Big Brother Fed Uses Biodata to Track School Lunch Choices

From EAG News:

A Pennsylvania school district is scanning students’ thumbprints, tracking all of their lunch purchases, and turning the data over to the federal government.

The Hazleton Area School District recently announced it would be providing free meals to all students, regardless of need.

The move comes after the federal government began incentivizing school districts to provide more meals to more students.

The school district already purchased biometric software to track students receiving free or reduced lunches. Now that federal money is being granted to give every student, regardless of household income, a free lunch on the taxpayers’ dime, everyone’s thumbprint will be scanned. The data, in turn, will be sent to the feds for “transparency” purposes, infuriated parents be damned.

Never has there been a better time to brown-bag it.

Hazleton isn’t the first district to binge on biometrics. Biometric data has been collected by numerous public school districts since 2011 in order to track a number of programs including transportation, school lunch and library use. Everything from fingerprint scans to iris scans are being employed to track a child’s every move, from the time they step on the bus until they get off at the end of the day.

It gets creepier. Along with questioning who is receiving the data, how it is being stored and what it could potentially be used for in the future, critics are concerned that this form of data collection will acculturate an entire generation to the use of biometrics, regardless of security concerns:

They contend that using the technology so early in a child’s life makes the practice seem commonplace. As a result, they argue, students may become desensitized to issues such as whether it is right, fair, or overly intrusive for them to be asked to provide their biometric data in other settings later in life.