Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:49 pm on 8 March 2023.
Diolch, Dirprwy Lywydd, and thank you very much, Minister, for those assurances. I really do appreciate it. I also want to say thank you very much to Jane Dodds. I totally agree, schools are not doing this on purpose—they have no guidance. Actually, if what had happened with the Department for Education happened now, they'd actually have been fined £10 million by the ICO, so we're actually leaving our schools wide open to absolutely enormous fines. They're sitting ducks for these huge foreign countries to target them and sell them this technology that they tell them is safer.
Jenny, I did address the very valid questions that you asked at the beginning, but you missed the beginning of my speech. I would ask you to go back and have a read of it, please, before you make your decision this evening. I will reinforce, though, that anyone with a toddler knows that they can remember the four-digit code to your smartphone. Children can remember a four-digit code to be able to have their school meals; that doesn't require them to compromise their personal data for the rest of their lives. And Jack, thank you so much for talking about the consent—children don't know what they're consenting to. They have no idea, as even many adults don't either. I think it's absolutely right that we have to hear their voice, which we do not have now.
I also want to say that I had a very interesting conversation with my colleague Cefin Campbell the other day about justice, and how, very often, in this Chamber we do talk about the legal, the practical, the outcomes, the results, the thresholds, the targets, but very little, sometimes, about ideology. Very often, it's dismissed as maybe being culture wars, and sometimes it is, but when it comes to this, it actually is really important that we do look at it through the lens of our values, our culture and our human rights—the children's human rights, and the power dynamics and the power exchange that is happening here on our watch, where our children, as we have heard, have no autonomy and no right to education free from surveillance. As the Manic Street Preachers sing,
'If you tolerate this, then your children will be next.'
But in this case, as we have heard, our children are actually being targeted first and we are tolerating it. The opportunity to share their very personal biometric data for whatever they wish has been taken from them because there is a lack of awareness, a lack of understanding, a lack of will, a lack of engagement with young people, a lack of basic data literacy to really grapple with the ramifications of this: how this is really changing our society, our children's perception of the world, their perception of themselves in the world and very much their futures.
Based on everything we've heard today, I do not believe that biometric data collection in schools should continue. Children have a right to education and a right to privacy under the UNCRC and, at the moment, they're not being able to do both at the same time. I also believe that this will lead to the introduction of live facial recognition technology within schools, which we have already seen in other parts of the country. I also believe that we wouldn't even be aware of its introduction. Once it is here, it will be almost impossible to roll back. So, I've brought this debate today and I thank everyone for participating in it. I hope that it's gone some way towards raising awareness. I hope now that we can put this on the agenda seriously, not just for children, for all citizens of Wales, and that we can work in conjunction with other devolved nations on this and that we can begin to take this very seriously. It is time to make up our own minds on whether or not this is something that we want to happen as a society. So, please vote for my motion today so that we can begin doing this. Diolch.