If you are a regular visitor of the Class of 1953 Commons, it has been difficult to miss Dartmouth Dining’s new hand scanner initiative that promises the ability to scan into Foco with just a wave of your hand. It seems that Dartmouth Dining has a table set up in the building entryway to sign students up for the program almost every time I pass through. Dining workers have been offering candy and other incentives for students to scan their hand prints. Although it might seem like a small change, I believe Dartmouth Dining’s aggressive push towards using this technology at Foco is a shameless attempt to cut costs that presents unaddressed privacy concerns about the storage and protection of student biometric data.
Dartmouth Dining’s advertisement of its hand scanner initiative is not just limited to the tables set up in Foco’s lobby. The first panel on the front page of the Dartmouth Dining website is an advertisement for the hand scanners. The link then leads to another page on its website that further explains the initiative, attempts to address potential privacy concerns and provides information about how the scanning system works and how student data is stored. According to a six-point explanation of the process, the system converts images of fingerprints into some kind of “mathematical representation” that is stored in association with your Dartmouth Dining account, and images of the fingerprints themselves are not kept on file.
This 94-word explanation is the most detailed description I could find of how the new hand-scanning initiative works. Other than a mention of “Morpho Hand Scanners” in some of the College’s online hand scanner advertisements, there is scant information available about which companies Dartmouth Dining is contracting to equip this technology, what type of hand scanners they are using or any more details about how the system works.
Morpho — now known as IDEMIA — came under fire in a 2020 Amnesty International report for their sale of their technologies to the Chinese government. The report stated that the sale of IDEMIA’s technology to China posed a “significant risk to human rights.” Furthermore, IDEMIA has a paper-thin ethics charter when it comes to protecting personal data, with only a couple of paragraphs dedicated to the topic. Although the charter mentions prioritizing personal data, it is overly broad about how Morpho plans put these priorities into practice, only assuring that the company will comply with “all applicable legislation” and won’t keep data for longer than necessary, as well as mentioning that they have a Data Protection Officer. Additionally, the fact that the charter discusses the handling of personal data at all is alarming considering that Dartmouth Dining has stated in advertising that no personal data would be collected or stored.
Although Dartmouth Dining claims that technically no biometric data is stored — rather, an algorithm is used to store prints as templates of zeroes and ones — the ability of the scanner to detect and match fingerprints suggests that there is some way to reconstruct biometric data. So, hypothetically, if a law enforcement agency came to Dartmouth Dining and IDEMIA with some kind of warrant for personal biometric data, would IDEMIA be obligated to decode their algorithm and hand the data over? Although I do not intend to suggest that I believe this is likely, I think it is important to highlight the consequences that might exist for forfeiting one’s biometric data to a large, multinational corporation.
On top of the biometric concerns, the hand scanners present further concerns in regard to job automation and threats to Dartmouth workers. Dartmouth Dining’s advertisements of the scanners are clear in their intention — a Nov. 20 post on Dartmouth Dining’s Instagram account states that the hand reader “is how you will enter ’53 [Commons] starting in December.” Although Dartmouth Dining Director Jon Plodzik explained to The Dartmouth last term that the use of the new hand scanning technology is optional and that there will still be one human swiper — rather than the two in previous terms — Dartmouth Dining’s advertisements and push to get students enrolled suggests that the College intends to fully transition to the hand scanning system as soon as possible.
This shift is consistent with a broader trend among large customer service companies pushing to cut workers out of their businesses in favor of automation. In the fall of 2024, dock workers across the East Coast protested the automation of the process of emptying container ships. During the Thanksgiving travel rush, airport restaurant workers in Phoenix went on strike because self-service kiosks began to threaten their jobs. Only months ago, members of the actors union, SAG-AFTRA went on strike protesting video game companies’ use of artificial intelligence and automation in place of human writers. The threat of automation is far and wide, and our campus and campus workers are not immune.
On top of the threat of automation, the new hand scanners have also made getting into Foco significantly harder. Because there is now only one human swiper at Foco, those not enrolled in the hand scanning programs now must wait in a single, significantly longer line to get into Foco. In fact, Plodzik stated in his previous statements to The Dartmouth that he knew the winter term transition to the hand scanners would create longer wait times. He stated to The Dartmouth in the fall: “If you haven’t enrolled before we start the winter term, you’re going to be in a very long line.” It seems that Dartmouth Dining has sacrificed efficiency for students in favor of pushing the use of the new hand-scanning technology.
It is critical that our campus community draws a line. The Foco hand scanners may seem trivial — comical, even — but they are symptomatic of larger, more insidious trends that are taking hold across our country. We must stand against the forfeiture of our biometric data to multinational corporations for the sole sake of efficiency, and we must protect human jobs.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
