Disneyland brings in biometric ticketing*

Eileen Yu CNETAsia

Published: 27 Nov 2006 09:12 GMT

It may have needed a dose of creativity to create the endless fairy
tales and wondrous fantasies for kids and adults alike, but when it
comes to the adoption of technology and IT security, Disneyland takes a
strictly pragmatic approach.

The world-renowned theme park and entertainment resort implements
technology only if it is able to derive real business value, said David
Shek, senior analyst of IT security, Hong Kong Disneyland, in an
interview with ZDNet Asia. In town this week as a speaker at the Secure
IT conference, Shek oversees IT security at Hong Kong Disneyland and is
responsible for the company's IT security policies and strategy.

"[At Disneyland], there's no such thing as an IT problem. It's always a
business problem," he said, describing the approach to IT that his CIO
adopts. "We believe that IT or IT security, by itself, has little value.
It's how you apply IT in relation to the business that matters."

It is with this philosophy in mind that prompted Disneyland to take a
closer look at its deployment of biometrics.

Hong Kong Disneyland this week launched a fingerprint scanning
technology that would not require an overly tedious process of
safeguarding its customers' fingerprint data and privacy.

Dubbed Ticket Tag, the ticketing system takes 50 points of a fingerprint
— captured in a numerical value — and runs the numbers through an
algorithm and adds encryption to it. The biometric system also detects
physiological data "underneath the finger" to monitor blood flow and
cartilages, so prosthetic or fake fingers are not allowed to pass through.

Shek said: "We didn't want to take the customer's entire fingerprint
[image] and have to implement a security structure to properly protect
that data." This, he said, also allows Disneyland to avoid having to
deal with privacy concerns.

First deployed at Disneyland World in Florida, Ticket Tag is currently
available to Hong Kong Disneyland's Annual Pass holders at two ticketing
turnstiles at the park's entrance, Shek said. But, he added, the
technology will eventually be implemented in every turnstile.

With Ticket Tag, Annual Pass holders no longer need to produce a photo
ID card to authenticate their identity, he said, adding that this
enhances the experience of the park's visitors. He noted that customers,
who still have concerns about using their fingerprints, can choose to
continue using a photo ID card as a form of identification.

Officially opened in September 2005, Hong Kong Disneyland is the fifth
and newest member of the Disneyland park family which, Shek said, has
its advantages. For instance, it took the Hong Kong site just three
years to be completed, when it usually takes five years to complete a
Disneyland park.

"Advancements in IT had allowed us to build our site faster," Shek said.
"We were also the most successful [in terms of our] implementation of
IT, where no major [business] operation went wrong." This experience is
unique, he added, compared to the other Disneyland sites which had to
deal with some major ticketing and operational issues when they were
first launched, and customers were affected.

"We were able to learn from the lessons that our other sites had to
offer," he said. "We had teething problems, but they were small and our
shows didn't have to stop [and customers didn't have to put up with any
significant downtime]."

Spread across 126 hectares of reclaimed land, Hong Kong Disneyland is
also the first site to adopt a fully converged Internet Protocol (IP)
network — having no legacy systems to worry about, Shek said.

The Hong Kong park has some 80 IT professionals, supporting more than
100 servers and a gamut of the latest technologies, including VoIP
(voice over IP), RFID (radio frequency identification) and Wi-Fi.