Disney faces $5-million lawsuit over use of facial recognition technology.
A visitor has filed a $5-million lawsuit against Disneyland for allegedly failing to properly disclose the use of facial-recognition technology at park and collecting sensitive data on guests.
Summer Christine Duffield of Riverside County filed the lawsuit after a May 10 visit to Disneyland and sister park California Adventure, alleging that the resort violates privacy and consumer protection laws collecting biometric data of visitors, without adequate consent.
“Disney does not adequately disclose the use of their biometric collection, so consumers — which almost always include children — have no idea that Disney is collecting this highly sensitive data,” the plaintiff noted in the lawsuit. “Guests should be able to expressly opt in to this type of sensitive facial recognition technology with written consent — the onus of privacy rights should not be on the victim.”
The suit was filed on May 15 in U.S. District Court in New York. The lawsuit cites an article from The Times on consumer reaction to Disney’s use of facial recognition.
The Walt Disney Company didn’t respond to a request for comment.
“People are getting fed up with being force-fed new tech, new AI, new tracking tools,” said Ari Waldman, Professor of Law at the UC Irvine.
Walt Disney Co. rolled out its facial recognition technology in late April across Disneyland Resort to verify tickets. The way it works is guests’ faces are scanned, converted into a numerical identifier and matched with ticket data.
Disney’s privacy policy notes that the identifiers created for identification are deleted within 30 days unless they need to be kept for legal or fraud prevention purposes.
Guests who don’t want to use the technology can enter through a separate entrance marked with a silhouette of a head and shoulders with a slash through it. However, of the dozens of lines to enter Disneyland and California Adventure, there were only four that didn’t use facial recognition, during an April visit.
The sign saying “Use of this technology is optional,” adorn the security checkpoint entrances.
“This technology facilitates ease of reentry into our parks and helps prevent fraud,” the company noted in its website.
Use of facial recognition technology for crowd management and ticketing has become increasingly commonplace.
Dodger Stadium deploys facial recognition for guests using the “Go Ahead Entry” at certain gates without producing a physical or digital ticket to enter the stadium. At Intuit Dome in Inglewood, visitors can use “GameFaceID” to quickly move through a separate lane with their face as their ID.
The lawsuit comes at a time when there is increasing concern of surveillance in public places, and privacy advocates have rallied against the normalization of surveillance. More recently, concerns of the potentially abusive use of artificial intelligence by government to analyze large quantities of data — from texts to facial scans — to surveil U.S citizens resulted in a high-profile showdown between the Pentagon and Anthropic.