Tots buy school dinners with veins

Children at a primary school in Scotland now have a new way to pay for their school dinners - vein recognition. Kids at Todholm Primary School are guinea pigs for a biometric payment system being developed by Fujitsu and Yarg Biometrics, called PalmSecure, which registers a vein imprint of children's hands as a unique identifier. The school will be the first organisation in Europe to trial the system.

Once their palm veins are on file, kids can pay for their dinners without carrying cash around. Instead, their palms are used to access their meal account with payments deducted accordingly.

Other UK schools have also trialled biometric systems. A secondary school in Berkshire is testing a system to keep tabs on truants using fingerprints. An Irish college used a similar system, which alerted parents by text if their child was thought to be bunking off.

Anyone who's seen the hit television series CSI has probably seen tools similar to those found in Motorola's biometric product suite, including those used for taking fingerprints and palm prints to identify criminals. But what they didn't see was the Oracle database backing up those products.

Speaking during an interview at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco last week, John Bredehoft, Motorola's biometrics product manager, said his company uses Oracle Database 10g to manage image data and recommends the same database management system to its customers.

"Counting all of our [biometric] product lines, we have over 300 installations and we're in nearly 40 countries," Bredehoft said. "We have everything from small local systems like in Bullhead City, Arizona, all the way to large national systems."

Germany and Canada are the best defenders of privacy, and Malaysia and China the worst, an international rights group said in a report released yesterday.

Britain was rated as an endemic surveillance society, at number 33, just above Russia and Singapore on a ranking of 37 countries' privacy protections by London-based Privacy International. The US did only slightly better, at number 30, ranked between Israel and Thailand, with few safeguards and widespread surveillance, the group said.

The study ranks countries on various privacy-related issues. These include whether they have a written constitution with specific mention of privacy, the use of identity cards and biometrics, electronic surveillance including closed-circuit TV cameras, interception of communication, access of law-enforcement agencies to private data, surveillance of travel and financial transactions, and global leadership in promoting privacy.

Plans to add fingerprints to UK overseas passports are under way, despite the cost and complexity involved in gathering biometrics from UK citizens across the globe, a parliamentary answer revealed last week.

Passports issued by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) are already "biometric", but only in a somewhat minimalist sense - the addition of fingerprints, however, would pull overseas UK residents into the National Identity Register net, closing off a prized but little-known escape route.

According to an answer obtained from FCO Minister Geoff Hoon by Liberal spokesman Vince Cable, the FCO "Secondary Biometrics" project commenced this month, and is due for completion by October 2010. It has not yet, Hoon revealed, been either scoped or fully costed.