A common question asked by Disney newcomers who are visiting the parks for the first time or maybe researching before their upcoming first trip is “Why does Disney scan your fingerprint?” So today I’m going to talk about just that. How Disney scans your fingerprint, why they do it, and what implications it might have on personal privacy.

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So if you’re looking for the really short answer I’ll say this: it’s not to track you or put you in some Orwellian master database. It’s essentially a preventative measure to combat ticket fraud, and it’s due to the way Disney sells their tickets.

You see, Disney wants you to stay on Disney World property for as long as possible. The resort is so large and all-encompassing that every extra day you spend there is another day you’re paying them for the hotel, another day you’re buying their food, their drinks, their snacks.

That means that in the end a five-day pass, at the time of this recording at least, would cost you $395, but a ten-day pass would cost $445. Only $50 extra. Think about that. Fifty bucks for five whole extra days at the parks! Of course there are all the added costs I mentioned like the hotel and food, but that’s the part Disney doesn’t want you to think about.

Now if you do think about it, there’s a pretty simple scheme within that pricing system that makes it very easy to exploit. Let’s say I want to go on a five day vacation. I could pay the $395 for a five day pass or I could buy a ten-day pass for $445, use five of the days, and then sell the pass and it’s remaining five days to someone else at a discount for say, three hundred bucks. Suddenly I’ve gotten my five days of Disney at a net cost of $145, and some other person is getting their five days at a discount too.

Everybody wins! Except Disney, and they’re not about to let themselves come out behind in this. So how do they Disney prevent it? Your fingerprints.

Essentially in order to stop the fraud, Disney needs to link an individual to each ticket they sell. More importantly, they need a fast way to do it. Sure, they could match up names on the pass with the guest’s IDs, but that process is slow, especially when you consider that daily attendance to the parks numbers in the tens of thousands. So fingerprint scanning acts as the biometric used to match your ticket to you so that you can’t turn around and sell it to someone else later on. But how do they do the scanning, and should you be worried about your privacy?

Well, as expected, Disney says you should not. In fact, according to them they’re not actually scanning your fingerprint. I mean, they are, but they also aren’t. It’s… weird.

You see when we think about fingerprint scanning we usually think of something like this. A machine that scans an image of your fingerprint and stores it or matches it to a saved fingerprint in a database. What Disney’s system does however is scans your fingerprint and measures three points on it. From that they calculate a unique number that then gets tied to your ticket. What do they measure and what’s the calculation? Well, we don’t know, and that’s on purpose. The minute that info gets out it becomes that much easier to circumvent the system.

Disney then dumps the scan and keeps the number. Every time you use the ticket after that, it makes sure that number still lines up. That number remains tied to your ticket for up to 30 days after your ticket expires or gets used up. And that’s really about it. It doesn’t go into some database. It doesn’t get used to track you. After all, they don’t need your fingerprint for that, they’ve got your Magic Bands.

In any case if you still find yourself uncomfortable with the idea, you can choose to opt out of the fingerprint scan and instead show a picture ID to confirm that the ticket is yours. Disney obviously doesn’t advertise this too much because it really slows down the process of letting guests in, but the option is out there.