I went to Universal Islands of Adventure and when they took my ticket they had me scan my fingerprint. I was too startled by the request to object. So my questions are
1.) Why??? I can see maybe for a season pass or something but I bought a one day, one park, one entry ticket that’s presumably voided as soon as they scan it.
2.) Out of curiosity, if I refused would I have been denied entry in the park?
3.) For whatever reason they want it I presume after a while it’s of no further use for them. So do they purge all digital fingerprint scans after a while? It absolutely creeps me out knowing someone has a copy of my fingerprint.
Only reason i can think of is to verify who you were afterwards, if there is some problem.
If someone is raped or a child abducted in the park, they could send all the fingerprints from visitors of the appropriate age & gender to the FBI, who could search for people with prior sex crimes convictions. And the fingerprint makes good evidence, it proves that this person was in the park that day.
If your payment for the ticket bounces, they at least have your fingerprint to identify you.
Seems rather long odds, but with digital fingerprint scanners, it probably costs them almost nothing.
:eek: definitely interested in the “what if I said no” question. I’d hate to make it all the way to the front gate, decline to give a private company my fingerprint, and then have to drag a very sad Dudeling to spend the rest of the day on the Line Ride in the next park over.
Yes, I know if someone wanted to they could get my special-as-a-snowflake fingerprints off a discarded booger, but that’s a bit different than collecting them at that scale and digitizing them on the fly.
{{{shuddder}}}
I did a quick Google search of “fingerprint site:universalorlando.com,” which returned no hits–so it’s not like they’re providing all that much notice ahead of time.
The ONLY thing that would make sense to me is if you paid with a credit card. But if you are forking over the green stuff, then I’d say the fingerprinting is an invasion of privacy.
Really!
~VOW
Disney has been using a similar system since 2005. The purpose is to ensure that no one else is using your park pass. There’s an explanation of Disney’s system HERE ; where Disney goes, Universal invariably follows and the system is probably much the same.
So, if someone from Universal’s IT department gets their unencrypted laptop with everyone’s credit card and fingerprint data stolen, then…?
I got an email from my Credit Union about a laptop with account information being stolen last month. So now I have a free year credit watch subscription. And it happened twice before–in 2009 and 2010 with my employer (a very large corporation). When computers get stolen from work and where I keep my money, why would my information be any safer with a theme park?
(sorry from going OT from the original question)
From that page (blue emphasis added):
The FAQ is a *bit *reassuring (particularly that they’re saying they’re not using fingerprints but a non-exclusive biometric measurement of your fingers).
Then…they’ll have a copy of your fingerprints? I’m not sure you can really do any mischief with a strangers credit card and fingerprint data that you can’t do with just their credit card data.
Yeah, you’re right, and a biometric scan is different from a fingerprint. I handscan customers all the time for their access cards. Still, it’s just another piece of my info added to the 'nets megadatabases, and it just bugs me.
So…are my fingerprints a part of a mega-database now? Like if I commit murder, will I be caught. I mean it’s not like I have murder on my calendar but you never know when the opportunity may arise.
No, as stated, a biometric calculation based on your fingerprint (one finger) is in the database. You can’t really go backwards from that to a fingerprint.
Back to the OP’s original question, the reason why Disney and Universal do this is because even a single-day ticket is not single-entry. You can enter, leave, and re-enter (the same park for a single-park ticket) as much as you want while the ticket is valid, even if it’s just one day for a single-day ticket.
Neither Disney nor Universal want you to give a ticket to someone else to use. It’s strictly prohibited once you use a ticket.
It’s obviously a bigger concern for multi-day tickets and annual passes than a mere single-day ticket, but they use the same finger-scan entry system for all tickets.
That is true. But let’s say they recover a fingerprint from a crime scene. They could run that fingerprint through the same biometric calculation algorithm that the theme park uses and see if there is a match in the theme park’s data base (assuming they can get access to the data base). THAT WOULD NOT PROVE THAT THE FINGERPRINTS ARE THE SAME. But they might be the same. If they could trace back the fingerprint to the credit card used to purchase the ticket or to the security camera footage when the ticket was used, the owner of the finger could become a suspect to investigate.
That’s true in principle, but I doubt the algorithm used to hash the fingerprint is up to the level that a court would recognize it. It may be enough for an investigation and it could make you a suspect, but I doubt it would hold up to a court order to divulge CC records without someone doing some serious leg work.
My guess, however, is that the algorithm just isn’t that specific. It doesn’t have to be. As long as 90% of the time it rejects “bad” fingerprints at the park gate it would act as a deterrent.
One of the reasons why they use fingerprints is so that only you can use a ticket. You cannot give your ticket to someone else to use on another day. Your ticket and your fingerprint become one entity.
5 of us (4 adults and 1 kid) spent a week in Orlando this summer, and the Disney parks were the first place we had seen this.
We had bought 4 multiday adult tickets, and didn’t bother to keep track of which adult used which ticket. Grab one of the 4 tickets, scan it at the park, get your finger scanned. There is no way that we each got the same ticket every day. And yet, never was anyone rejected for having the finger scan not match the ticket.
These tickets were bought from a hotel, where the concierge peeled them off of a whole stack of similar tickets. I don’t think there is any way that Disney could have said “These 4 tickets go together, allow any fingerprint” So I’m not convinced that the parks are actually paying attention to the data that they are scanning.
On a funny note - As we were standing in line to get fingers scanned for the first time, my SO was trying to convince our nephew (7 years old) that the machine was going to prick his finger and take a blood sample. The kid calmly went along with it, but did give my SO the stinkeye afterwards, when only a scan was done. Now the ticket taker was laughing so hard she couldn’t talk.
It would be fairly easy to program the system to handle this case: the first time the ticket is used the fingerprint it scanned and recorded. When it is used later, if the fingerprint scan doesn’t match, check the other tickets that were scanned near the time it was first used – say the 6 tickets scanned before & after at that time. If one of those matches, accept it as valid.
This would handle precisely your situation – people coming in groups and not keeping track of which person uses which ticket. The ticket computer could do this very fast – under a second. And it would prevent time-consuming and customer-annoying problems in the line at the gate. I think it’s pretty likely that Disney has actually implemented this.
Heck, if they were all ordered at the same time, the system could have all the finger prints mapped to all the tickets.
When the Black Helicopters come to kidnap us & steal our organs, you will be the first to be taken.
Hope you enjoyed your ride!
From the FAQ linked above: