In order to enter the park, you have to provide your fingerprint. This then is matched to your park pass, which could easily be matched to your hotel reservation, which contains a vast amount of personal information - name, address, phone, email, credit card(s), etc.
Does anyone know how long USO/IOA stores this data? Having all of this information available, including my fingerprint, is a bit unnerving.
Comments???
Universal takes a fingerprint so you can’t buy a ticket for 1 week, leave the park after 2 days, then give or sell your remaining days on your ticket. They used to give you a full week pass with a two day purchase. So this makes sense to me to protect against losing monies.
There are many ways to track you in a Theme Park unless you pay cash for everything.
If you are so concerned and paranoid about being tracked, pay cash at the window the day of the park visit (Cost more), stay at an offsite hotel under a fake name, Visit Wiki Leaks often.
And keep looking over your left shoulder…… Boogie man is coming… Not your right shoulder, but your left shoulder. They track those who look over their right shoulder too often.. But you did not hear it from me.
Or you could just call Universals and ask them about their policy….
If you're really worried about your identity being stolen by a theme park or by hackers accessing theme park computers, then you should go find a nice cabin in the woods, hide your money under your mattress, get yourself a HAM radio, and hide under your kitchen table.
Breaker ONE NINE
Breaker ONE NINE
You got you ears on...
It's unlikely that universal is actually keeping a copy of your fingerprint. More than likely, it's making a record of the characteristics of your fingerprints and comparing those. Think of it as a detailed physical description. Your finger has so many ridges, so many whorls, so many loops, and so many arches. Their goal isn't to positively ID you beyond a shadow of a doubt, it's just to keep you from selling your pass to someone else, so they could have it do a quick check against the records to see if the person coming into the park has the same number of arches, ridges and whorls. Not perfect, but it doesn't have to be since that would stop the vast majority of people from gaming the system, which is their goal.
that being said, you aren't going to get an answer from them if you call. first off, the person answering the phone isn't going to know the answer, second, they aren't going to tell anyone what they are checking otherwise someone would make a website that matches up people wanting to sell their tickets with people who have the matching characteristics.
If you've ever seen it, Busch Gardens used to use a system that you put your index and middle finger on the scanner and it measured the lengths of those two fingers and used that to determine if you were the same person. (They were trying to avoid people being spooked about using fingerprints.) They got rid of it after a year or so because other parks were using fingerprints without causing complaints and because it didn't work well for kids. If they have a two year pass, their fingers could grow from the time they got it before it expired. The system did work well for adults other than people couldn't always figure out how to put their hand in the scanner.
Hope this helps...
