What happens to a child’s fingerprint
The scanner keeps a mathematical template and throws the image away. The template never leaves the till it was captured on. Here is the whole of it, in detail, including how to say no.
The short version
A pupil enrols one finger, once. From then on any counter in their school recognises them, and they carry nothing that can be lost, lent or stolen.
Everything below is the detail behind that paragraph.
What is actually stored
Not a fingerprint. A template: a set of coordinates describing the minutiae (ridge endings and bifurcations) in the ANSI/INCITS 378 format, which is a published standard rather than something we invented.
A minutiae template is not a reversible encoding of a fingerprint. It is not designed to be turned back into an image, and it is not interchangeable with the biometric a phone or a border system holds.
Where it lives, and where matching happens
On the till phone at the school, and nowhere else. Verification is performed on that device: the till compares the finger presented against the template it holds for the pupil the cashier has selected, and acts on the answer.
Consent
Enrolment is by consent, given by the parent or guardian, and consent is the only basis we rely on for it.
The alternative
A QR wristband. It works at every counter that a fingerprint works at, enforces the same daily cap, and produces the same itemised feed.
It is the fallback for a finger that will not read, the option for a family that declines enrolment, and the route back to normal for anyone who withdraws consent. A pupil using a wristband is not treated differently at the counter.
Re-enrolment and who can do it
Fingers change. A cut, a burn, growth over a school year, and a template that used to read well can stop. Recapturing it is deliberately not a routine counter task.
When it is deleted
There is no archive copy to delete, because there was never a copy anywhere else.
Accuracy, and what happens when it is wrong
The reader is configured to a false-match rate of roughly 1 in 100,000. That is the figure quoted on the home page and it describes how often a finger is accepted as someone it is not.
Your rights over this data
A biometric template is personal data under the Data Protection and Privacy Act, 2019, and the rights in our privacy notice apply to it in full, including the right to ask what is held, to have it deleted, and to complain to the Personal Data Protection Office.
For anything specific to enrolment, write to info@sendipay.net. Schools can raise a device or counter question at info@sendipay.net.
Changes to this policy
If anything in this document changes, whether that is where a template lives, what crosses the network or who can re-enrol, we tell affected parents in the app before it takes effect. This is not a policy we will quietly amend and re-date.