Westminster County Council has requested that staff provide fingerprints, for the purposes of tracking their staff ‘clocking on and off’.
The use of fingerprints by the council can be seen as a modern solution of the age old problem of monitoring staff arriving and leaving work.
With the traditional punch cards anyone could have logged in and out, the same could be said with passwords or identity tokens, which can be passed between people. Fingerprints are unique and cannot (allegedly) be transferred between people.
While the government and councillor alike insist there is nothing wrong with fingerprinting staff, they also stated that DNA would only be taken from the guilty, that ANPR would be targeted at terrorists, and that surveillance powers would only be used against criminals, and that our data would be secure. It should also be noted that the fingerprint reading technology can be defeated
Perhaps the biggest concern is that fingerprinting workers in an office is just part of the “softening up process”, where we as a society, are monitored and tracked every stop of the way.
2 million children have had their fingerprints taken by schools, many without consent. Currently the government states that these prints would never leave the school databases. As the government has previously asked for children under 11 to provide fingerprints, why would the government just give up all of this data? What is to stop them changing the law so that they can keep these 2 million records? Even more concerning is that as these children move into adulthood they will be accustomed to being tracked and monitored, and will not object to the ever growing databases of CCTV, Fingerprints, and DNA.
So when the unions object to workers having to provide fingerprints, perhaps they are not doing it out of short term political gain (a charge often levied at the unions) but out of long term concern for society.