New York State Faces Off on Face Recognition
In most of those instances — take fingerprints, for example — users and administrators know that the data that’s being stored or analyzed “is not an actual recreation of your biometric data,” Levin says. Instead, it is “statistical measurements abstracted from that, and that measurement is not being shared. It’s not your actual fingerprint, it’s a generated alphanumeric code based on your fingerprint.”
From a privacy perspective, that distinction makes a lot of difference. A bad actor can do little with a fingerprint’s code; however, with an actual image of a fingerprint or a face, that person could potentially “cause mischief,” Levin says.
As new biometric capabilities come into focus, some schools are pumping the brakes on deploying tools that rely on face recognition. The New York State Department of Education recently issued a ban on face recognition technology in all elementary and secondary schools while leaving other forms of biometrics in place as long as privacy is considered.
DISCOVER: Download this checklist with five steps to secure student data.
Schools elsewhere might take issue with voice or gait recognition, iris or retina recognition, or DNA sequencing, all of which K–12 privacy advocates say might impact student data privacy. Others have taken a wait-and-see approach until broader implications are understood.