A British highschool has been hit with a warning after it used facial recognition AI technology to scan students’ faces to discover them without cost school meals, but the usage of the technology was deemed “opt-out” and didn’t actually require specific prior consent.
TechCrunch recently reported that Zelmer Valley High School in Essex, England, received a proper reprimand from the U.K.’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
In keeping with this, the college has been using fingerprint recognition for meal management since 2016, and can introduce facial recognition technology from an organization called CRB Cunningham starting in 2023.
The issue was that the opt-out method, which notified parents but required a separate procedure to precise their refusal, was adopted. This violated the UK’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which stipulates that a ‘clear affirmative motion’ is required for consent.
One other issue was the failure to properly conduct a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA). As well as, the UK GDPR stipulates that children over the age of 13 can provide their consent to how their data is processed.
“All organisations must perform the mandatory assessments when deploying latest technologies to mitigate data protection risks and ensure they comply with data protection law,” said Lynn Currie, head of information protection innovation on the ICO. “Now we have taken motion against this school to indicate that adoption of such technologies shouldn’t be taken flippantly.”
Opt-out methods, that are also commonly utilized by big tech firms, are repeatedly being identified as problems in Europe (EU).
Recently, Meta inserted an opt-out clause stating that social media posts could be used for AI data training, but was criticized by EU regulators and banned from data training. Because of this, Meta gave up its AI service within the EU.
Reporter Im Dae-jun ydj@aitimes.com
