Just seen this news article before going to bed and felt pretty strongly about the last part in particular so I'm ranting: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7230487.stm To quote from that: Later, a spokeswoman for the DCSF said: It is ridiculous to suggest that headteachers who choose in consultation with parents - to introduce simple systems to help speed up school lunch and library queues are somehow spying on their pupils. Now, first of all, if ANYONE tried to fingerprint any of my nieces or nephews for the sake of speeding up a lunch queue in school, I would shout very loudly. I've never heard anything so ridiculous in all my life. If our own British Government can lose the personal and financial data of 25 million parents and children (due to non-secure postage of disks), AND THEN not more than a couple of months later lose data on our servicemen/women (due to a laptop being left overnight in a vehicle) - when will they learn? Careless mistakes such as those are scandalous, and so is the fingerprinting of children for the sake of faster lunch/library queues. I'm sorry but I cannot see any justification whatsoever for that. The risks outweigh any benefits. Totally unreasonable to use such a system in schools where the security of that fingerprint data is almost certainly open to security breach. The issue of data protection, and surveillance, is my biggest worry for the future in the UK. I shred all documents with my name and address on them (yes - illegal immigrants and others really do go digging in household dustbins for leftover mail with personal data), and I recently complained to my mortgage lender when they printed off documentation with my personal details but then put some of it in their waste paper bin under the table during a consultation appointment. How secure is that? I insisted on having the unnecessary printout to dispose of in my own shredder. Certain members of the public in my city alone have been approached by [decided to remove the company name] - an organisation that asks you to give consent to be monitored for health over your mid to late lifetime, to help others (not yet in your lifetime). Part of that consent is to give a blood sample for your DNA, to which you must SIGN AWAY ANY OWNERSHIP of that sample. In other words, once they have it, your DNA sample is no longer yours. It belongs to them, to use on ANY RESEARCH they choose and you don't have a say in it whatsoever. Who in their right mind would consent to such a thing? Supposing that a future research project was based around cloning? Not unrealistic at all... would you want your DNA used for that? The invitation to participate is cleverly worded to fool the vulnerable into thinking that they would be helping future generations. Basically, privacy and the right to live in freedom is dying out. That's a depressing thought and as a nation, as a world, we can only blame ourselves. We're responsible for electing these incompetents and imbeciles into Government, though they all seem as bad as each other. Also, the world is ever more controlled by the media, and people are stupid enough to 'follow the crowd'. I stand firm in my chosen lifestyle - I don't bow to media pressure and I don't let others do the thinking for me. I have a brain and I use it. You've probably guessed by now, I'm an individual with strong opinions, and I'm going to voice them whenever I see yet another invasion of privacy, especially when it's in the form of an abuse of technological advances (i.e. the fingerprinting in schools). They would do better to spend money on things that matter in schools, rather than unnecessary technological 'luxuries'. Am I alone in my disgust of this news or do you share the same views?
