A fair amount of controversy has been stirred by Disney’s policy of biometric scanning their customers fingers as part of the theme park admission process. As detailed in these earlier posts, Disney was not actually scanning fingerprints, but rather was noting a series of measurements of distances between points on two fingers and then saving that as a mathematical number. That has changed. Disney is now converting their biometric scanners to scan the prints of just one finger, however the result will still be stored as a mathematical formula, not the actual fingerprint. (see Photo of the new scanner at LaughingPlace.com)
Nevertheless, this is raising concerns among privacy experts. As part of a series on Privacy in the age of Security Northwestern University has run an article detailing the new procedure, what you can do to get around it, and why the US Government is keeping an eye on this new system.
Update: See more at BoingBoing.net, including an interesting bit about how the NSA might match Disney’s records with their own, and this Local6 story as well.
Here’s a pic of my two fingers taken last April:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/urbandude/202450214/
I was going to take a pic of me giving it the finger, but there were a lot of kids around.
Is it me? I couldn’t find “what you can do to get around it:.
What you can do to get around it is show photo ID. There are no signs to that effect, but the Disney spokesperson says it’s so. Alas, not everyone going to the theme parks carries photo id with them. Also those 10 and under using child tickets can pass the finger scanning.
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