Fingerprint scanners at Disney World concern privacy advocates

Does it really matter everything is on the internet anyways. You say people can check your criminal records. Well sorry to tell you thats been posted all over the internet for some time now. And like others have mentioned think about how much info you give out just using a debit or credit card. Do you think your fingerprint is going to give that much away. And does anyone even know what the employees can even access about you once you do use your fingerprint. For all you know all they see is a screen that shows your fingerprint that says approved or unapproved.

That's sort of the point. We're kind of getting away from the point with all this stuff about data mining. What Disney is doing is exactly the same thing they did with the finger-joint scanners. What they are doing is to connect the ticket serial number to a single piece of anonymous but substantially unique biometric data. This is important: The only thing they care about is that the same person uses all the days on the ticket. They don't care who that person is, they only care that it is the same person.

From a privacy standpoint, whatthey are doing is no different than putting a coded wristband on each person on first use of a ticket and requiring that the subsequent days on that ticket be used only with the wristband. The difference is that here instead of using a wristband, the park is using something that the customer already has, literally on hand.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

People. They don't use fingerprint scanners. Last time I was there (May 2005) I asked. they measure lengths of bone between knuckles. Apparently they are different enough that the chances of two people having matching data is fairly low in the scope of people attending a park.

Did you happen to read the article/news item at the top of this very page? :)

Apparently I didn't. My bad.

They claim they are not storing images. Of course it doesn't really make sense for them to store images since that requires disk space and disk space costs money.

So they don't scan the image and the image is purged 30 days after the ticket is expired. There really isn't much to get upset about.

Now if I were Disney, I'd have an independent auditor randomly confirm that they are living up to their word.

I'm also guessing that in order to use the finger print information, that they'd have to link to a government database. I doubt that is going to happen unless the government finds that most terrorists can't resist Disney's magical pull.
*** This post was edited by Thomas Crymes 9/6/2006 10:12:06 AM ***

Hey, I was on msn.com and I noticed a headline for a news article with a pretty in-depth detail on the fingerprint story with the Orlando Disney park.

link*** This post was edited by Jeff 9/7/2006 9:14:22 AM ***