Telangana Declares November ‘Special Attendance Month’, Puts Facial Recognition at the Centre of a 100% Attendance Push in Government Schools
The Indian state of Telangana has designated November as a Special Attendance Month in government schools, making facial recognition technology central to a campaign targeting perfect student attendance.
Why this matters: Children in government schools do not choose to be scanned. Their parents likely were not asked either. Facial recognition built into a routine attendance push normalizes biometric data collection for kids before they are old enough to understand what that means. The school framing makes it feel administrative and harmless. It is not. Once a government has a biometric database of children, the question of what else that data gets used for does not disappear just because it started with attendance.
Who should care: Privacy officers · Cybersecurity · General readers · Policy
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