This is just another example of how we Americans since 9/11 have agreed out of fear to give up our personal liberties. I for one refuse to do so. And, in fact, I have given up commercial flights, except when necessary, as my one-person protest. I served 8 years in the military, and did not do so in order for fear to consume personal freedoms. As you can tell, the invasion on our privacy and liberties annoys and frustrates me. Where is our backbone, America? The only things separating us from becoming Iran or North Korea are our personal freedoms and our willingness to protect them at any costs, including protecting them from invasion by Disney or our government at any level. Perhaps if the draft was re-instated and more of us served, we would begin to better understand the cost of freedom.

I have been a DisneyWorld Annual Passholder for years, and we have always been required to use the biometric scanning. While this may help in case someone loses a pass, what it does for Disney is to make sure that people do not resell any leftover days, or share passes. Basically, making Disney more money. Annual passholders don't mind, after all, we understand not being able to let all our friends use our pass. However, if I had a pass with one day left and wasn't going to use it, I would want to be able to sell it and get the full use of the ticket. For tickets only good for so many days, you pay for all those days, and in my opinion, should be able to do whatever you want with those days.

You are right. That's why I didn't think Disney is doing anything sinister with the data, but imagine how much information they have on everyone that passes through the park....and perhaps a national finger print registry

Donna,

Please take this in the right way. I do not mean to be pedantic, preachy or righteous, and I especially don't want to impugn Mickey, Minnie and Donald. But it concerns me deeply that we are willing to give in so easily to demands for such things as searches and finger printing, not to mention warrantless wire tapping. Seems like a slippery slope to me. Sorry, Eric, I promise not to take up any additional space to further make my point.

Eric, I think your initial instincts were right--there's a reason that your ears perked up. To a large degree, I agree with Lewis. Disney may not today have any ill intentions, but no one knows how circumstances may change tomorrow--though one can certainly come up with likely scenarios for abuse. The fact remains that a corporation will have gathered a large repository of private information. And who's to say tomorrow the government won't try to gain access to that information and use it how it sees fit. I'm not necessarily imputing government abuse... but I am saying the potential for abuse has been greatly increased as a result of Disney's data collection.

This reminds of the discussion about Facebook privacy that I had with Paul McEnany, David Armano, and Clay Parker Jones on David Armano's blog (http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/2006/09/faceoff.html).

One of the threads of that conversation was that Facebook's recent change in its "News Feeds" suddenly had a 20-something generation that never cared a whole lot about privacy suddenly consider what it MEANS, exactly, to be posting their entire lives online, via Facebook, Friendster, MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, YouTube... etc. It's sort of the same issue here...except it's Disney is collecting some pretty revealing information. In my mind, Disney doesn't feel so squeaky-clean any more when you consider the potential....

I'm one of these 20-somethings who is in to the whole social net "thing"...and I love it. I'm not bothered by giving up my information to the companies I love. But it's always the ones that I respect, the ones that I want to hear more from, and I do it knowing exactly what information I make public.

Not many people my age and younger think about these things. Which is pretty scary!

As companies seek to intrigue, engage and actually involve consumers in their brands, the ever-growing knowledge base of consumer information (required to actually make these programs relevant) starts to step on people's privacy. Sure, you might opt-in.

But how much does that give away? How much are we willing to divulge in order to have meaningful marketing tailored to our wants/needs?

I don't know. But it's an interesting thing to think about...