Quote:
Originally posted by spookyfish
I find this troubling. Big Brother meets the Lunch Lady.
http://www.ohio.com/mld/ohio/living/...on/5856733.htm
Spree: Link to article about Akron Bd. of Ed. considering purchase of a system which will allow students to purchase school lunches by registering/reading fingerprints.
Sometimes I think we become too enamored of technology for technology's sake. I mean, the board is seriously considering spending $700 K for this system. Meanwhile, there will be no cost savings, no reduction in labor (likely an increase when you consider they will have to program and maintain the servers needed to make this happen) and the fucking idiots think there's not a privacy issue.
Can someone explain to me how mapping two unique points based upon a person's fingerprint as an identifying mark is any less an invasion of privacy than the fingerprint itself? And who really believes that the fingerprints will be disposed of -- Who's going to supervise that?
The claim is that it will reduce loss of lunch tickets and reduce the "stigma" of kids who get free or reduced price lunches and have to pay with a ticket as opposed to those kids who pay with cash. Hardly justifies the cost, if you ask me. Thoughts?
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My first thought after reading the article was what ways would the kids think of to fuck up the system. They mentioned the Garfield Heights system and the problems of reading the prints of kids with grimy hands. What about kids who will take a pen or a knife or some other object and try to scratch or damage the scanner? Or kids that will try to somehow alter their fingertips (glue?) to try and mess up the system. And if and when the system does crash, what do they do? Is there a back-up or does Betty the lunch lady just stare at the nice touch screen monitor for a few hours and hope that the thing magically fixes itself???
I still don't see why they don't go for some other system like a swipe card. The comment that kids lose the cards is recockulous. Charge the PARENTS a replacement fee on an escalating scale. We'll see how fast it would take for Johnny to stop losing the fucking card when mom and dad are charged $50 for a replacement.
It just seemed to me that the Board members view it as a system that comes from some far off fund that doesn't really mean anything, its cool and they are sold on the idea.
aV
