), Jesus states, “ for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.””
It is happening to everyone everywhere – how could it possibly not happen to children too?
I pray this kind of thing does act as a wakeup call, that we can collectively think and act before it is too late – and that is not far off at all, few years perhaps.
I would have no objection to mood indexing children if the aim was to improve the way children are taught. If the material was revised to ensure difficult concepts were better explained and poorly presented material revised it would undoubtedly be a benefit to the children. Unfortunately I suspect that is not the purpose. More likely it is to blame the child for inattention rather than improve delivery.
One might think the technology would be useful to a teacher trying to improve their practice. Available only to that teacher and perhaps a coach, used as needed in specific classrooms for specific purpose.