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Comment by bklyn11201 | Hacker News Reader

I remember being fingerprinted in elementary school. Is this still common practice in USA?

Yes, AFAIK. It's still "voluntary" in that a child can refuse to do it if they're willing to raise enough stink and make a scene. Of course, one could paint their fingers with nail polish on that day, too...

Do the schools have to get the parent's permission somehow? This can't seem like a situation where the child has to make a commotion in order to not consent.

I believe it's probably covered in the mass of stuff you sign at the beginning of the school year.

What? Did you ever find out what the fingerprints were used for?

This is like taking a DNA sample from child when they're born nowadays, it seems harmless now, but we can already see companies using this kind of data maliciously.

In the US it was very common. My kids did it at school in the 90s.

The point was that if your child goes missing, you have their fingerprints available so they can be used in investigations. In our case, the fingerprints were given to us to take home in case they were ever needed. At the time I didn't think to ask if the police kept a record for themselves, but I doubt it (just because local PD wasn't very organized).

where did you go to school?

New England.

I went to school in the 2000's when I moved to Florida, and I don't remember this, maybe I was too old, I went to school in Puerto Rico prior to this.

I still have my card from the early 80s, in semi rural Oregon. The way I remember it (with a caveat of me being six) was it was the only copy. I don't think my parents would have done it if the government was keeping one.

I don't remember anything like that happening to me. I hope that's not common.

Very, very common.

Our entire school district did it for decades.

Very common. I suspect they slowed down post-2020.

https://mobile.twitter.com/search?q=elementary%20(fingerprin...

I had no idea you could do querying for twitter like that...

Yep, it has almost the same feature set as the dev API. You can get really specific without knowing what exactly you’re searching for.

Do you always have to put it in parenthesis to make it know you're trying to do an advanced query?

I don't think it ever was?

They took ours when I was in third or fourth grade (so early 80's). They took us on a field trip to a police station and everybody lined up to have their fingerprints taken - I don't know if they actually kept them or did anything with them, though.

It may be regional. Not sure how their marketing worked. See "Ident-A-Kid" (https://identakid.com/)

Never did that in NJ in the 90s

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