Fingerprinting and Other Privacy Issues ...

Engadget (of all places) ran a story about parents of kids in a school district threatening to sue over fingerprints taken without the parents consent.

This is one of those issues that I'm of two distinct minds about. I take my privacy very seriously, and the idea of people making any sort of profile of me without my consent really freaks me out. In this particular case, I think that fingerprinting these schoolchildren and not notifying the parents until after the printing had taken place is about as egregious a privacy violation as you could make.

At the same time, I'm fairly certain that we could prevent a lot of crimes from taking place if people knew that there was a fingerprint and/or DNA profile of them was available to law enforcement. There are certain classes of crimes that happen only because people assume they can get away with it, and I think knowing that you can and likely will be caught would act as a strong deterrent.

Then the more liberal part of me kicks in again and says that it's essentially treating everyone as criminals prior to any crime being committed.

Then again, to paraphrase "The Incredibles", if everyone is treated as a criminal, then no one is.

But that's a slippery slope down to a Big Brother scenario.

I'm having a hard time coming to grips with this one. Should all schools fingerprint our kids, and should there be any opt-out policies?