Put simply, biometrics are Biological Measurements.

Ask the questions: How tall are you? How much do you weigh? The answers are biometrics. These seem pretty innocuous, and they are. But these examples are not unique. I am the same weight as many other people. The same height, too.

Not only that, these biometrics change over your life. In your first 20 years, you tend to grow an awful lot. You stay roughly the same for the next 35-40 years, then start to get progressively shorter for the rest of your life.

When people talk about Biometric systems they are talking about something else. They are talking about biometric information that is stable over your while life, and is unique to you. They are yours and yours alone. Like a DNA profile or a fingerprint. Well, not just like those things, but actually those things. Each is unique to you (except the DNA profile if you’re an identical twin). Each can be used to identify you.

Your biometrics can’t be changed. You can’t change your DNA, you can’t change the pattern of blood vessels on your retina, you can’t change your fingerprints.

Because of their lifetime fidelity, they are trusted as identification. They are the absolute Gold Standard of identity. A single fingerprint can send you to prison for life. So reliable are they that a single case of misidentification in more than 100 years led to astonishing self-examination among the world’s fingerprint experts.

DNA is helping to solve cases that have been outstanding and unsolved for up to 40 years!

This seems like a great idea. Identify everyone with their biometrics all the time. What could go wrong?

The trouble is, that is as far as most people’s thinking goes on the subject. This isn’t to criticise them. The biometrics industry has powerful (and mostly unchallenged) Public Relations. They are doing a magnificent selling job on their product. But as with any other product we should be asking three questions:

1. 1.Does this product do what the manufacturer says it does?
   

2. 2.Is it good value for money?
   

3. 3.Do the benefits outweigh the risks and the costs?
   

I will explore these three themes in more depth in the next three articles, and justify my answers. But, in case you hadn’t noticed the general tenor of this site, those answer are: No, No and No!

There are many reasons to object to biometrics in schools, and many reasons I object: Civil Rights, Habituation, Unwarranted Data Harvesting, Data Abuse,... and these are easy to get worked up about. Very easy when you think about it.

The difficulty is, if you want to change a school’s mind, or turn a Head (no pun intended) you have to address the issues from their mindset. These three questions will do that. When the School and its Head or Governors understand the answers to these pragmatic, procedural questions, they will not introduce Biometrics. Or if they have them already, they will throw them out.

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