West Bengal schools to introduce AI-powered attendance system with facial recognition
West Bengal is planning to roll out a facial recognition system in schools to automate student attendance tracking. The AI-powered system would scan and identify students' faces as a substitute for traditional attendance methods.
Why this matters: This puts biometric surveillance into schools, and the subjects are children. Kids cannot meaningfully consent to having their faces scanned and stored. Neither, really, can their parents when the school system makes it mandatory. Facial recognition is not a neutral efficiency tool. It builds a database of children's biometric data, and the question of who controls that data, who can access it, and how long it is kept rarely gets answered before the cameras go in.
Who should care: Privacy officers · Cybersecurity · General readers · AI governance · Policy
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