Dale Farmer 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