TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: Finger Scanning At Disney Parks Causes Concern

Re: Finger Scanning At Disney Parks Causes Concern

Dale Farmer (dale@cybercom.net)
Tue, 19 Jul 2005 02:16:10 GMT

Clark W. Griswold, Jr. wrote:

> Dale Farmer <dale@cybercom.net> wrote:

>> Disney does have a problem with (typically teenage) chronic
>> troublemakers. They get caught, given the usual don't come back on
>> the property spiel, and escorted off the property. The problem is
>> that some of them come back with revenge in mind. By getting these
>> folks prints and scanning everyone upon entrance, they can easily
>> recognize them at the gate and block them.

> While I don't doubt that is one use of the technology, I'd have to see
> the details of the implementation before I'd believe that the hand
> geometry from two fingers would be sufficient to uniquely identify
> anyone.

> What is far more likely in my mind is Disney's ongoing desire to
> prevent multiday passes and resort passes from being used by more than
> one individual. I suspect that Disney ties a hash function of a few
> points from the hand to the serial number of the pass.

> Try to use the pass by someone else and the odds of the hash being the
> same are sufficiently high enough to be detected ...

If the conditions of sale for the passes say that they are for one
person only, then this is, again, perfectly legitimate. Two fingers
worth of fingerprint (depending on the particular algorithm used to
analyze the prints) is more than enough accurate for this usage. All
the scanner is going to do is bring this to the attention of the human
being at the gate, and put the relevant images on a computer terminal
or whatever.

My guess is that the system only keeps in active storage the
fingerprint signatures of employees, troublemakers, and the previous
week or so worth of park visitors, and folks with season passes. Once
the pass has expired, there is no reason I can see for the fingerprint
signature to be retained, and good reasons for it to be purged.

--Dale

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