The UK's data protection watchdog has reprimanded an Essex school for using facial recognition for canteen payments, almost three years after other schools were warned about doing the same.
Facial recognition technology in schools banned across the country
A statement from the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) said Chelmer Valley High School in Chelmsford broke the law when it introduced facial recognition technology (FRT) to take cashless dining room payments from students in March 2023.
By processing biometric data to uniquely identify people, the FRT could result in high data protection risks, the regulator said.
The school, which caters for around 1,200 pupils aged 11 to 18, was reprimanded for failing to carry out a data protection impact assessment (DPIA) before starting to use the FRT, as required by UK data protection law, formally the UK's post-Brexit GDPR, which alongside the Data Protection Act 2018.
