Six Flags rolling out biometric scanners for season passholders

If a business wants to get rid of somebody, they will cut them no breaks. Most businesses that I have worked for do not like to keep the complainers because they bring down morale.

Hopefully my honesty will be helpful.

We have used the Digital Persona fingerprint devices at my work for decades without any real issue, and a staff member will routinely use their fingerprint as many as several dozen times a night to activate a terminal. I think this technology has made great strides over the last few years, and this is becoming more common. They are very reliable, and this with a $100 off the shelf USB device. I would think the higher end commercial grade devices are even that much better.

At the end of the day, the rest of us consumers pay for the fraud, so anything that helps keep the cost down to me as a consumer, is fine with me.

Back to the scanners...
Where I have seen them in use is at Disney and Universal. I actually used them at Universal. In fact, the print scanner takes less time to approve the digit print than the ticket scanner takes to swallow, read, and regurgitate the ticket.

It is clear to me that these gate systems were designed with the idea of making the gates self-service, allowing for more open gates with fewer attendants. In practice, it takes an attendant at each gate to keep the traffic moving. At USH, part of that is because the barcode scanners used for passes don't work very well, especially if the pass is in the park-supplied plastic sleeve.

Rumor has it that Disney has done some other things that tend to make things run more smoothly, such as allowing multiple prints to match on multiple tickets. As Jeff pointed out, the point of these systems is to prevent fraud. They establish that the person matches the admission media.

For that reason, the requirements of the system are greatly simplified. The digit print is not required to establish the identity of the person entering the park, it is required to establish that there is a much higher probability that the digit belongs to the ticket holder than that it does not. The result is that the systems can be fairly quick and simple.

Now if the parks could figure out ticket readers. If you can insert a ticket four ways and three of them are wrong, that's a problem. With that in mind, Sea World/Busch Gardens has a system where there is an infinite number of ways to align the ticket, and all but one of those ways is wrong. The biometric device is the least of their admission problems.

Finally, for the tinfoil hat crowd, the digit print isn't typically an image in these systems, it is a statistically significant number of related points. Given the limitations on the requirements of the system, there is a good chance that the digit print is actually *less* personally identifiable than the photograph that Certain Firms use in their systems. But it is *more* machine-readable.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

The thing Disney does to make the system run more smoothly is not validate every bio scan.