For visitors to California Disneyland amusement park, now there’s a tech question asked of everyone before they enter the gates: Do you want your face biometrically scanned?
Disneyland has previously tested face-scanning technology at entrances to reduce tickets and bypass fraud. It has now officially launched the program, with certain lines to enter Disneyland and California Adventure requiring a biometric image of their face.
Disney says face scanning is optional, and there are lines that take a picture of the customer’s face, but don’t scan it for facial recognition. Those lines, according to reports, are fewer in number than the lines that make up the face.
In a post on the Walt Disney Company website, Disney explained that photos taken for facial recognition are converted to a numerical value and compared to photos taken previously when a ticket or pass was used for the first time. Numerical data, the company says, is deleted within 30 days except in cases where there is a legitimate or fraud prevention purpose to keep it. Children under the age of 18 can be facially scanned with the permission of their parent or guardian, according to the post.
Technically, Disney hopes to break the law for guests who give their passes or tickets to someone else when they re-enter.
Privacy experts have he warned that facial recognition technology poses many ethical problems as practical issues that scanning hopes to address.
Among the many questions raised what companies do with the facial data they collect, how long they plan to keep it, whether they can resell it or sell it, and if it will be shared with law enforcement. In its post, Disney didn’t talk about what it does with the digital images themselves — only the numerical data generated from them.
A representative for Disney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the Disney parks are one of several high-traffic areas in the Los Angeles area using facial recognition, including the Intuit Dome and Dodger Stadium. Both use technology to enable facial recognition for check-in, bypassing the need to scan a physical or digital ticket. Intuit Dome technology can also verify that a guest is over 21 using facial data.
Also face scanning: Universal Studios in Florida
Blogs covering Disney trends have been following the story.
Earlier this month, Disney Fanatic posted about the changes in early April, comparing the early reaction to Disneyland introducing the technology — in a state with strict privacy rules on facial recognition — to that when it was introduced at Universal Studios Orlando.
“Florida’s technology-advanced, recovery-oriented approach tends to see rapid adoption and less public outcry,” wrote Emmanuel Detres on the site.
Universal calls its scanning “Image Verification” and promotes it as a faster and easier way to enter parks and use lockers than scanning a ticket.
At Walt Disney World in Florida, fingerprint biometrics is used to verify IDs alongside tickets and annual passes, although it has yet to introduce facial recognition technology.
