Florida School Board Confirms They Have Ok'd Iris Scan Without Parental Permission

What would you do if you found out your school scanned your child's iris for the all critical purpose of enabling your child not to have to "carry an identification card?"  Parents in Florida are answering that question today.

A mother in Florida posted last week on Facebook that she thought her third grader had been scanned at school, but she could get no confirmation of that, that is until today when she received this letter from the school board.

In case you couldn't read it, it reads in part,

"The program is called Eye Swipe-nano. It is a safe non-invasive iris reader. It simply takes a picture of the iris, which is unique to every individual. The Eye Swipe-nano is an ideal replacement for the card based system since your child will not have to be responsible for carrying an identification card. With this program, we will be able to identify when and where a student gets on the bus, when they arrive at their school location, when and what bus the student boards and disembarks in the afternoon. This is an effort to further enhance the safety of our students."

Oh, well as long as its non-invasive on the collection part I guess I won't worry that you now have a way to track my child's every location without chipping them. All you need is one of those fancy iris readers that apparently can be installed anywhere. And of course, you have now given my child's uniquely identifiable feature to a private company without my permission. Those companies are never subject to federal requests to turn over data, like say Google or AT&T were.

And who decided this high tech privacy invading solution was needed?  That's right, the transportation department.  Given yesterday's story of a 6 year old boy who was suspended for having a plastic gun the size of a quarter on the bus, I wonder how long parents will continue to allow their children to ride the bus.

Schools regularly operate on the principle of "It is easier to ask forgiveness later than to ask permission beforehand." (Parkway wrist monitors) This culture must be stopped and it's up to parents to stop it. Do not take any government agent's assurance that they will never abuse the privilege of having access to this data. Say it with me, "No data collection on my child without my permission."