Mickey Prints
Since Kat and I were going to be visiting Florida so often last year and this, and therefore we of course had to visit Disney World a lot, we decided to buy annual passes. I was quite interested that when you buy an annual pass, the Disney folks take the prints of your right hand’s first and second fingers. That data is associated with the card; whether it’s encoded onto the card’s strip or not, I don’t know. But either way, some of your biometric data is associated with your Disney pass. When you enter the park, you run the pass through the turnstile and stick your fingers into a reader. If the fingers don’t match the card, you can’t get in, so you can’t share an annual pass with anyone else.
Now, suppose the Disney database stores that biometric data. Now they have that data tied to a credit card number, purchasing patterns in the parks, probably a home address and phone number, and so on. Interesting. Guess what? As of 2 January 2005, Disney is doing that for all passes: day passes, park hopper passes, all kinds of passes. Every kind of pass. Get a pass, get your fingers scanned. (Okay, yes, you can opt out and be required to show photo ID, but how many people will bother?)
That’s a whole lot of biometric data associated with a whole lot of consumer data. Interesting, don’t you think?
