If you’ve visited one of the Walt Disney World resort parks before, you’ll know that you are required to scan your fingerprint when going through the park gates to verify that the ticket you’re holding belongs to you.

Before now, this process was only required for guests aged 10 and over. However, World Disney World are now introducing fingerprint scanning for children aged 3 and up.

Disney have said that the new policy has been put in place to combat ticket fraud and ticket sharing. Up until now it’s been possible for families to swap tickets between children as there’s been no way of identifying who the ticket was bought for.

For those concerned about data security and protection, you’ll be pleased to know that Disney don’t store the fingerprints. The fingerprint process Disney use, known as “fingerprint geometry”, takes pictures of several points on your finger, and converts it to a number which is stored against your ticket, after which the images are deleted. The number stored against your ticket is then used to compare against then next time you visit a Disney park.

Parents who don’t want their child to scan their fingerprint, can use their own fingerprint instead.

I suspect for the majority of younger children, a parent using their own fingerprint will become common practice. For one thing, getting a 3-year-old to scan their finger could be quite a task, not to mention getting them to remember which finger they scanned when returning to a different park. But also, if a family is trying to swap tickets between children, surely using their own finger would allow this practice to continue?

Let us know what you think about the new fingerprint policy by leaving a comment below.