Big Brother!

While it might sound like a scene from a sci-fi movie, a small number of Victorian schools ( Including a private school in Ballarat) have been trialling scanners that sweep classrooms for students’ faces to ensure no one is missing.

But privacy concerns about the technology has promoted the education minister and Victoria’s inaugural Information Commissioner to sound the alarm.

Mr Merlino has ordered the Education Department to immediately assess the software and report back to him.

He’s also asked the Department to contact every state school to remind them that they must undertake a privacy impact assessment before considering the software.

Information Commissioner Sven Bluemmel said the compromising of children's privacy appeared to outweigh the benefits of the technology.

"Do we want our children to feel like it’s normal to be constantly under surveillance?” he said.

“There are unique risks for biometrics, which can be used to identify people based on unchangeable personal characteristics. Unlike other categories of identifying information, such as a drivers licence, if biometric information is compromised it is generally not possible to get a new identifier."

But LoopLearn co-founder Zoe Milne said the technology saved teachers valuable time.

“We’ve found that schools report that the roll marking process can take away up to two and a half hours of lesson time from students every week,” she said. “Schools spend this teaching time, as well as additional time from administration staff, on roll marking because they have a duty to keep students safe.”

She said that the technology had been designed with “privacy at its core”, complied with all relevant legislation and deleted students’ faces once they had been identified.

“To our knowledge, we’ve gone through all the proper channels and are open to further conversations to ensure that all stakeholders are comfortable with the LoopLearn technology,” she said.

Facial recognition technology is becoming increasingly common.

It’s used at airports, to unlock the latest iPhones and as part of China’s social credit system, which by 2020 will monitor the nation’s 1.4 billion citizens using surveillance cameras fitted with facial recognition.

In the US, the technology is being rolled out at schools fearful of shootings. One system allows security officers to respond to expelled students, sex offenders and disgruntled employees whose photos have been uploaded into a system.

A Ballarat Clarendon College student, who did not want to be named, said he didn’t like the idea of always being monitored.

“It has a Big Brother type of feeling to it,” he said.

But the school’s head of research, Greg Ashman, said the school had completed a thorough risk assessment and communicated its plans to the community.

He said if the trial was unsuccessful, the school would walk away from the technology.

Mr Ashman said the technology, which will be used in a handful of classrooms in coming weeks, would maximise the time teachers spent on instruction.

He said marking the roll could be cumbersome, particularly if students had left the class for a music lesson and then returned.

“There is no filming of what students are doing," Mr Ashman said.

"It is really just to check where they are.”