Vacations and Fingerprint Scans | Hacker News Reader

Vacations and Fingerprint Scans

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There's one other way to complete this puzzle that isn't mentioned in most walkthroughs:

1. Go back to Kennedy space center

2. In the museum, go to the third room, containing the "first monkey in space" exhibit

3. Wait about 30 seconds until the big hawaiian shirt guy and his family leaves

4. Pick up the taxidermied monkey

5. Go to Seaworld

6. On the screen to the left, pick up the electric eel from the aquarium and place it in the giant water flask you bought from the guy at the beach

7. Return to Disney World

8. Remove the eel from the water flask, and place it behind the guard's chair. He'll be distracted by the eel's thrashing about and start panicking about what to do

9. Use the taxidermied monkey with the fingerprint scanner. Your ticket will be marked as "validated"

10. When the commotion dies down, show your ticket to the guard, and he'll let you in

Is this some kind of twisted eulogy for LucasArts?

I'm pretty sure this would be illegal in the EU. Most people are disgusted enough by the practice of being fingerprinted upon entering the US.

Indeed. And I can't understand how the EU itself is OK with its citizens being forced to hand over their biometric information to a foreign government.

Ah wait, it's OK, they're the good guys.

Here in Brazil the government just fingerprints everyone when they go make an ID card, which they need for everything. No one makes a fuss.

Europe still remembers the 20th century.

Most people in the UK were happy at the idea of ID cards. There was a vocal group opposing them, but it wasn't a huge group.

The thing that finally killed ID cards in the UK wasn't privacy or technical limitations, but the cost to anyone who wanted one. At £30 most people didn't care. At £100 the scheme died.

Point noted. I guess 'Europe' is a blanket term. This is different to the attitude in Germany & France I feel, but I may have a skewed view, mostly interacting with hackers when I am over there.

You don't have to enter Disney World if you don't want to. It's a private commercial business.

That is one of the reasons I wrote the post. I was completely unaware of the scanning that was required of my family. Also, there is no 'Privacy Policy' for park admissions (like for a website). They are not required to say what they will use the data for or how long they will keep it.

Well, while I'm sure this might raise eyebrows among those that are protective of their personal data, I was just happy to see there was no shitstorm after requesting a no-fingerprint entrance --- I think it's good that that is a "oh, no big deal" option.

I don't understand though - why the fingerprint? So that you can exit and re-enter the park?

>I don't understand though - why the fingerprint?

Disney first started using the biometric turnstiles about 10 years back to stop people from sharing season passes, and then a few years later they added it for plain old multi-day tickets.

It used to be that there were folks lingering in every Denny's and IHOP parking lot on International Drive in Orlando, buying and selling partially used multi-day theme park tickets. The marginal price increase for adding an additional day drops quite a bit for every day you add to a ticket - so you could have bought a 10 day ticket for not all that much more than a 5-day, used half, and sold the rest to someone else.

The fingerprint scan is done so that the ticket is biometrically locked to the person who first uses them, thus killing that secondary market for partially used tickets.

I'm guessing they did that because most kids don't carry ids with them? Otherwise requesting an id seems simpler?

But less efficient as it probably takes more time to check an id…

I'm guessing an automatic ID reader is a lot cheaper than a fingerprint reader. Most long-distance buses around here have them, so you don't have to bring a ticket (just book with your id number).

It might be easier to spoof an ID reader, but I bet it would be hard enough to seriously hamper the second hand market for day passes at least.

For a while (not sure if they're still doing it), they were checking IDs for multi-day ticket holders at Disneyland in California (no fingerprint readers there). It slowed the lines down massively. I've been to both parks many times, and the fingerprint readers are immensely faster than checking IDs. For annual passes, they scan the pass and your picture comes up on the screen, but that's not as practical for a 3-day ticket.

And, to to get more meta, why didn't the OP ask the Disney staff what the fingerprint was for? It's not that hard of a question and you have to be 99.99% certain that the staff is trained to handle questions like this.

I'm sure he thought about this question the entire visit before rushing home to write an urgent blog post, which is sad because it probably ruined his trip a little.

My experience generally with front-line staff making people follow policies is that they have no idea why the policy exists. I expect to have to go up one or two levels in the hierarchy before I find somebody who can talk sensibly. So I could understand him not bothering.

Also, he was clearly startled the first time, and then mad the second time. The blog post may have only occurred to him later.

FYI, I visited on a multi-day pass (4 days this last week). I didn't rush home to post, in fact, I did it on my last night after packing for home so I wouldn't lose the motivation and things were still fresh in my mind.

Also, the front line staff was pretty clueless (IMO). I was told it's for our 'guest's convenience'. However, I didn't really engage in a deep discussion with them because my family was waiting to have the fun I promised.

It's so you can't share a multi-day pass.

They don't really care who you are. They do care that one multi day pass stays with one person. Making sure the same thumbprint is used every time the pass is used accomplishes that; somehow registering ID might, too (but then they need to either print it on the pass, or have a database of pass serial # to ID, in parallel with their fingerprint database).

An interesting option might be to do ID one day, thumbprint the next. But I guess they're smart enough to require the choice on the first use, and then not allow it to be changed.

I haven't tried this, but I was told a few years back by someone involved in the design of the passes that you can use the multi-day pass of a different person in your party. Disney recognized that in a large family people might mix up the passes, so all the passes issued as part of a transaction are interchangeable.

I was in Disney for a day a couple of months ago. They scan everyone, from newborns to grandparents. We had a 1-day pass, and got scanned.

> They scan everyone, from newborns to grandparents.

I was there last month. My young children in strollers were NOT scanned.

> We had a 1-day pass, and got scanned.

The parks are open until 9 or 10pm. If you leave at 5pm, Disney doesn't want you selling your ticket in the parking lot on your way out.

I used to see this at ski mountains. People with wire cutters would ask to 'clip' your lift ticket in the parking lot for a few bucks if you were leaving the mountain early.

Maybe some employees got fired, but I saw kids having their fingers scanned :/

Children in strollers did not get scanned (like my 4 year old), but any child on foot (no matter the age) was scanned.

Disney also uses facial recognition:

http://www.wired.com/geekmom/2012/02/geeking-out-with-the-di...

One has to admire Disney's use of technology in this area, mostly because they seem to have a very balanced approach to this kind of work.

One one side, you're trying to streamline the customer experience (like this facial recognition feature mentioned above) and on the other you're trying to maximize the amount of cash extracted from each and every visitor for every minute they're on the grounds (such as letting your room key serve as a charge card while at park stores).

I'm sure Disney has a master plan that involves this kind of transparent biometrics everywhere, someday. It's just being used in bits and pieces until it gets efficient enough to use everywhere.

People have raised the privacy concerns before, such as the recent fight between CEO Iger and US Rep Ed Markey. Iger's response was basically: "We're not that stupid to jeopardize kids, and you don't have to visit us if you choose not to".

http://www.insidethemagic.net/2013/01/disney-ceo-bob-iger-st...

>you don't have to visit us if you choose not to

True. I choose not to visit any place that is harvesting biometric data simply to increase profitability.

Some details are provided in this old article from 2006:

http://newsinitiative.org/story/2006/08/14/walt_disney_world...

> But Disney's Prunty downplayed privacy issues, saying the scanned information is stored "independent of all of our other systems," and "the system purges it 30 days after the ticket expires or is fully utilized." Visitors who object to the readers can provide photo identification instead – although the option is not advertised at the park entrance.

Why would a theme park do this? Does the government supply a terrorist-fingerprint database?

I would understand if a private company does ID and (maybe) fingerprint checking for visitors of their research facilities. I had this a few times, although most of the time they maybe write down your name and address and thats it. The only facility that took it really serious was the ESA tech-center in Noordwijk (not to be confused with the little theme park they have near by). They needed passport-numbers beforehand, those passport scanning keyboards they have at airports, the software on the pc also looked similar and guards openly carrying big guns (you seldom see that in Europe). But well, its a space research complex there is probably a ton of military secrets around.

But at the admission for a F'kin theme-park... Why?

They do it to curb sharing of multi-day tickets, which is prohibited by their terms & conditions. It's a relatively quick way to check that the person who first used the ticket is the same person who returned with it, rather than someone they sold/rented it to. Selling or "renting" multi-day passes for some fraction of their days is a common way to make money in the areas around theme parks (and a common way for people to try to save money getting in). I don't think this is all that sinister.

I personally would rather have thumbprint scans than have to wait as each guest's photo ID is checked every time they enter.

i'm surprised they even bother with fingerprints...face recognition cant be that far off

I love France. I arrived there internationally and didn't even have to fill out a form. They looked at my passport and stamped it. I do not recall them having a scanner for the passport. This was 2-3 years ago. But this is the way it has been through most of the 20th Century. What happened to change all of this else where in the world?

Once you are in the EU Schengen area, you can cross numerous borders and travel to many different jurisdictions, all without a single checkpoint or identification required.

It sounds harder to get into Disney World than France.

Far as I am aware form previous visits and discussions Disney delete the fingerprint record when the ticket expires.

Also the level of fingerprint scanner we are talking about is not even close to say the one UCIS use when you come into the US. UCIS having my fingerprint is actually pretty handy as it speeds up border processing with new passports etc.

Busch Gardens use a hand size device which is just weird.

I think his 1 million visitors a day to Disney quote may be off. From some Googling, the number appears to be around 17M/year (approx 50K/day). In any event, that's a lot of fingerprints (foreign and domestic) potentially being piped right into the NSA and any other 3 letter agencies who may care for such data.

How can you be sure the government doesn't have a deal with the hotel you stayed at to have the maids lift fingerprints and DNA samples from your room?

Edit: /s

Actually the bigger point is: what privacy protection do Disney visitors have?

Is it allowed for Disney to e.g. correlate their fingerprint or ID database with a federal database for wanted people? Is it allowed for the FBI/NSA/CIA to go to Disney and demand a full list of fingerprints of visitors?

Funny, prior to 2001, most people would automatically assume that the answer to these questions are "of course not". Now, anyone who is paying attention would respond "most likely".

The fact that we are even asking these questions now is testament to the changes over the last decade-plus.

Since you're on their private property, probably not as much protection as you're inclined to believe you have on public grounds.

That being said, if it was ever discovered that Disney was sharing visitor information with outside groups you're guaranteed a huge public backlash, both in the media and in the park visitor count. Disney is the type of organization that avoids this kind of conflict, especially when a huge percentage of their clientele are children and their parents.

Google complies with 88% of government data requests. Where's the outrage?

They don't need it if you're entering the US for your vacation. Your fingerprint and face photo are taken at the border.

They don't yet take DNA, but I guess they could. There's a bit of trickiness about invasive procedures.

That's why I always wipe all flat surfaces before leaving a hotel room. I also bring dna samples from other people (something of the thread, something of the head, something of the body, and something of the dead) that I leave so that they can't be sure that it was I staying there.

I have considered removing my fingerprints but that's just weird.

That's awesome. I might start doing this as well. What do you actually use to wipe them off? Are you cautious of what you touch or try to touch as little as possible?

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