Disney and The Fingerprinting

So, we are back from our second vacation down in Walt Disney World thanks for hanging in there with me last week.  As you can see, I preloaded posts before I left.  One of the biggest changes since February (besides the unbearable heat at the end of August in Florida) was that almost every park is now matching your fingerprint with your park pass.  Disney told us it was to protect you in case you lose your park pass.  However, my mind started spinning about all of the data Disney collects on us.  And, I guess I'm not the only one because Donna Bogatin over at ZDNet had a similar observation in a post called Walt Disney World "fingerprinting" Visitors: Magic Kingdom, or Mickey Mouse?

You can read Donna's article for a quick look at the technology and the company behind it; however, I'm taking a different approach.  Let's look at the data Disney collected from me that can now be theoretically matched with my fingerprint - name, address, email, age, children's name and age, credit card, phone numbers, emails, which parks I visit, potentially which rides (via fastpass), food, purchases and more.  Wow, that is a ton of data, but what could Disney do with it?  According to their Park Privacy Policy almost anything they want.

Q3. How may we use and share your personal information that we collect? A3. We may use and share your personal information collected under this Privacy Policy in a variety of ways, including, without limitation, for example:

One of the examples they give is this:

We may disclose personal information when we believe in good faith that such disclosures (a) are required by law, including, without limitation, for example, to comply with a court order or subpoena, or (b) will help to: enforce contest, sweepstakes, promotions and/or game rules; protect your safety or security, including, without limitation, the safety and security of property that belongs to you; and/or protect the safety

Now I don't think Disney is up to anything sinister, but what jumps out at me with their data/privacy policy combination is that they theoretically could build a national fingerprinting registry and hand it over to the US Government. 

Over at Wikipedia they reference that in 2005 the Magic Kingdom had over 16.2 million visitors.  Not all of those people are US citizens or are being fingerprinted (kids), but based on a 250 million US population I wonder how long it would take Disney to build a sizable database of US fingerprints.  Clearly this system is not Mickey Mouse.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Comments

[SkylarKD]

Apparently, although Disney doesn't advertise it, visitors who object to the scanners can show their photo ID instead.

I'd like to hear from someone who has tried that, to see if they got much of a hassle!

[PardonMyFrench]

Funny, I didn't notice that being promoted at all and I didn't see anyone object. People like myself just went right up, slipped our card in, and left our fingerprint.

Eric