Mal Fletcher comments on the value of privacy

Mal Fletcher

'Friends don't spy,' wrote Stephen King, 'true friendship is about privacy, too.'

According to news reports yesterday, pupils at a leading independent British prep school are being finger-printed as part of a new payment system for the school dining room. This has reportedly happened without the specific consent of parents.

Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' school took its pupils out of lessons to have their thumbprints recorded. In future, students will press their thumbs against an electronic scanner each time they buy lunch or a snack. The price will be charged to their account.

Parents, who reportedly pay annual fees of more than £15,000 per child, have complained that they knew nothing about the procedure. The school simply posted a notice on its website, which many parents did not see.

Indeed, most students knew nothing about the school's plan until it was carried out.

The school claims that many other schools have already taken the biometric route when it comes to student data.

The issue of parental consent is, of course, a hugely important one. Parents should bear the ultimate responsibility for deciding on appropriate levels of privacy for their children. How else are they to be held responsible if their children fail to respect the privacy of others?

Parents must be given the authority to match that responsibility.

For their part, governments should provide penalties for privacy incursions that are generally adjudged to be inappropriate. However, the state should never seek to rob parents of their rightful role as primary guardians - and even less so should schools.

In the case of schools fingerprinting or using other biometric data, however, there is another issue of equal concern. By extracting biometric information from its young charges, the school is encouraging them to believe that surrendering such information is a normal part of life.

Studies suggest that, when it comes to privacy invasion among young people, we already have cause for concern.

This is especially true in the age of 3G and 4G mobile internet technology, broadly uncensorable video and social networking sites and the increasing use of data-mining by marketers and other sectors of business.

Twenty-five percent of British young people, aged 16-25, say that they are 'addicted' to their mobile phones. They also admit to feeling 'separation anxiety' when their phones are removed.

For the young, this dependency on phones - particularly smart phones - means that the online experience plays an important role in establishing personal identity.