Elementary biometrics.

• Author: Rimensnyder, Sara
• Position: Citings - Fingerprint pay system in school cafeterias - Brief Article

A technological revolution is brewing in an unlikely locale: elementary school cafeterias. In a few Pennsylvania schools, kids can now pay for lunches with their fingerprints. It's one of the first consumer applications of biometrics, an industry that offers an uneasy tradeoff, some argue, between efficiency and privacy. At schools such as Welsh Valley, in Lower Merion, Pennsylvania, children have been speeding through the lunch line. They press their finger to a scanner, which records 17 grid points that are then used to identify their personal school lunch accounts. (The actual fingerprints are not recorded.)

Officials love the system: It's fast, kids can't lose their lunch money, and it helps schools comply with a federal law protecting students on the free lunch program from their classmates' scrutiny. The system is optional, and only a few parents have declined to let their kids participate in it.

Such popularity suggests a future in which biometrics are a daily part of doing business--assuming that parents are as willing to offer up their own fingerprints as their children's. The technology has also turned up in welfare offices and at international customs desks, and as it...