School Collecting Fingerprints to Verify Students’ Lunch Payments
| School Collecting Fingerprints to Verify Students’ Lunch Payments | |
|---|---|
| Short Title | Polish School Collecting Fingerprints to Verify Students’ Lunch Payments |
| Location | Gdansk, Poland |
| Date | 2015 |
| Solove Harm | Surveillance, Identification, Interrogation |
| Information | Identifying |
| Threat Actors | School in Gdansk |
| Individuals | |
| Affected | Pupils |
| High Risk Groups | Children |
| Tangible Harms | |
A school in Gdansk (Poland) was found to be using a fingerprints reader in the cafeteria to check whether the students paid for lunch.
Description
A school in Gdansk was found to be processing students’ fingerprint data to verify whether they had paid for school lunch.
A primary school in Gdansk, Poland had been using a biometric reader at the cafeteria entrance since 2015 to verify whether pupils had paid for their meals. The system was used on 680 children in 2020 — with four kids using “an alternative identification system.”
Students not using biometric ID were forced to the end of the line. This can be seen as an example of Interrogation.
Regularly recording and storing pupils biometric information is an example of Surveillance.
While parental consent was obtained for the biometric ID program, the Data Protection Authority in Poland found that the system was “not essential for achieving the goal of identifying a child’s entitlement to receive lunch.” This can be interpreted as unnecessary Identification.
The school has been fined €4,600 ($5,200) for breaching Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Laws and Regulations
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)