'Mood indexing' UK school children
From fingerprinting to AI attentiveness monitoring
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’ - put simply, there are systems in classrooms that log UK pupils attentiveness by using biometric face and bodily data, aligned with artificial intelligence, to assume a student’s lesson engagement within the classroom.
The EdTech community gleefully tell that their ability to data scrape from students in education exceeds that of Google using our data from search engines and their many other products. The many 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 the meta data such as the times logged onto apps and when homework was e-handed in, etc.
How have we got to a point in schools where teachers need an app to see if they are engaging their students in real time? Where we need biometric technologies replacing a librarian to log books in and off shelves with a fingerprint and recently facial recognition systems to pay for a portion of chips?
My two children were nearly fingerprinted in 2006 when they were 6 and 7 years old for a library system in a primary school that had 160+ pupils, hardly overrun with students pressurising a librarian. Anyone with a child in school will know that permissions from parents are sought for just about everything - but not for storing your child’s fingerprint on a database, as I found back then. In fact the school didn't even have to inform parents they were taking and processing children’s biometric data back in 2006.
The school were sold a solution to a problem that simply did not exist.
Thankfully that changed with the Protection of Freedoms Act in 2012. A decade late shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted, but nevertheless a step in the right direction.
Now parents and kids, in England and Wales, have to consent to schools taking student’s biometric data for services such as registration, canteen, library, locker access, photocopier, vending machine and more. An alternative method of ID must be offered by the school for those not wishing to give up their biometrics for everyday, mundane uses.
We were the first country globally to introduce such legislation, but then we were one of the first countries to adopt biometric technology in schools. Fingerprint and facial biometric system are sparsely used in the US. There are a handful of states that have laws on consent but Florida went a step further in 2014 and completely banned biometrics in all of its schools. As far as I know, the Florida education system isn’t crumbling though their lack of using children’s biometric data.
Back in the early 2000’s biometric technology was not in society. It hadn’t yet progressed to phones or entrance to areas like it is now. NO2ID were challenging the then Blair government to stop them implementing biometric ID cards for the adult population, and they succeeded for many reasons.
Where was my child’s biometric going, or potentially could go in the future? My child’s biometric data has to be secure for the next 7 or 8 decades. The security of our current systems are immature in comparison to emerging systems coming in the future, beyond our comprehension as computer processing accelerates at an ever increasing speed.
Are police and lettered agencies skimming students biometric data, say for the Prevent Programme? Freedom of Information requests to all UK polices forces in 2013 and 2021 turned up a bland response to this, with most forces claiming they were exempt from answering due to excessive costs in retrieving the data. So we do not know if a students biometric information can travel from a school to elsewhere, but why would that data not be used to potentially ‘prevent’ a crime?
My greatest concern in 2006 was about my then young children receiving a subtle subconscious message that in order for them to eat, gain knowledge or to access areas, they had to offer up their most sensitive personal data - their bio (life) metric (measure).
A completely disproportionate and unfair balance of exchange for accessing everyday, essential activities in a school, desensitising them to the use of their biometrics.
The most irreplaceable data they will ever own.
GDPR, which was codified into our Data Protection Act 2018, confirms the unbalance of the biometric data relationship between school and child, with data regulators in Sweden, France, Bulgaria and Poland banning and fining schools for using fingerprint and facial recognition biometric systems.
So why is our equivalent regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), not issuing similar notices to schools? The only information has come from Department of Education which issued updated advice in July 2022 for schools using biometrics systems.
The Education Department have seemingly took it upon themselves to state that facial recognition is acceptable when your child leans into a camera to pay for a sausage roll but facial recognition is not good in areas when scanning areas for children’s faces, say for door entrances - or perhaps for mood indexing experimental hybrid learning rooms?
A camera is measuring a child’s facial biometric data regardless of purpose, whether the child consciously or subconsciously interacts with the lens. There is an intent to process a student’s facial data by the data controller behind the lens with all types of facial recognition.
So how come the Department of Education is determining what biometric is acceptable for use with our children when Data Protection and GDPR state very clearly that it is not acceptable when another less intrusive form of identification is available? And why - after pausing food purchasing facial recognition systems in schools in North Ayrshire, Scotland (in October 2021,) because of the question of legality under DPA and GDPR - has it taken the ICO 10 months of investigation on this with no comment yet?
If the ICO doesn't quickly offer an opinion on the use of facial recognition in schools, the direction of travel for biometric systems seems to be freely moving from outside the classroom, providing services such as canteen and library, to inside the classroom - or as Intel like to call them ‘experimental hybrid learning rooms’ - to log kids wellbeing and engagement. ‘Mood indexing’ them.
The only other country to have this type of monitoring in their schools is China. Also, where does it leave fingerprint systems used in UK education of which around 75% of high schools use? Still a biometric.
A lot of unanswered questions that will hopefully soon be answered. The ICO is due to publish a letter to North Ayrshire Council on their website regarding the legalities of their use of facial recognition systems in schools. One would hope this happens before schools reopen in September so school leaders fully understand whether they are operating within data protection laws.
More information on this at my website Biometrics in Schools and @Pippa_King