Think of the children!

From the biometrics industry website PlanetBiometrics.com:

The Antelope Valley Schools Transportation Agency is considering the use of biometric iris scanners on special needs buses following the tragic death of a pupil.

In the pilot programme, students will biometrically (Iris) scan identity as they board and exit the school bus. An IRITRANS system will notify the driver visibly and audibly if the child is about to get on or off at the wrong bus stop.

When the bus reaches the end of its daily route, the driver simply ends the route on the IRITRANS mobile device and if all students have not exited the bus, the device will notify the driver both visually and audibly to recheck the bus.

Earlier this month, an autistic student was left on a contracted school bus in a district parking lot for hours, until he was found unresponsive laying in the aisle.

“Lost or sleeping kids. It happens every year in most school districts nationally only we rarely hear about it. Kids left sleeping on a bus is at epidemic proportions nationally,” says John DeVries, president of IRITRAK Corporation, developer of IRITRANS.

How better to acclimate society to a future without anonymity or privacy than to use advanced biometric tracking systems on children? Sure, the police and the advertising companies scan my eyeballs every two feet in public space, but what’s so bad about that? It’s for my own good, just like my teachers said when I was a little kid.

In related news, the US government has just acknowledged that foreign hackers, most likely from the Chinese government, stole nearly 6 million sets of fingerprints belonging to US government employees. Bizarrely, the same federal government that places a premium on collecting and retaining as much biometric information from as many people as possible downplayed the significance of the hack.