Pippa King

Biometric Tracking with a Focus on the Young

Sunday 23 April 9.30am UK Time

Pippa King is a parent whose children were nearly fingerprinted in 2005 when they were 6 and 7 years old for a school library system. After asking the Head Teacher when the school was going to obtain consent from parents she was told that the school did not need to ask her permission to take her children's fingerprints. She campaigned from 2005 along with other parents, and privacy/civil liberties organisations, for schools to gain, in writing, parental (and student) consent when they wished to process a child's biometric data, with alternative provision provided for those who did not want their biometrics used in school.

From 1999 to present, biometric technology has been in UK schools, mainly fingerprints. However, more recently facial recognition has been used to gauge whether children in a classroom are sufficiently engaged in the lesson my ‘mood indexing’ their emotions - Chinese style.

The Protection of Freedoms Act was passed in May 2012 which requires, in chapter 2 clauses 26-28, for schools to gain written parental consent if they wish to store/ process a child's biometric data as of 1st September 2013.

Through her interest in biometric technology she works to have greater general transparency and accountability with the use of biometrics in the wider community, especially in public spaces, with police and supermarkets regularly using facial recognition.

Her AV talk will be about aspects of biometric technology in schools and the wider community.

Pippa also takes an active interest in children rights, including CCTV in schools, classroom apps data scraping and RFID (radio frequency identification) tags used to track children in schools.

Pippa's work can be found at:

Biometrics in Schools - https://pippaking.blogspot.com/p/about.html

Against RFID in Schools - https://rfidinschools.com

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