April 2007 — News
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Biometrics in K-12: The Legal Conundrum
4/10/2007—Biometrics are among the latest implementations for school security. There are many issues to consider, which have been voiced by parents, students, and civil liberties groups. It's an international issue. Just look at LeaveThemKidsAlone.com, and you will see the extent of the uproar raised in the United Kingdom regarding fingerprinting of children in schools. For the most part, questions are the same ones being posed in our own country. Blogs are in use to discuss the issue in the United States and abroad, such as Pippa King's Biometrics in Schools.
But the legal side is perhaps the area of the weakest knowledge for most parents, teachers, and even some school administrators. Although administrators study school law as part of their licensure, finding time to keep up might be difficult once on the job. In this newsletter I'll take a look at some legalities that I've discovered. I'm not a lawyer; I'm a concerned educator, so don't construe what follows as legal advice. Basically, know the risks versus benefits in any implementation. Informed consent from a parent or legal guardian is key for collecting and using any biometric data from children under 18. If you adopt biometric technology, you will still need to provide alternative security measures for those who object to their use.
In a cautionary statement following its decision in the 1977 case, Whalen v. Roe (429 U.S. 589), the Supreme Court indicated its awareness of the implied threat of accumulating extensive personal data in computerized data banks (Freeman, 2003). Biometrics, such as the commonly used fingerprints and handprints in schools, are used in verifying a claimed identity or identifying an unknown individual from numeric templates created when enrolling individuals in a data base.
There is fear that those data bases might be shared and in the wrong hands cause irreparable harm. Woodward (1998) indicates that individuals fear losing control over their biometric identifiers, as they might become part of a public domain, as names and addresses used in mailing lists have been (p. 8). The biometric template has been associated with the Social Security number, and we all know the problem created as a result of that number being used as a universal identifier. A principal concern surrounding biometric use is essentially one of surveillance, which lends itself well to tracking. "This concern underlies constitutional protection for anonymity, both as an aspect of First Amendment freedoms of speech and association, and as an aspect of Fourth Amendment privacy" (Abernathy & Lee, n.d., sec: Tracking).
The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act protects student records and might provide some protection for public disclosure of records stored in databases containing a student's biometric measurements, and where and when the student used a biometric device, according to Steven McDonald, general counsel at the Rhode Island School of Design. However, those records still might be subpoenaed by law enforcement officials (Kiernan, 2005, sec: Privacy). It seems reasonable to make that statement in light of how states define personal information. For example, South Carolina's Family Personal Privacy Act includes in its definition of personal information such identifiers as "an individual's photograph or digitized image, social security number" and "biometric identifiers" (South Carolina Code of Laws, 2006, sec: 30-2-30).
