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UK School Introduces Facial Recognition
Posted by
timothy
on Fri Mar 06, 2009 05:10 AM
from the excuse-me-while-I-register-my-delight dept.
from the excuse-me-while-I-register-my-delight dept.
Penguin_me writes "A UK school has quietly introduced new facial recognition systems for registering students in and out of school: 'HIGH-TECH facial recognition technology has swept aside the old-fashioned signing of the register at a school. Sixth-formers will now have their faces scanned as they arrive in the morning at the City of Ely Community College. It is one of the first schools in the UK to trial the new technology with its students. Face Register uses the latest high-tech gadgets to register students in and out of school in just 1.5 seconds.'"
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Wearing a berka sounds like a good idea, (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wearing a berka sounds like a good idea, (Score:4, Insightful)
You make a good point.
This "school"... it has high-tech security, guards, biometrics, no one learns much there and they call it an "institution".
What makes it different from a prison?
You know there's a huge push on to try to get kids into elderly care? They'll throw money at em, pay for their school, pay em a salary to go, and yet, the kids don't want to have anything to do with it. It's a real crisis, cause there's not enough kids to wipe all the elderly assholes' assholes, so to speak. Final result of all this womb-poison being shoved down peoples throats, I guess.
I told my folks and their friends this was going to happen when I was 17, and that it was inevitable that we would abandon our parents generation to die without care because there weren't enough of my generation. Man you want to see some pissed off people with a sense of entitlement.
But I'm starting to think maybe I was wrong. With shit like this being done to children by their own parents in their own nation, abandonment seems a little too turn-the-other-cheek to be realistic. The way things are going, demand for retribution and revenge seems inevitable...
Parent
I wonder how it copes with twins? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or just someone holding up someone else's photo?
Re:I wonder how it copes with twins? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:I wonder how it copes with twins? (Score:5, Funny)
This absolutely sucks. In my day, all we had to do to sneak out of class, was wait for teacher to turn their back.
Now days kids have to wear Thermoptic Camouflage armour. What is the world coming to.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
In my sixth form, I don't think anyone bothered turning up for registration :) The teachers didn't care. It's not like this is compulsory school, if you don't turn up it's your loss, not theirs. (US readers may not be aware - 16-18 is optional in the UK, and my experience was that they treat you much more like an adult student at University, rather than still a school kid who has to follow rules. Although some colleges may be stricter than others.)
Re:I wonder how it copes with twins? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Why do this? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Why do this? (Score:4, Insightful)
Besides which, when I was at college (in the UK age 16-18 normally) they didn't take register - If you didn't turn up, that was your own problem; the lecturers took it up with you when you finally did turn up for class.
Except when you get hit by a bus the college then gets into trouble for not knowing where you are when you're supposed to be under their care. We're a nanny state, remember.
Parent
Re:Why do this? (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Same reason they're making DNA databases of kids, fingerprint databases of kids and so on.
Because most head teachers are power hungry muppets with not a single bit of respect for liberty in their blood.
It's no suprise then that Jacqui Smith was a teacher before coming totalitarian dictator in chief for the Labour party reporting only to comrade Brown and torture master Milliband.
I don't know what the deal is but so many people in the teaching profession in the UK seem to have this power hungry attitude. I d
Re:Why do this? (Score:4, Informative)
I've been to schools where ID cards have been used for toilet access and to monitor where kids are in the school with the aim of making sure kids aren't spending too long in the toilets avoiding lessons or to make sure they're not elsewhere in the school they shouldn't be.
How well does your monitoring work? The schools I covered were all attached to the Yorkshire and Humberside Grid for Learning which is effectively an ISP for all schools connected in that region. They offered filtering which was pretty ineffective because it'd take 24hrs or more to get a site blacklisted. Some schools used their own filtering solutions on top, usually Censornet. There was certainly no problem kids getting round most censorship regardless but certainly many teachers getting wound up about it when the end result of the kids getting where they wanted anyway had questionable negative effect regardless.
The problem is that as with the real world and CCTV cameras, monitoring to stop bullying and such merely just moves the problem elsewhere. It doesn't deal with the core issue, it just hides it away better.
I wouldn't argue kids should have the right to view porn, they should certainly be taught it's not accepted behaviour to browse stuff in public places, but I would question what the actual problem is if they do look at that kind of thing. I mean, how many kids have mobile phones now anyway that can access the internet and browse stuff like that if they really want to? Monitoring seems like a futile band aid that just hides the problem. It does have the side effect of discouraging people from using the internet in case they run into something that may get them in trouble. A lot of kids also just used proxy sites to bypass filtering, if required, using another kids password or even in the odd case, getting hold of the teacher's.
Of course, you can blacklist everything and whitelist what is required but again this just ruins the internet for the kids, there'll be little point to it for the most part. Even Wikipedia has content people might not want kids seeing and you either go through trying to block every questionable page or you let them have full access. You then do that for every site you allow.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Security services love it. Can passively track you for your productive life. No more funny codes on tickets or 'numbers', just you in front of any networked camera.
ID the skull in the shallow grave? Rebuild a skull and f
You guys are missing the point... (Score:5, Interesting)
It is ONE school. How useful could data from only one school in the entire UK be for a forming of some BigBrotherTM database?
Nah... It's something much simpler.
Same reason the face-recognition companies practically gave away their hardware to selected locations in India so they could get better at recognizing the "darker" faces.
Fine tuning.
Teenagers have a tendency for two things more than any other age group.
Growing up and changing their facial structure very quickly in a matter of months AND they "play" with their faces more than anyone else.
Makeup and cosmetics for girls, facial hair for boys, piercings etc. for both.
The point of this "experiment" is to teach the machines how to successfully identify people even if they change their hairstyle, hair color, eye color, grow a beard or a mustache, do some light plastic surgery or heavy makeup to alter their faces, etc.
Now, when they put this in every school - THAT is for making the Great Britain's Good Citizens Glorious Database or GBGCGD.
Parent
Re:You guys are missing the point... (Score:5, Insightful)
>It is ONE school.
It's the FIRST school.
Parent
Re:You guys are missing the point... (Score:4, Informative)
I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that Cory Doctorow's awesome book Little Brother [craphound.com] is a great read and can be downloaded for free from the author's site.
Parent
Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
When I was in school, many moons ago, the teacher just wrote up who was there and who wasn't. Is Johnny in class? No? Report it. No matter if he was in school roaming the halls. Why solve a social problem with a technical solution?
The bad thing is that these are the people who should teach your children.
Re: (Score:2)
It's not particularly even a social problem. At 18 you should be old enough to decide whether to go to class or not.
Re: (Score:2)
All the more reason to have a real human being check that they are OK when they enter the school.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why solve a social problem with a technical solution?
You're misapprehending the problem. If the problem was "how do we know who's in class?", then there's nothing wrong with the simple signing of the register. The problem that this is designed to solve, though, is "how do we collect facial-recognition data on as many people as we can while they're still to young to do anything about it?"
Parent
Bloody idiots (Score:5, Insightful)
I work in schools, in the UK, in IT. This is just incredibly stupid.
You are now RELIANT on that system being accurate to safely evacuate the building in an emergency. That automated system is NO GOOD for that purpose - and you're relying on it with little to no manual backup. You WILL get students with photocopies of their friend's faces (and/or other similarly low-tech solutions to allow the automated system to recognise and register them) in order to get out of lessons, lectures, etc. that they are made to attend. Then when you have a fire, and they are actually somewhere else (or vice versa, logged out of the system but actually still on the premises) you are going to put people's lives at risk. Seriously, give me a week, and I could probably find a way around it that a sixth-former could manage.
Not only that, you are opening yourself up to enormous DPA issues, because this is a irrevocable biometric - much like the UK government and education in general currently condemns and advises against fingerprint recognition systems in schools. It's also completely unnecessary, extremely expensive, probably quite unreliable (any identical twins go to that college, or even just two people who look alike?), potentially discriminatory (What if someone's face isn't recognised? What if they have disfigurement? What if they deliberately obscure their face or object to the system? Do you allow a bypass to that system for them?). The cost of implementing and *maintaining* and *renewing* that system probably far outweighs an hour or so a day at minimum wage for a member of admin/support staff who has some free time, before you even consider the future problems you've opened yourself up to.
Tell me... did the head of the school come up with this idea? I very much doubt it was the staff who were handling the registration systems in the first place.
Re:Bloody idiots (Score:4, Insightful)
Not only that - but who has the time to "quickly and effectively print data off from the system showing who was on site" when there is a bloody fire alarm. When I was in school we were told to leave everything and get out, not wait for a laser printer to warm up or an epson stylus to clean its printer cartridges.
Parent
Re:Bloody idiots (Score:4, Funny)
You're thinking too localized. For missioncritical systems, you'd use an offsite datacenter with a decent SLA-contact. It's up to the datacenter to take the precautions to not have their servers go up in flames (that's why some of these datacenters are bunkered and have high security) and preferably have a redundant setup, spread over more then 1 location which is easy these days with virtualization.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
That should be no problem, there are alot of options.
Pay nodoby a bit more to be present or pick a good datacenter, there should be at least one person physically at the datacenter and a few on call to make sure they can meet their SLA's.
When I drive to work I browse the web on my cellpho
Re: (Score:2)
Tell me... did the head of the school come up with this idea? I very much doubt it was the staff who were handling the registration systems in the first place.
Most likely it was someone who looked at the amount of physical registers needed for the current system, thought an electronical system would be cheaper/more efficient, and it got pushed through. I agree with the fire safety side,. Its a shame that people will likely need to die in fire even to start an 'urgent review' of the system if it gets widely adopted.
Whenever I read of things like this I'm always reminded of the university office of a lecturer whose research speciality was issues around the paperles
Re: (Score:2)
Replying twice as I've just thought of something else.
"What if they deliberately obscure their face or object to the system?"
In todays multicultural Britain, what if a Muslim wearing a Burqa wants to enroll at the college?
Re: (Score:2)
Spending public money sometimes is a way to get rich, so the real usefulness of the expense is not important as long as it gets approved. I'll answer your last question with another one: who's getting paid to implement the system and which decision makers are close to some of those companies?
Disclaimer: I'm sure these things don't happen in the UK so any similarity to any person living or dead is merely coincidental, etc.
Re: (Score:2)
I work in schools, in the UK, with MS. This is just incredibly stupid.
This is not about you. This is about the next generation feeling happy about facial recognition.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Agreed, in part. It's just a dumb idea.
However, that system is undoubtedly NOT under the control of the IT department, or only minimally via their contractors, when it should be - nobody else really deals with the policy regarding DPA issues except for the IT department and possibly a Data Manager in the larger schools. Unfortunately, it will also tie into their IT registration systems. In doing so, they've given no thought to maintenance or integration costs, whether it satisfies the requirements of suc
So, what you are REALLY saying is... (Score:3, Insightful)
You WILL get students with photocopies of their friend's faces (and/or other similarly low-tech solutions to allow the automated system to recognise and register them) in order to get out of lessons, lectures, etc. that they are made to attend.
(any identical twins go to that college, or even just two people who look alike?), potentially discriminatory (What if someone's face isn't recognised? What if they have disfigurement? What if they deliberately obscure their face or object to the system? Do you allow a bypass to that system for them?).
... that it is a great testbed for determining the flaws of the system and fine-tune it against deliberate ways of obscuring one's face or missidentification due to either deliberate attempts to present oneself as someone else or accidentally through changes in facial structure due to puberty?
What better group to test your system on then a bunch of teenagers.
They ARE smarter than anyone else anyway (or so they think) and it is in their nature to go against the system and find a way to "play it".
Plus their f
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You certainly couldn't - I worked in another school in Essex that does exactly the same. I assure you it is not only real, but *nobody* in the school understands the problem with it except the bad teachers who accept it but get tetchy that their bad teaching is being recorded... not the fact that they are bad teachers, or that they/the staff/the students are being recorded - but the fact that they might have thier gravy-train ended.
I was asked to design and build systems to do just this too, because I coul
For the watchful... (Score:2, Informative)
Great, so we now have a picture of the student demoing the machine, and her PIN (6447). What did we learn today?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Brilliant! (Score:3, Funny)
"UK School Introduces Facial Recognition"
This is very good progress. It is important to keep up with the development of various sexual perversions in our modern fast-paced society. Therefore, recognizing facials as a new part of the curriculum of sexual education in schools is a good thing, even if only in one school in the UK for now. But it is a start, and hopefully facials are recognized soon in every school. It is about time to introduce the recognition of facials!
CCTV in schools (Score:3, Insightful)
There are also reports of schools installing CCTV cameras in UK classrooms to monitor both teachers and pupils. Very depressing stuff, that this is even considered, let alone allowed to go on.
All I can say is, I'm glad I went to school 10+ years ago. I wouldn't want to learn in such an invasive environment. It's disgusting, and those who think it's appropriate should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.
Re:CCTV in schools (Score:4, Interesting)
And there is no money to renovate the buildings or hire more/better qualified personnel. But, there is money for tech to watch^H^H^H^H^Hspy. Says something about the priorities nowadays...
Parent
Great! (Score:2)
Misleading summary (shock!) (Score:5, Interesting)
"A UK school has quietly introduced..."
If by "quietly" you mean, "telling everyone about how good it is and getting it in the press" then yes I guess so. Ahem. Did the submitter actually read the article they submitted?
It's worth RTFA and watching the short little video to see what the system does (I know, this is /. etc).
This is not some Big Brother style camera system covertly watching the students. This is a box on the wall which the students have to actively use to sign themselves in and out. They have to actively press buttons (well a touch screen) to use it.
While I am nervous about using biometrics for this sort of thing, the data being collected is exactly the same as would be recorded by the class register, the only difference is that it uses a computer rather than a teacher. Some schools have been using swipe-card systems for a few years, this is just a step up technologically.
There is a wider argument about the way schools are run, and the creeping use of biometrics, but this is primarily used to see who is in the building if there is a fire, so I'm not really sure that the "OMG, BIG BROTHER!1!!!!1!!" spin is warranted.
Especially since they have not exactly kept it quiet.
Re: (Score:2)
this is primarily used to see who is in the building if there is a fire, so I'm not really sure that the "OMG, BIG BROTHER!1!!!!1!!" spin is warranted.
Especially since they have not exactly kept it quiet.
Any system to be used in the event of a fire *cannot* be optional, or under the control of those subjected to it. Thats a fact, one learned the hard way in the past, that cannot be argued. Give people the option of not doing something, and they won't, at least not always, because 'nothings going to happen'.
big brother is not the issue here (Score:2)
The issue seems:
1. that the system can possibly be tricked, meaning you'll have conflicting data
2. Possible dangers (you walk into the building, but forget to register - a fire breaks out and nobody comes to search for you because the system says you're not there)
3. that it might not be necessary to have the system in the first place - people are pretty good at face recognition last time I checked
There is no privacy in school anyway, with teachers watching you all the time... so this is no concern at all.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
There is a difference between 'quietly introduced' and 'announced its launch'
You can scheme quietly to make something happen that you know will be controversial, then implement it and announce the fait accompli. The amount of objections to cause a deinstallation will be vastly more than the amount of objections needed to prevent i
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"Quietly introduced" means without consultation before the introduction. It was the introduction that went quietly. Learned that in a school without this stuff and English isn't even my first or second language.
How large are those schools?? (Score:2)
Even with 1000 students, teachers will personally know the pupils soon enough.
When I was still in school, and you didn't show up, the teachers found out soon enough. The
system seemed unbeatable.
You might be able to fool a computer, but people (teachers) are very good at finding out who is in class, and who is not. Also, people are better at face recognition than any computer.
Are pupils really just a number in that school?
Will the economic crisis save freedom? (Score:2)
I've read somewhere that UK financial situation is quite bad recently (similar to Iceland).
Any chance they'll bankrupt and cut founds to such silly projects?
What problem, exactly, is solved by this? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sixth-formers will now have their faces scanned as they arrive in the morning at the City of Ely Community College. Face Register uses the latest high-tech gadgets to register students in and out of school in just 1.5 seconds.
Erm... what problem is being solved by this?
If you want to know whether the kids are in class, as opposed to in school, you have to look in every classroom. Except that it doesn't really work; you have to look where the students are supposed to be, which the system may not know (or be able to adapt to).
Is it fire safety and evacuation? So you have one of these machines at every exit, and it can perfectly well identify everyone in a screaming running horde of people?
It doesn't seem to solve any useful problem. Does anyone know what it's intended to accomplish, and whether it actually accomplishes anything?
Fire in the server room. (Score:2, Informative)
Brilliant idea (Score:2)
Get them used to having their faces scanned. Get them used to the state collecting info that way, and storing your appearances anywhere.
Get them used to being scanned, watched. They'll need it.
And for heavens sake, ban the "1984" book.
Well, I guess face recognition isn't AI anymore... (Score:3, Interesting)
...Every time AI researches find a working algorithm for something that the human mind does, the ability coded on that algorithm stops being thought of as "Intelligence" and becomes "just a calculation that any computer can do".
So I guess pattern recognition in images is not AI anymore, right?
1.5 seconds.. how many millions did this cost? (Score:4, Interesting)
I can sign my name in 1.5 seconds, and type it even faster.
I can depress my thumb onto a (now 2 decade old) biometric reader for the same result in the same amount of time.
This is an excellent example of stupidly wasted money.
Heck, even if its tied to stimulus spending, the new deal wasn't just about putting people to work, but putting people to work building infrastructure which would improve the efficiency and cut the costs to businesses in the long term.
This does not do either.
If it's not tied to stimulus spending this school should be chastised for buying this expensive system in a time when a few more jobs would be more valuable to the community.