The school will issue your child with an alternative method of identification, such as a smart card, which can be used in the canteen or library.

Every BioStore database is uniquely encrypted. If a school's security is compromised and a backup of the database is stolen, the data will be unreadable, even by another school.

A cut on a finger will not cause a problem for BioStore, unless it is a major injury.

We do not store a fingerprint image in BioStore, so our system cannot be used for forensic identification.

No. Even identical twins have different fingerprints.

In very rare cases there are people who are born without prints. Occasionally somebody's fingerprints will degenerate because of exposure to some chemical products, and sometimes temperature changes can cause reduction in fingerprint quality.

These terms refer to how accurate and reliable the system is in correctly identifying people. False Acceptance occurs when a person is wrongly identified as someone else. A False Reject occurs when a person's own fingerprint is not recognised.

It is the policy of Biostore never to store images of fingerprints anywhere on their system. Only mathematical representations of certain points of interest are recorded, typically between ten and forty depending on the characteristics of the finger. This information is encrypted and is called a template. This data is extremely secure in its encrypted form but even if it were not encrypted it is impossible to recreate the original fingerprint image from this data.

A simple way to think about how the system works is to consider an ordnance survey map of a given area. Mark all the points where roads cross over rivers and railway tracks cross roads and record their coordinates. Armed with this information and given a pile of one hundred maps, compare each map with the recorded information and with some degree of certainty the original map can be identified. From the recorded coordinates alone it is obvious that the original map cannot be recreated with any real level of accuracy. More than 99.99% of the information on the original map has been discarded, leaving only a few points. Even these points cannot be totally recreated as only a simple description of each has been kept.

Biostore only records templates to an accuracy that can discriminate among populations of hundreds or a few thousand people. In the wider population the accuracy of the system is such that it could not be used for forensic matching with any degree of certainty and a court of law has never and could never use this information as evidence.

The answer is no. The fingerprint template stored in the database is merely a string of encrypted numbers. If this string of numbers were to be removed from the database, it would be useless, because it cannot be recognised as a fingerprint. A fingerprint scanner checks for a real finger – it does not recognise a string of numbers, unlike a bank machine, which will accept a bank card from anybody who happens to know the PIN number.

The Biostore database is stored on the school or organisation's own computer.