London Tube Cleaners Don't Want Fingerprint Clock-in

Bismillah writes "Biometrics is hot stuff, not just for Apple but cleaning companies like the UK division of Denmark's IIS which tidies the London Underground railway network. However, the cleaners aren't happy about having to clock in and out with biometric fingerprint sensors, and are taking industrial action to stop the practice."

Re:Fraud

[Anonymous Coward]

The only "civil liberty" it attacks is the ability to fraudulently sign in for someone else. This is how unions get a bad name. Bio-metrics are used for time card validation on many places and it is neither "draconian" nor "an attack on civil liberties".

This is The Peter Principle [amazon.com] at work.

If a superior is incompetent they will often judge the subordinate by "behavior that supports the rules, rituals, and forms of the status quo. Promptness, neatness, courtesy to superiors...." This is evaluating input, not output.

It's pretty easy to show up, put your hand on the scanner, and half-ass it all day long. Do you want clean tubes? Or do you want employees who make sure to put their hand on the scanner at the right time? When you figure that out, design your checks and metrics accordingly.

Slippery Slope

[litehacksaur111]

This is exactly where technology like this will be deployed. They will say you know what it is just a slight inconvenience to the menial tube workers. Then eventually the government and other employers will hand out some no bid contract to some corporation to install these in all places as self identification methods. This technology must be fervently resisted before it is too late. If you don't believe me, just look at the how the TSA is expanding operations from airports to rail stations, highways, and bus depots.

Re:BFD

[Anonymous Coward]

I took a break from Slashdot three years ago, hoping the userbase would eventually grow up, realize that the real world isn't an Ayn Rand novel, and the ridiculous libertarian bullshit would eventually go away.

Imagine my disappointment when I come back to find this kind of shit.

Re:Fraud

[Anonymous Coward]

I work with it, depends of the sensor type used... simple resistive capture just generate low quality images (think on fax like) but common used scanners found in banks or by HR sofware like ours, provide better quality images of the finger prints than can be saved and procesed with unrelated SDKs for biometrics. The hardware vendor librarys use propietary data structures for the minutiae obtained from the images... but unrelated more expensive SDKs exist (focused massive or bach server processing) that support many hardware models and sharing trought some niche defacto standart formats.

So... once you give out your biometric, is not captured by the specific reader implementation. Its very easy to keep it accesible and ready to use.

Re:BFD

[martyros]

well the reason they don't want the scanners is that then they can't as easily sell their job when they move on - or have their cousin cover for them on a sick day.

Possibly, but another very good reason they don't want scanners is that it's demeaning and insulting.

Unless there are significant problems (and not just "significant bending of the rules", but "significant extra expense or reduction in quality"), there is no reason to treat people like criminals.

And if there are significant problems, there's a better solution: Hire people you trust, and then trust the people you hire; and don't judge them by stupid metrics like "has been physically present exactly N hours?", but by metrics like, "Is the area they were responsible for clean?" If it would take an average person working at a reasonable rate 8 hours to clean a certain area, and because of me the area is now clean, then pay me for 8 hours worth of work, whether it took me 8 hours or three hours.