We went to Disney World in Orlando yesterday, Sunday, 30 September 2007. It was a nice day.
What surprised and dismayed me was the fingerprint scanner at the entrance. Just slide your card (ticket) in here, then put your finger (thumb, I guess) here on top. Uh… no, thanks, I’ll pass. And pass, I did. I tried putting the top of my bent finger on there (no print up top) a few times but it just spit out my ticket each time. So some guy came over and told me to put my finger on there. I told him, simply, “No.” He asked me at least one more time and I did not vary my response.
Eventually, he asked me if I have ID. Sure, I have ID. He asked me for my ID and to sign my Disney World ticket. Okay. I signed my ticket then handed it to him with my driver’s license and he inspected both in parallel, apparently confirming that the signatures matched.
Then he put the ticket back through the machine and keyed in something on a keypad on his side of the entrance-blocking, person-counting, ticket-confirming, fingerprint-taking machine. It didn’t work and the machine spit the ticket back out. He repeated this, reaching over and reinserting the ticket easily ten times or more. He surely tried every ticket orientation as he fed it into the machine — though, at my questioning, he told me he should be able to put the ticket in at any orientation.
Sometimes the machine held on to the ticket for a bit, probably expecing a fingerprint despite whatever he was keying in on his side. Sometimes it spit the ticket right out after it was inserted.
The guy then told me I needed a new ticket. So he brought me a new ticket and had me sign that new one then put it through the machine.
After we got in, a good friend we were there with remarked, “I’m already in the system.” And a few minutes later, my mother-in-law came up beside me and told me, “I didn’t know being fingerprinted was optional.” I replied, “Neither did I.”
I won’t be fingerprinted to attend an amusement park.
A quick google search of “disney fingerprinting” returned some interesting articles:
Google
Boing Boing
Engadget
http://newsinitiative.org/story/2006/09/01/walt_disney_world_the_governments