Go to Disneyworld, get your fingerprints scanned!

[thewayne]

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.

Comments

[deborak]

Bill's worked in one building in DC that controls all its access by the security card scenario, and he has to get an escort every time he has to enter, leave, or even go down the hall to the bathroom during the work day.

I told him that if there is ever a fire in that building, the first thing he'd have to do to save his ass is mug an employee and steal their badge so that he could get out. And there you have the low-tech solution to thwarting this "secure" environment, even easier than surfing through doors behind other people.

[apostate-96.livejournal.com]

Actually, I also read about one amusement park that was trying to institute a policy of no known sex offenders being allowed in the park. It wouldn't surprise me if part of the underlying reasons for this are wanting to see if such a system would be workable for that purpose, too. However, given the limitations of certainty of those results, I don't know how well such a system might work.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

I don't think such a thing would work. The Feds aren't about to allow access to their fingerprint database to anything except accredited law enforcement agencies. You could possibly do it through facial recognition software, take a shot of the person as they enter the park through the turnstiles then run it against a database, but that software is also notoriously unreliable at this point.

[apostate-96.livejournal.com]

Agreed. Plus, given the degree of change that can take place in a person's appearance in a relatively brief period of time, and that turns impractical, too. I talked with a couple of folks about that particular idea on the amusement park's end, and we pretty much concluded it was a publicity stunt but nothing more. There's just no realistic way to do that...

Now, if they ever get a reliable and easy-to-use and quick retinal scanner going, we'll have something else to think about.

[magic-rat.livejournal.com]

"AFIS on CSI is nothing like reality."

I would only be surprised if AFIS did act like it does on CSI (not that I watch those shows). I remember back in the Seventies and early Eighties when television or the movies would show the police tracking a phone number with the help of the phone company. It would take them quite a few minutes ("Keep him talking, just a little bit longer) to trace it when in reality the phone company could have that information in less than a minute. I heard that this discrepancy was intentional so that the public at large would not know how easy this was (with the phone company's help, of course), but that could just be hearsay.

Anyway, the media's fictional content (even when based on real events) always misrepresents the ability of technology, usually for reasons of dramatic license. Anyone who believes that, for example, AFIS works as it's shown on CSI is only a step away from believing that you can cast magic spells by either twitching your nose or uttering the right incantation.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

What, you mean if I cast Feather Fall on myself if I jump off the roof of Bank One Ballpark it won't work? :-)

[magic-rat.livejournal.com]

Gee, I dunno. Guess you'll have to try it and see. :-P

[cardigirl.livejournal.com]

It's the whole "take it with a grain of salt" thing. I remember some show or other that used carbon-14 dating as part of its plot umptysquillion years ago (i.e. back when I was in college). The item in question was plopped into a machine, numbers rolled by like a flip-digit electric clock, and stopped at whatever the appropriate date was. Despite being an anthro student, I had no idea what a C-14 machine might actually look like but I sure as hell didn't think it worked like that.

Sadly enough, the question was asked "was that real?" in the next day or two at some anthro class I was in. I sympathized -- like I said, no prof had ever shown or even described the real article -- but there had been no doubt in *my* mind that the show had gone for visually-easy-understandable over real.

[joecthulhu.livejournal.com]

Yes Big Brother Disney has my prints on file. Just in case you were wondering.