For visitors to California's Disneyland amusement park, there's now a technological question posed to everyone before they can get through the gates: Do you want your face biometrically scanned?
Disneyland previously tested facial scanning technology at its entrances to reduce ticket and pass fraud. It has now officially launched the program, with some lines to enter Disneyland and California Adventure requiring a biometric photo comparison of their faces.
Disney says the face scanning is optional, and there are also lines that take a photo of a customer's face, but do not scan it for face recognition. Those lines, according to reports, are fewer in number than the lines that do facial recognition.
In a post on the Walt Disney Company website, Disney explained that photos taken for facial recognition are converted to a numeric value and then compared with photos that were previously taken when a ticket or pass was first used. The numeric data, the company says, is deleted within 30 days except in cases where there's a legal or fraud-prevention purpose for keeping it. Kids under 18 can be facially scanned with their parent or guardian's consent, according to the post.
With the tech, Disney's hoping to crack down on visitors who hand off their passes or tickets to another person on reentry.
Privacy experts have warned that facial recognition technology poses as many thorny ethical issues as the practical issues the scanning hopes to address.
Among the many questions raised are what companies do with the facial data they collect, how long they plan to keep it, whether they could repurpose or sell it, and if it will be shared with law enforcement. In its post, Disney did not address what it does with the digital photos themselves -- only with the numeric 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 just one of several high-traffic venues in the Los Angeles area using facial recognition, including Intuit Dome and Dodger Stadium. Both use the tech to enable facial recognition for entry, bypassing the need to scan a physical or digital ticket. The Intuit Dome technology may also verify whether a visitor is over 21 using facial data.
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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 early reactions to Disneyland's introduction of the technology -- in a state with stricter privacy laws on facial recognition -- to those when it was introduced at Universal Studios Orlando.
"Florida's more tech-forward, convenience-focused approach tends to see quicker adoption and less public outcry," wrote Emmanuel Detres on the site.
Universal calls its scanning "Photo Validation" and promotes it as a way to enter parks and use lockers faster and more easily than scanning a ticket.
At Walt Disney World in Florida, fingerprint biometrics are used to validate IDs alongside tickets and annual passes, though it has yet to introduce facial recognition technology.