Disneyworld has implemented fingerprint scanners at the gate for season ticket holders,
here's the story. Basically, you buy your ticket, at the time of purchase you scan your index and middle fingers. Whenever you go to the season ticket gate for admittance, your pass is scanned and your fingerprints are verified.
A couple of points need to be made here.
1. These are not the same sort of scanners as are used by law enforcement and AFIS (Automatic Fingerprint Identification System). Those prints must be taken or entered by highly-trained professionals because a mistake can mean that the print cannot be compared to the database for possible matches. This Disney system identifies certain characteristics of your fingerprint and builds an algorithmic hash for future comparision. Yes, AFIS does the same thing, but it does it for all fingers along with storing images of the individual prints. The Disney scanners don't have enough resolution to do this as quick as their system works (WHEN it works, it is far from bullet-proof).
AFIS on CSI is nothing like reality. On CSI, they feed in a print and AFIS pops up a match in 30 seconds. In reality, that pesky thing that is so easily ignored by television and cinema, AFIS does not spit out matches instantly. It takes hours, if not days, for it to make matches. And it does not match a single print -- it spits out a half dozen or more prints that are very similar. THEN a court-certified professional fingerprint examiner compares the prints to their latent and makes a match. This is a critical point -- the machine DOES NOT make the match! Thus, in court, you cannot get off as easily by claiming the machine made a mistake, because if the print examiner has been properly trained and did their job correctly, they'll be able to defend the process that they used to make a match.
The other thing that slows AFIS down is queing. You have hundreds of law enforcement agencies bouncing requests off AFIS on a daily basis, there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of prints stored. That's a LOT of searching to be done. I don't know how much time the actual search takes, my understanding is the main time sink is spent in the queue waiting for your search to be performed.
2. Disney is a private corporation. Unfortunately they can do what they want to try and increase the security of their passes. Their intent is probably mainly to prevent me from buying a pass and letting all my friends use it, and this system should be successful at that. They can do this, if we don't like it, we don't have to go to the "happiest place on earth". We can go to Six Flags, or anywhere else that doesn't have this, though odds are that if it works out for Disney, all the parks will eventually adopt the technology.
We vote with our feet and our pocketbooks when we seek entertainment. Is this a big deal? No more so than the fingerprint scanners installed in IBM laptops and that Microsoft sells. I don't like this, I'm also not too keen on the cross-contamination disease vector possibilities. But I think it could easily be a wave of the future.
One story: a company has a need for high security, so they install RFID pass badges and scanners on both sides of every door. You must scan in AND out of every room. Inconvenient, but the company feels better about it. Here's the problem: if you surfed someone into a room, i.e. follow them in after they use their pass and you didn't surf someone out, the door wouldn't let you out because you cannot possibly be in that room as far as it is concerned.
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