New at Disneyland: Your face recognition at the gate

For visitors to California Disneyland Park, there’s now a technology question everyone is asking before they can even get through the gates: Do you want to scan your face with biometrics?

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 get into Disneyland and California Adventure requiring a comparison of biometric images of their faces.

Disney says facial scanning is optional, and there are also lines that take a photo of a customer’s face, but don’t scan it for facial recognition. those lines, According to reportstheir number is fewer than the lines that perform facial recognition.

In a post on the Walt Disney Company websiteDisney explained that the images captured for facial recognition are converted into a digital value and then compared to images that were previously captured when the ticket or pass was used for the first time. The company says that digital data is deleted within 30 days except in cases where retaining it has a legal or fraud prevention purpose. Children under 18 can have a facial scan with parental or guardian consent, according to the post.

Using this technology, Disney hopes to crack down on visitors who hand over their passes or tickets to someone else upon return.

Their privacy experts Beware of facial recognition technology It raises as many thorny ethical issues as the practical ones the survey hopes to address.

Among I asked many questions They are what companies do with the facial data they collect, how long they plan to keep it, whether they can repurpose or sell it, and whether they will share it with law enforcement. In its post, Disney did not address what it does with the digital images themselves, but only with the digital data generated from them.

A Disney representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the Disney parks are just one of many high-traffic places in the Los Angeles area that are using facial recognition, including Intuit Dome and Dodger stadium. Both use technology to enable facial recognition for entry, bypassing the need to scan a physical or digital ticket. Intuit Dome’s technology may also check if a visitor is over 21 years old using facial data.

Also face scanning: Universal Studios in Florida

Blogs covering Disney trends have been following the story.

Earlier this month, Disney Fanatic I posted about the changes in early Aprilcompared early reactions to Disneyland’s introduction of the technology — in a state with stricter privacy laws around facial recognition — to those introduced at Universal Studios Orlando.

“Florida’s more tech-forward, convenience-focused approach tends to result in faster adoption and less public outcry,” Emanuel DeTris wrote on the site.

worldwide Scanning is called “image validation.” It is promoted as a way to enter the parks and use the lockers faster and easier than scanning a ticket.

At Walt Disney World in Florida, fingerprint biometrics is used to verify ID cards along with tickets and annual passes, although it has not yet offered facial recognition technology.