[ news_security_news ]
Biometrics Comes To Disney World
David Utter
Staff Writer
2006-09-01
 Security News RSS Feed
Visitors to the Orlando theme park will eventually see the finger geometry readers replaced with fingerprint scanners, as The Walt Disney Company fights illegally resold park passes with biometrics.
The Newsinitiative.org website discussed something I got to see up close in June - the use of biometric fingerprint scanners to associate visitors with their park tickets. By the time October rolls around, all four of Disney's parks in Orlando will have replaced the finger geometry machines with the fingerprint devices.
Disney has used these methods to mitigate ticket fraud or resale, which is forbidden by Disney's terms when purchasing a ticket. The finger geometry reader allowed Disney to keep the lines moving while verifying the ticketholder held a valid pass.
I've seen where these don't work well, for people who for myriad reasons cannot get the geometry machines to recognize their fingers. A lot of times they are people with physical ailments, and watching someone who's just trying to enjoy a few hours of escapism get humiliated by a machine is very sad to see.
A Disney representative told Newsinitiative.org more about the technology in the fingerprint scanners that will retire the finger geometry readers:
"It's essentially a technology upgrade," said Kim Prunty, spokeswoman for Walt Disney World. The new scanner, like the old finger geometry scanner, "takes an image, identifies a series of points, measures the distance between those points, and turns it into a numerical value." She added, "To call it a fingerprint is a little bit of a stretch"
The new machines scan one fingertip for its fingerprint information. Prunty said the company does not store the entire fingerprint image, but only numerical information about certain points.
Privacy advocates became predictably infuriated over the new technology:
"The lack of transparency has always been a problem," said Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, who added that Disney's use of technology "fails a proportionality test" by requiring too much personal information for theme park access.
"What they're doing is taking a technology that was used to control access to high-level security venues and they're applying it to controlling access to a theme park," Coney said.
Concerns about unnecessary sharing of fingerprint and visitor information should be addressed, and Disney claimed that won't happen, as data is purged from the system 30 days after being recorded. And although it is not publicly posted, those who do not want to be scanned can present a photo ID to a cast member at the entrance queues instead.
There are a couple of reasons why the privacy issues probably will not concern many visitors to Disney World. Being the tourist mecca that it is, visitors may perceive the fingerprint scanner as an extra layer of welcome security instead of an intrusion.
The biometric machine is a lot faster at moving people into the parks than the old geometry machines, and anything that speeds things up under the blazing Florida sun will be appreciated rather than criticized by most visitors.
---
Tags: Biometrics, Disney World
Add to  Del.icio.us |  Digg |  Yahoo! My Web |  Furl
Get all the updates in RSS: 
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
More news_security_news Articles
Security News RSS Feed
|
|
RSS
Archive
Contact Us
Advertise
