Facial Recognition in Schools: Is It Really Protecting Students?

The accelerating advancements in facial recognition have resulted in its adoption at various touchpoints. However, each of its adoptions has faced its own course of criticism yet the technology is not backing off from its innovative forward march.

The most recent debate regarding facial recognition is over its adoption in schools.

For years, the Denver public school system worked with Video Insight, a Houston-based video management software company that centralized the storage of video footage used across its campuses. So when Panasonic acquired Video Insight, school officials simply transferred the job of updating and expanding their security system to the Japanese electronics giant. That meant new digital HD cameras and access to more powerful analytics software, including Panasonic's facial recognition, a tool the public school system's safety department is now exploring.

Moreover, after a school shooting in Parkland, Florida left 17 people dead, RealNetworks decided to make its facial recognition technology available for free to schools across the US and Canada. If school officials could detect strangers on their campuses, they might be able to stop shooters before they got to a classroom.

Anxious to keep children safe from gun violence, thousands of schools reached out with interest in the technology. Dozens started using SAFR, RealNetworks' facial recognition technology.

The Lockport City School District turned on the technology to monitor who's on the property at its eight schools, becoming the first known public school district in New York to adopt facial recognition, and one of the first in the nation.

Lockport public schools spent roughly US$1.4 million to install facial recognition technology at its schools. The money, which was spent on 300 cameras, servers and software, had initially been allocated for educational technology for students through the Smart Schools Bond Act, a New York bill passed in 2014.

"Much to our dismay, school shootings continue to occur in our country. In many cases, these shootings involve students connected to the schools where these horrific incidents occur," Michelle Bradley, the superintendent of Lockport schools, said in a now-removed post on the district's website explaining the decision. "The Lockport city school district continues to make school security a priority."

Also, public opinion has swung in favor of facial recognition in schools, despite little evidence of its effectiveness. In November, the privacy watchdog group ProPrivacy found that 54 percent of survey respondents said they were comfortable with using facial recognition in schools.

Is it really protecting students?

These types of systems, armed with the ability to track individuals via their biometric identifiers, create a permanent state of surveillance. That sense that a student is always being watched can not only make a student uncomfortable, but Elizabeth Laird warns that it can have a chilling effect on expression and education. Laird, the senior fellow on student privacy at the Center for Democracy and Technology says, "In the context of a school with a mission to educate all students, deploying this kind of technology may chill expressive activities that are critical for young people's development as well as transform a school from a learning environment to one of surveillance that actually makes students feel less safe."

Likewise, Erica Darragh, a board member at SSDP says that surveillance of students hinders "creativity and expression, which is detrimental to learning."

Study after study has found that surveillance has a detrimental effect on free speech. A study of student behavior when cameras are present, published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology found that many modify their behavior when they know they are on camera. This has been found time and time again — humans change how they act when they know they are being watched, even when they aren't doing anything wrong. While it may seem like that would result in "better" behavior, that isn't always the case. Sometimes, it means stifling what would be the true expression.

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, that type of fear of expression has been observed in students who use school-issued technology that monitors their activity. Similarly, students under the watch of cameras — particularly ones that can identify them using their biometric data — may choose to self-censor or restrict their behavior for fear of how it may be viewed by an authority figure.

There's still a lot to be understood about how students behave and express themselves while under the watchful eye of surveillance systems, but schools shouldn't be the testing ground. "Using facial recognition in schools amounts to unethical experimentation on young people," Darragh argues. "We have no idea what kind of psychological impact this type of surveillance will have on students."