In Aroostook County, Maine, Caribou High School, is at the forefront of adopting invasive biometric scanning technology to monitor student attendance.
This initiative, a collaboration with IdentiMetrics, a leader in biometric solutions, involves capturing, storing, and using students’ fingerprints. Around 460 students at the school will be subject to this new attendance-tracking system.
The school’s principal, Jamie Selfridge, announced this initiative in a letter to parents on January 24th. According to The Main Wire, Selfridge stated, “Starting next trimester, we will be introducing Identimetrics to assist with attendance and tardies entries into PowerSchool, our school’s student management system.”
He assured parents that this advanced, yet potentially intrusive technology complies with strict privacy guidelines and will be confined to tracking attendance within the school.
Despite these assurances, the letter did not address how the district plans to protect the biometric data from security breaches.
The introduction of this biometric system in Caribou High School has raised concerns among some parents, who worry about the invasion of privacy and the risk of data breaches.
These fears are not unfounded.
Biometric tools such as this are a growing practice that have many wide-reaching implications, not to mention data storage and privacy. Last year, Denver public schools, which implemented similar technology, found themselves the target of a data breach that exposed personal biometric data of students.
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