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+ - My school wants my finger prints for my work study 6

Submitted by BonesSB
BonesSB writes "I'm a student at a University in Massachusetts, where I have a federal work-study position. Yesterday, I got an email from the office that is responsible for student run organizations (of which one I work for) saying that I need to go to their office and have my finger prints taken for the purposes of clocking in and out of work. This raises huge privacy concerns for me, as should it everybody else. I am in the process of contacting the local newspaper, getting the word out to students everywhere, and talking directly to the office regarding this. I got an email back with two very contradictory sentences: "There will be no image of your fingerprints anywhere. No one will have access to your fingerprints. The machine is storing your prints as a means of identifying who you are when you touch it." Does anybody else attend a school that requires something similar? This is an obvious slippery slope, and something I am not taking lightly. What else should I do?"
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My school wants my finger prints for my work study More

My school wants my finger prints for my work study

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  • There are a few jobs (usually lower-level) that require a finger-print reader for time card clock ins\outs. Not something I agree with, but its more common than you would think.

  • I worked for a very short time last year in a small company's warehouse. The time clock for this warehouse could be operated by either a fingerprint or an employee number and code combination. We didn't have to provide a print for every single finger, just the one we wanted to use for clocking. It didn't seem like a big deal to me because my girlfriend works for a large consulting firm and the crazy amount of biometric data their clients use made a single fingerprint look like a joke.

  • This may get more common in the future. I live in Scandinavia, where fingerprint scans are used voluntarily to identify oneself when boarding domestic flights. In our case, the fingerprint is recorded when checking in at the airport, read when I boarding and deleted afterwards. Not to mention that I own a Dell laptop which supports fingerprint identification as an alternative to a password.

    The statements you mention are not contradictory. The machine does not need to store an image of your fingerprint, only

  • This is also a security concern. When someone who wants access to your system or your place of work, and they steal an ID card or a password, you can recover by getting a new ID or password. When someone steals your fingerprint, they can't exactly issue you a new one.

    Granted, you have to have a pretty motivated attacker to go through the trouble of duplicating your fingerprints, so the average person is safe - but the more systems that use this as an identification/authentication measure, the more incen
  • That your fingerprint is something that you can feasibly hide from the world, good luck. You will be fingerprinted at the DMV, you will be fingerprinted at your bank, and you will be fingerprinted by the police. The fact that you are so concerned about this incident is astonishing, as previously, I have had my fingerprint taken for something as simple as cashing a check at a local convenience store. I don't think your local paper will care. Frankly, I don't think anyone will care.

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