29 ms·

Data-Free Disneyland

croatiancoder 4y ago
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none_to_remain 4y ago
Wearing a fat suit and one of those Mission Impossible face masks to the grocery store so the cashiers and security cameras can't catch my true aspect
- fragmede 4y ago
  Which sounds ridiculous to you and me, but if you're James ‘Whitey’ Bulger living in Santa Monica, that's not so crazy. https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/top-ten-fugitive-james-whitey-bulger-arrested https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/top-ten-fugitive-james-whit...
dom96 4y ago
Shameless plug: I'm fighting back against Disney's data capture by capturing their data right back[0] 0 - https://mousetrack.co.uk https://mousetrack.co.uk
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
birdman3131 4y ago
I am pretty sure blogging about this removes 90% of the supposed tracking protections.
no-dr-onboard 4y ago
Fun-ish story (for me, at least): I worked with a fellow who was incredibly privacy conscious. Now, that means many things to many people. I've worked in academia where people had time to do things like dynamically tunnel connections to their home VPN concentrator only to be piped out through their handrolled nameserver. That was old hat compared to this gentleman. During one engagement, he and I were holding a seminar on location about secure coding practices. He insisted on using HDMI cables without ethernet connections, piped to his own projector of his choosing, and spent about 10 or so minutes finagling device drivers to get the projector to work with his librebooted OS. After that we spent 10 or so minutes trying to setup a cellspot router to extend his phone signal so that he could phone home to a concentrator setup like I mentioned earlier in order for him to pull the handout pdfs from his home server (also librebooted btw, thanks for asking). Every bathroom break, and there were only 2 over 8h, he would disassemble his getup and take it with him into the stall of the bathroom. I don't know where this person is today, but I can only assume that the extent of his privacy consciousness has only continued to sink its roots deeper into his life. It struck me as a sort of paranoia that likely started off proper and good but grew malignant and degenerative over the years.
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  Depending on his threat model that isn't overwhelmingly paranoid, that is fairly sensible.
  - rippercushions 4y ago
    Even the bit about taking the gear into the bathroom with him? The only threat model that thwarts is somebody physically tampering with it, which seems very paranoid to me.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      > The only threat model that thwarts is somebody physically tampering with it, They way you state 'the only' seems to present a total misunderstanding of the fact that physical access is the number one easiest way to compromise just about any type of computing device that exists. If for example you went to any data center and attempted to get physical access without permission you would quickly find yourself accosted by armed personnel as to prevent the physical tampering you're talking about. In my work I must keep my laptop on my person, or otherwise locked up when I'm not using it to prevent physical access by others. This is in now way unique in the computer security industry.
      - OkayPhysicist 4y ago
        For the vast majority of threat models, having someone you have a little bit of rapport with watch your locked computer is perfectly adequate. Realistically the bigger threat is someone stealing the laptop to sell, not as part of some targeted assault on your security. For that not to be adequate, your threat model needs to include field agents establishing a false sense of trust through some relationship, then leveraging that into an attack physical security. At some point you're getting really close to the "It's easier to bribe/blackmail/kidnap you" territory.
        pixl97 4y ago
        In some businesses the risk of being blackmailed is high, but it also comes at significant risk of the blackmailed working as a double agent. If the affected agent has no idea they've been compromised it is unlikely they will change their behaviors in any manner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_maid_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_maid_attack I mean in the case of desktop hardware, it's exceptionally easy to inline a USB key capture dongle.
nfinished 4y ago
This must be what having schizophrenia is like
zucked 4y ago
On one end of the spectrum you have the people who don't give privacy any thought - they've downloaded and logged into every app under the sun and generally don't care that they're being surveilled. They mindlessly consume hours of curated TikTok videos and go about their day getting a barrage of targeted ads. And on the other end, you have… this. Buying burner phones and wearing facepaint to avoid facial recognition at a theme park. Imposing that on your _family_. As an academic exercise I guess it's interesting, but living this way must be truly exhausting. Me? I'll continue to be somewhere in the middle of these two polar opposites. I participate in society, but I don't willingly or knowingly give away more information than is required. I obscure or block what I can, but still sign up for and use accounts that can be tied back to me. I consider success as making it difficult to tie my data together - either such that I don't fit the majority pipelines and need extra attention, or I break hamfisted techniques altogether.
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  You're missing another approach: use legal coercion to clean up your data trail. Disney is in California. You have a right to request your data be deleted. Pay a firm to send them a formal deletion request every 90 days.
  - zucked 4y ago
    I'm not a California resident so as far as I understand, that technique is not applicable in my use case.
    - vorpalhex 4y ago
      It's not as dead as you think it is.
      - zucked 4y ago
        If I read between the lines, you're suggesting that I abuse the system and request my data be deleted anyways? No thanks.
lalos 4y ago
I've would be shocked to learn that Disney doesn't have the full path taken by each individual inside the park.
salty_pretzel 4y ago
I admire the author’s willingness to stick to their principles, but man it must be tiring.
ezfe 4y ago
There's some mistakes in this, most notably that the app is not a requirement to go to Disneyland or Disney World. I've been to both and I can confidently say I could go without installing the Disney apps. Tickets: At Disney World you can get a physical RFID card and at Disneyland you get paper tickets to enter the park. Maps: You could download a map online, find a paper map, or just ask around! Wait times: https://thrill-data.com https://thrill-data.com
- fragmede 4y ago
  How do you access Disney Genie (neé FastPass) without an app? Do you just wait in line?
  - sumeno 4y ago
    You can use the website directly or go to customer service at the park
    - easton 4y ago
      To my knowledge at Disney World there isn’t a web client for Genie like there was for FastPass+, since it’s all day of you’re expected to do it in the park on your phone (I’d be happy to be proven wrong). Guest Services can probably still do it though, you’re right.
      - sumeno 4y ago
        You can book lightning lanes through the website (or at least you could last February). It's the most reliable way to get the ones that are very popular because the app is too slow, it's better to log in on a laptop from the hotel first thing in the morning.
- jjulius 4y ago
  >There's some mistakes in this, most notably that the app is not a requirement to go to Disneyland or Disney World. As the piece notes, this is about the tech stack itself, not the actual experience at the park. In the companion piece[1] that is linked to at the very beginning of the article, it's clearly stated repeatedly that the app is not required, but that your experience may not be as "ideal" as you would like as a result. [1]https://www.publicbooks.org/data-free-disney/ https://www.publicbooks.org/data-free-disney/
tonetheman 4y ago
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fragmede 4y ago
The cheapest method for defeating car licence plate recognition systems is just don't give them the plate to begin with. Just pull over and tape over the license plates right after you get off the freeway with two pieces of duct tape. Or remove the plates. Illegal, obviously, but weigh the chances of getting pulled over, vs those cameras in the Disneyland parking lot which don't take breaks. If you're white, and also not a drug dealer or a criminal on the lam, they'll just give you a ticket. If you're dedicated to the cause, here's a device available via Amazon Prime that will hide it on demand. Not sure how easy it would be to install on a rental car though, given that it needs power and you don't have a garage. https://www.amazon.com/license-plate-hider-gadget/s?k=license+plate+hider+gadget https://www.amazon.com/license-plate-hider-gadget/s?k=licens... For more plausible deniability, there's the leaf-shaped license plate hider: https://crast.net/161243/they-warn-of-a-leaf-shaped-magnet-that-is-placed-on-top-of-the-license-plate/ https://crast.net/161243/they-warn-of-a-leaf-shaped-magnet-t...
jwagenet 4y ago
I can’t help but feel bad for the kids in this situation. I’m sure while they are young it could be fun to play spy, but at some point the extreme aversion to data collection just becomes a new flavor of paranoid helicopter parenting. The author even mentions these overprotective tendencies in the Public Books companion!
- petsfed 4y ago
  Like, when does it stop being "we're playing spy" and becomes "daddy won't let me come over and play because he says your toaster told google about me". The face painting in particular (especially the OP's own admissions that its not clear how effective it is) feels like putting on tin-foil hats. If privacy concerns are that great, then the OP has an obligation to explain to his/her kids why they can't go to Disneyland. There are sibling threads that provide some valuable context as to who might actually need this degree of paranoia. Without that context, this feels like a prequel to a story like this https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/06/my-childhood-in-a-cult https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/06/my-childhood-i....
- autoexec 4y ago
  > I can’t help but feel bad for the kids in this situation. I feel worse for the kids whose parents don't care and have all their information collected before they're old enough to know better. They're handing children chromebooks and letting google collect their kid's test scores so they can sort children into 'smart' and 'dumb' buckets before they're out of primary school, letting youtube and tiktok babysit them the way previous generations did with television, making them carry cell phones at younger and younger ages etc. I think there's some solid middle ground there, but those kids will be much better off having been made aware of the issues and having their information at least somewhat protected.
  - ojame 4y ago
    Can you provide a source for Google 'bucketing' kids based on their test scores?
    - 4y ago
advisedwang 4y ago
I suggest privacy advocates draw a distinction between potential sources of tracking and likely sources of tracking. Tracking by a credit card: 100% happening. If that's a problem for you you definitly should pay by cash or use a privacy preserving card like the author does. The app looking at history of WiFi hotspots to expose you: Pretty unlikely. Tethering to prevent "a record of a home wifi connection point" is really low value work.
- FearlessNebula 4y ago
  Yeah and what are the odds Disney is correlating their license plate scanners with anything in the park? I’d assume the license plates only get looked at if a crime occurs
  - advisedwang 4y ago
    They actually list specific uses in a separate policy [1] > our use of the ALPR Data is limited to the following purposes: > * To enhance your experience while visiting such properties such as, for example, by assisting in locating a lost vehicle; > * To prevent unauthorized use of our facilities; and > * To detect, investigate and prevent activities that may violate our policies, be illegal, or otherwise impact the safety and security of our guests and/or third parties. [1] https://disneyland.disney.go.com/alpr/ https://disneyland.disney.go.com/alpr/
    - monksy 4y ago
      It's also probably the same reasons the casinos are using them to. Verifying who is there, why they're there there, CYA for when they screw up, and probably looking for reasons to remove you.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    > I’d assume the license plates only get looked at if a crime occurs Why do you assume that? Disney is a major multinational corporation. It's hard for me to believe that such companies are willing to leave money on the table.
matthewaveryusa 4y ago
I like the take on this, using a burner phone to blend in. At what point is the lack of signal the signal? If I were Disney and my tracking system showed you as not ozzing out radio or AI not ever labeling your stills as "person staring like a zombie on the phone" I would red-flag the hell out of you.
- rjmunro 4y ago
  That's what I was thinking. Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1105/ https://xkcd.com/1105/
- LesZedCB 4y ago
  what do you mean red flag? do they track and mark people as "whales" then market the hell out of them? i'm unfamiliar with the latest tech involved there.
  - frollo 4y ago
    No, it probably means you're getting assigned your personal security guard tracking every step you make until you leave property. And that the moment you look too awkward a very friendly guy is going to come to you and start asking questions.
labrador 4y ago
Meanwhile his kids roll their eyes at Dad's obsession with data collection while they're just trying to enjoy the experience
- cyberlyra 4y ago
  It's mom who's obsessed. Dad just enjoyed the experience ;)
  - labrador 4y ago
    Ah yes, I jumped to conclusions on that one!
ocdtrekkie 4y ago
I'm a privacy-focused person, but when we went to Disney World I kinda just accepted I was going to visit their sandbox and they were going to know everything I did while I was there. I don't want them tracking my behavior outside the park, but in the park, it's their territory, and there are countless strategies they can (and do) use to monitor it. I think if I wasn't going with a wife and kid, it would've been fun to try to avoid data collection as the author did, but if you're also staying on resort as we did, your magic band is your hotel key and stuff too, so it's really kinda a whole-hog thing. We didn't exit Disney's municipal boundaries the entire time we were there, so it's not like they could track us anywhere else. I guess I made my vacation to Disney World sort of a vacation from being a privacy advocate, and just went ahead and cried at the sight of my credit card statement when I got home. (Hot tip: The "character dinners" that your vacation planner will recommend are obscenely expensive, and they will definitely know you are a Midwesterner if you dare ask for a takeout container when you are leaving. It's really great when you spend like $60 a seat for one person who's not feeling well enough to eat that much, and a kid who's going to barely sample the food.)
giantg2 4y ago
Seems they left out a huge point - they had a spouse/family amenable to this. My wife and her family don't give a shit about data collection. They have no imagination of how it could be used in the future, at which point it would be too late. Even the slightest inconvenience (like the marginally beneficial switching to DuckDuckGo, Private Browsing, turning off location, or broken links due to PiHole) are met with annoyed resistance. It's actually a struggle to get them to even lock the door when they leave the house...
- kylehotchkiss 4y ago
  I care about privacy and find switching to DuckDuckGo to be annoying! As the one also trying to take care of privacy concerns in my home, I try to go for the lowest-friction options: Adblockers, paid Google accounts which have history tracking turned off and aren't supposed to be monetized, trying to be Apple-product exclusive, keeping social media accounts private, etc. I'm not going to win any further compromises and am content with these good-enough solves.
  - sockaddr 4y ago
    > Google accounts which have history tracking turned off You mean “Google accounts which have history tracking (display to the user) turned off”?
easton 4y ago
One minor note from a Disney nerd: Disney World no longer gives you the wristband (magicband) by default. You can buy one, but they want you to either use your phone or a RFID card they give you when you buy the ticket. The rumor is that they were never able to make effective use of the long range data collection beacons that used the bands. Alternatively (and more likely IMO), they realized that knowing how many people were in an area was a matter of measuring how many unique devices scanned for the Wi-Fi AP in that area, which would work even if you didn’t have a band or the battery in the band died (the battery was necessary for the long range functionality, you could still get in the park via RFID no matter what). Since they never launched the bands at Disneyland, they probably were able to do a a/b test and confirm that they didn’t get additional useful data from the bands (or that their data science team wasn’t able to use the data to improve guest experience, anyway).
- ArtificialAI 4y ago
  > Since they never launched the bands at Disneyland MagicBand+ was launched at Disneyland this past October.
  - easton 4y ago
    Correct, I forgot that. They never launched them as a free accessory for guests to help with payments/room key/FastPass/admission/data collection though, like MyMagic+ at Disney World. They are mostly a wearable ticket now (and I presume they can be used as room keys/payments at Disneyland too, but it’s been a minute since I’ve been there).
- flutas 4y ago
  > The rumor is that they were never able to make effective use of the long range data collection beacons that used the bands. Alternatively (and more likely IMO), they realized that knowing how many people were in an area was a matter of measuring how many unique devices scanned for the Wi-Fi AP in that area, which would work even if you didn’t have a band or the battery in the band died (the battery was necessary for the long range functionality, you could still get in the park via RFID no matter what). IIRC both are true. MB was in development before phones were everywhere, so it's a long time pivot basically. Also the 2 reasons I've seen that the data was thrown out was not due to use, rather the data was VERY bad / corrupted and not as accurate as they needed.
rsync 4y ago
I think a lot about this subject and have a lot to say about this. Rather than nit-pick, I want to showcase this particular item: "I ended up going for the Disney lot, although they learned that they do have license plate readers. I was driving a rental car. Certainly, my name and driver's license are attached to that car, but that's through a different corporate database. A corporation that Disney does not own or have data rights to or share board members with ..." (and later) "Here I follow a different rule for obfuscation, which is to store data across corporate databases where the corporations have no prior relationship--or even an antagonistic one. I can be reasonably sure that, failing an acquisition, that data won't migrate." This is wrong thinking. Personal identifiers like phone number, license plate, address, etc., are commodities that are collected, digested and sold by many different third party providers. He's thinking about Disney somehow comparing their license plate reader data with Hertz or something through some unlikely corporate agreement. Far more likely is that both Disney and Hertz employ a third party data intel provider that gives them enterprise wide coverage and query for these, and other, identifiers while simultaneously acquiring the data to be made available via API to other "partners". A good example of this is Ekata and their reverse phone product which, until recently, was available via Twilio API lookup: /usr/local/bin/curl -s -X GET "https://lookups.twilio.com/v1/PhoneNumbers/$number?Type=carrier&Type=caller-name&AddOns=ekata_reverse_phone" -u $accountsid:$authtoken ... and would give you not only a reverse number lookup but also a list of "associated persons" as well as your address and number history. I feel assured that APIs like this exist for license plates, SSNs, IMEI, etc. I also strongly suspect that Disney and Hertz are both contributors to, and consumers of these APIs.
- cyberlyra 4y ago
  (Original author here). Yes I am aware of the identifiers that are sold through a third party data provider. Reading further, I also note that I decided not to care if Disneyland knows that I went, it was more about continuing to obfuscate my family, so I decided that was a risk I would accept. Of course, YMMV.
  - matt-attack 4y ago
    Curious why you consider D+ asking for birthday and gender to be deal breakers? Why would you even consider providing real data to those question? Just simply make up a name, birthday and gender. That's what I do.
jacquesm 4y ago
The best and simplest way to evade data capture at Disneyland is to avoid Disneyland.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Disneyland is a metaphor for 21st century life. Avoiding that last comes at rather higher costs.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    The first and most important step: don't get a smartphone. That alone will reduce the value of your profile considerably.
    - dredmorbius 4y ago
      <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34619336 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34619336>
- Delphiza 4y ago
  It is surprising that I had to scroll down so far to see this answer. Unlike government services, street cameras, and things that cannot be avoided, it is reasonably possible to avoid Disneyland altogether. I do it quite easily (but I am in a country that doesn't have a Disneyland). If OP doesn't want to participate in the Disneyland business model for monetisation of their brand, then don't do it (no Disney+ either, so that you don't have perpetually disappointed kids).
FearlessNebula 4y ago
What the heck is Disney doing with location data inside the park? And why facial recognition? To fight crime?
winterqt 4y ago
> Unlike an iPhone, my phone doesn't learn much about who is tethering to it, nor does it relay to the access point what is going on or who is accessing it. Anyone know what they're referencing here?
- cyberlyra 4y ago
  Original author here: My phone runs Sailfish, a mobile Linux OS (Red Hat).
mixmastamyk 4y ago
Disgusting. A few year back we took the family to DL. I had read that they were going to take our pictures and I thought "not a chance" and prepared for a fight. But I knew deep down they had me over a barrel. Gonna turn around and say no to the family (after an hour drive and $$$ spent for parking) at the front steps of DL? Paying cash not practical anymore either, was almost $500 for tix! For whatever reason at the moment we arrived they were not prepared for pix and we walked in unscathed, and without apps. Just like the good 'ol days of... 2010? Looks like I'll never be going back.
advisedwang 4y ago
Both this article and the non-tech companion article [1] skip over talking about why the author wants privacy. The failure to outline her objections makes the countermeasures seem untethered from any motivation; I think that is why so many comments here react negatively to the valuable anti-surveillance work she's doing here. This could be a issue by issue analysis. For example: "I don't want targeted ads -> prevent collecting targeting data -> use a privacy credit card". This is the easiest way to argue for privacy and can cover a lot of ground, however I worry it's too limited. This gives us the world of the "opt out" button which can fix a specific issue but somehow still leaves a really nasty taste about the surveillance world we are in. I'd love to see more writers make on-the-principle arguments for privacy. This author clearly has that depth of feeling so it's a real missed chance. [1] https://www.publicbooks.org/data-free-disney/ https://www.publicbooks.org/data-free-disney/
- cyberlyra 4y ago
  Original author here. I'm also in favor of more writing about privacy motivation, even if editors don't always want that all in the text they publish. I'm writing more about it at The Opt Out Project in addition to other places: for instance, the famous Pregnancy Experiment, where I kept my data about my (unborn) children away from digital detection: https://time.com/83200/privacy-internet-big-data-opt-out/ https://time.com/83200/privacy-internet-big-data-opt-out/
m463 4y ago
I went to disneyland and didn't want them to take my picture. That was a pain, but they finally relented.
euroderf 4y ago
So what's the chance that this set of countermeasures set off some red lights in the Disney master control room, and they put a tail on him/them for the rest of their visit ?
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Trying similar tactics in Vegas and reporting on the shenanigans might be amusinteresting.
its-summertime 4y ago
And by opting out manually using these methods, they've gone from lost-in-the-crowd to unique, including with a publicly findable name, since the whole writing-an-article on it. Unless you tell the other side, "hey don't track me", they can (and will!) legally use your aversion to tracking as another data-point! of course, spreading tracking-avoidance methods helps with this! (as long as we can all agree on which methods to use...)
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  The activity and blog are clearly a demonstrative performance. Though there's always an appropriate xkcd: <https://xkcd.com/1105/ https://xkcd.com/1105/>
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cyberlyra 4y ago
I'm the author of the original post. I'm happy to answer questions in thread.
- josefresco 4y ago
  How annoyed was/is your family at your privacy antics?
  - cyberlyra 4y ago
    Not annoyed. Spouse is fully on board. Kids think it's fun, especially as we use data privacy to explain how systems work under the hood. Extended family is supportive. Maybe people are surprised to hear that, but that's been my experience so far.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Have you made any attempt to determine how effective such "personal responsibility" methods are at actually avoiding surveillance, and/or do you have any thoughts on how you might go about finding out? A follow-up on this topic, perhaps interviews with people who'd know, might be of interest. I do like the piece, as a demonstration of the difficulty / cost / inconvenience of actually opting out of pervasive surveillance. As a work of performance art your blog post is excellent. (A point several people commenting in this thread seem to have spectacularly missed.)
  - cyberlyra 4y ago
    Thanks! You totally grokked what I'm doing with this--I appreciate it! Yes I do think a lot about the effectiveness of personal responsibility, and its limits. Certainly I could request my logs and data from every company, although that takes more time than opting out. In the meanwhile, I don't block ads as those as my only clues as to what a corporate database thinks it knows about me (obviously I use blockers to stop info flow from me to them, it's just that I want to see what they think they know). I also use lots of addresses and CC numbers so I can trace data migration and can identify the culprit if so ( https://www.optoutproject.net/what-email-address-should-i-use/ https://www.optoutproject.net/what-email-address-should-i-us...) As for if it's working... There are more quantitative ways to tell for sure. In the meanwhile, my Pregnancy Experiment started in 2013 and in the intervening ten years I have seen zero online ads for anything baby- or child-related, and I have only received an unsolicited catalog in the mail every three years (thanks to the above technique, though, I always knew who the weak link was). When I tell other moms that, their jaws drop.
libraryatnight 4y ago
We went to Disneyland end of 2021 and it was unpleasant. The staff seemed stressed, there always seemed to be one or two people being assholes about their masking rules (they were outside off, inside on at that point), and the usual Disney level of attention to every detail was just not there. We chalked it up to pandemic stress, but also thought maybe new leadership was going in a bad - like some conveniences previously available on the app no longer available as they were about to transition to a version where those services would be paid for or made more expensive. Anyway, my following opinion is based on pre-pandemic Disney. Disney for me is a little like Apple in that you're handing yourself over to the corporate overlords and are reliant on their benevolence. These companies take some freedom in exchange for a clean and consistent experience. I don't like the surveillance state either, but going to Disneyland with two families was easy because of the app. We pre-booked rides, pre-ordered meals and snacks, kept up with where groups went if there was a ride split. It was easy to give kids some spending money we knew was only going to get spent in either of the parks they had access to. If you go further and pay for the hotels nearby they're even more connected. And it wasn't creepy, because it's why we went. It was what I paid for. That experience you're trying to opt out of is a core part of their product. It's why their movies are on repeat in houses all over. It's why people will hand their kids and their grandparents alike and ipad. There's an expectation around what these companies provide and a certain level of assumed safety. Now, in Disney's case, since we are paying for it, if we could just get some privacy guarantees when we surrender to their systems I'd love that. I'd even pay extra for it. I'm so ready for people to start selling me privacy tiers. I can pay to get rid of ads, lemme pay to not have my data sold or tracked. I'll vote and harass my reps accordingly, I'll use blockers and unique emails across services, I'll teach my family to do the same, and if I'm at a protest or driving someone to an abortion clinic sure let's talk burner phones and face paint - but I also just don't have it in me to miss out on experiences with friends or family because of my objections.
- kylehotchkiss 4y ago
  I visited a few months after you did, the masking rules were gone at that point. Everything seemed pretty positive, other than the park just being absolutely crammed with people. I don't know how they'll be able to maintain quality long term until they can reduce the daily headcount, which means we'll all be stuck booking further into the future, but at least you'll be able to walk between rides in the evening.
frietzkriesler2 4y ago
I've long given up on keeping my data safe. What I mean is I try and restrict who has what data and provide junk when necessary but after awhile, there's only so much you can do. So I've done the opposite: I've made it impossible for them to use my data to target me. I block ads on all of my browsers, I regularly reset my advertising ID, and I hope that the amount of trash data I feed makes it even more useless. One day, I'll set up some sort of home server and use next cloud or something and finally move off of Google's garden.
this_steve_j 4y ago
As someone who regularly visits the parks and resorts, I don’t understand what they do with all this data. I use the iOS Disney+ app and their website to make reservations, and don’t attempt to block most of their ad tracking and telemetry. I’ve probably made 50+ visits to the Orlando parks and resorts in the last 3 years and our family spends considerable sums of money on their concessions. So why does every restaurant host and hotel employee ask if it is our first time at the restaurant/hotel? And why doesn’t the app use historical data to promote experiences we are likely to enjoy? Why do they always ask where we are from, if we are parking a vehicle, and whether we (still) have food allergies or preferences? Saving these preferences could save dozens of person-hours per family vacation and would not be difficult to implement, or at least to try. I believe they, like many companies, are just hoarding the data in the hope that one day Someone will come and figure out how to squeeze it or sell because Data Science. Or maybe it will become sentient and some creature will crawl out from the ocean of primordial data ooze.
judge2020 4y ago
> My understanding, from these conversations, is that it is still possible in Disneyland (not World) to evade because they rely on the app and credit card swipes to generate single user ID's, not on a wristband which is subject to infrared detection throughout the parks in Florida. MagicBands (via MagicBand+) has finally being introduced to DisneyLand Resort[0]. 0: https://disneyland.disney.go.com/guest-services/magicband-plus/ https://disneyland.disney.go.com/guest-services/magicband-pl...
jccalhoun 4y ago
This seems like a long way to go to avoid some place that you could simply not go to. I've never been to Disney. I hate kids, crowds, and lines so instead of trying to find some way to get around it I just don't go.
woodruffw 4y ago
There's something exceptionally funny about putting this level of effort into anonymizing your trip to Disneyland, of all places: I was never a "Disney kid," but my understanding is that it's milquetoast in terms of advertising profiles. "Likes and went to Disneyland" is probably roughly as strong as "lives in a house" and "grew up in the US" in terms of personalization signals. (This shouldn't be read as a criticism! I just think it's an amusing application of an otherwise valuable thought experiment/practice.)
mark242 4y ago
The comment I would have to the author is this -- it is all well and good to demonstrate how difficult it is to opt out of marketing surveillance. Great. Completely on board. The question is, how did this make your experience of the park any better? Other than personal gratification of "yay this awkward face paint is stopping cameras from recognizing me", what is it, exactly, that you got that the other 50,000+ people in the park didn't get? Because the completely opposite argument is much more compelling to the general public. Download this app, turn on your location data, and you get notifications for a little personal guided tour. Attach your payment information and you can mobile order food for a quick pickup and save time that you can spend going on the rides. Add your party contacts and you can set up fast-passes to jump the lines for your entire party all at once, again saving you time. If the idea of opting out (which again, great, admirable, etc) doesn't come with a clear benefit, nobody will do it, and the paper attached gets into Howard-Hughes-level of data paranoia.
- cyberlyra 4y ago
  OP here: This is what the article in Public Books is all about. A lot of the "benefits" the Park presents are made up, manufactured conveniences, accompanied by manufactured inconveniences that make it hard for others to resist. The Park makes people feel like they've get a lot of benefit out of playing along, while the park actually benefits from convincing people so easily to relinquish any control over their personal information. We should think more about whether a convenience or "benefit" on offer--a few dollars off, a few minutes shaved--is a lure designed to get us to sign our data away for their profit. What did I get out of it? Personal data autonomy.
  - mark242 4y ago
    That is just fundamentally not true. Disneyland in particular has had a steady, growing problem over the past 15-20 years, accelerated recently with the rise of photo-sharing-sites like Instagram, where they are fighting a balance between keeping the parks accessible and affordable, while also trying to limit overall attendance. A family who books a vacation for a couple of days at Disneyland will struggle to see and experience everything that they want, for the simple reason that there are 50,000+ people (on quiet days!) all trying to do the same things. This isn't manufactured or made up. It is a real inconvenience, and one that existed before smartphones and mass data tracking. The real solution is in eliminating the annual pass program (and raising the ire of the millions of Southern California locals who go to the park on the regular) but that's for another conversation. "A few minutes shaved" is absolutely a tangible benefit, 100%, especially for a family who has paid thousands of dollars to travel, stay, and visit the park. "the app was a necessity, a non-negotiable" - that "non-negotiable" is because compared to the experience even four years ago, pre-app, your day does allow for more experiences, and I suspect you felt that while breezing through the Space Mountain line. Look, I do not work for Disney. Disney does not need me to "shill" for them. But "personal data autonomy" is not enough of a real, tangible benefit to the average person, especially compared to the real conveniences of even the slightest opt-in. It does not take a massive data surveillance program to know that our family are Star Wars fans. We literally do not care if the app is more likely to recommend we go on Star Tours more often. We do care that we're able to go on Star Tours without an hourlong wait.
blobbers 4y ago
Am I the only one who thinks “my life is so incredibly boring that you can track me all day, everyday”?
matt-attack 4y ago
Funny that the author considers D+ asking for birthday and gender to be a deal breaker. I'm always flabbergasted at people whose knee-jerk reaction to forms is to just fill in truthful data. As if it's a moral issue. I have a hypothesis (please prove me wrong): It is not amoral to default to completely fictitious information when prompted on the web. Signing up for D+? "Jose Conseco", Gender? Female. Buying some shoes at a random retailer? Just make it all up. EVERYTHING. Additionally, I've discovered that when paying by credit card, even the billing details can be entirely wrong, with the exception of zip code. There is just zero reason to provide your real address (assuming you're not having something shipped) for charging to a CC. Think about it, you're signing up for HBO Max and they ask for you name. I'm genuinely curious how many people think there's any valid reason at all to answer truthfully. Why does HBO Max need to know your real name? You're just there to watch to videos. This basically applies to close to 100% of places on the internet. Am I the only one?
- userbinator 4y ago
  Some may consider it fraud, and the legal system might have a say in that too. That said, I think there's a spectrum of acceptability for fictitious information that varies on the person and one requesting it. At one end is anything government or otherwise "real life" or "serious business" related, where I would not hesitate to provide real information. At the other end is accounts for various online-only entities, in which I tend to stay as far from my real identity as possible.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    "Fraud" is deception employed in order to take something of value from someone else. I don't see how this could be considered fraud.
oceanghost 4y ago
Disney uses all this data to "optimize" the park-- for profitability. They're not interested in you, exactly. They've gamified the park, which is what sucks about it now. I was very blessed to have the means to live near Disneyland and be able to afford yearly passes for a decade. I've been to Disneyland at least a thousand times-- and if you think surveillance is a new idea there, you are mistaken. True story-- I worked as a sysadmin for a number of years, and as such found it useful to carry a knife with me to open boxes-- as receiving equipment was a daily duty for me. My weapon of choice was a CRKT "snap lock" mini knife with a blade no larger than an inch. It was completely inoffensive, but it could open a package quite well and due to the design it was quite safe to keep in your pocket. They don't seem to make this knife anymore-- but be aware it was not the quite large "snap lock" knife CRKT still makes-- this guy about the size of a key. So, I arrive at Disneyland like any other day. Park in the mega-structure and when I arrive at the security gate, a very respectful gentleman in touristy clothes says to me, "Excuse me sir, can you come over here for a moment?" He pulls me aside-- he says, "The knife in your pocket. You can't bring that into the park." I am floored. How could he possibly know about a knife I literally keep on my key ring that doesn't even look like a knife? This is the day I learned that Disney employs security staff to pretend to be park guests. I said, "Yes, I do have a knife, but I think if I was allowed to show it to you, you might agree that it's not a weapon. If you disagree, then I'll give it to you, so it doesn't enter the park, but don't throw it away because it's a great knife, so consider it a gift." To his credit, I showed him the knife-- and he said something to the effect of, "That's fine. Have a great day at the park." To me, this was security done correctly. The guy identified a possible problem (my knife), and was allowed to exercise his own judgement about the situation.
- Atheros 4y ago
  Here [1] is a video someone recorded of a fight that happened in a Disney park. And here [2] is a Reddit thread discussing it. Expand the comments. Numerous people talked about Disney's infamous security and the apparent lack of it in the video. Not a single other person in that thread noticed the four plainclothes officers in the video, two of whom were present throughout almost the whole video. Can you find them? This day was grey-hat day. The first one shows up exactly 30 seconds after the incident starts. The one who does the choke-hold departs almost as fast as he arrived and acknowledges his coworker at 5:29. And no one saw them even from their armchairs. Caught on video and still complete ghosts. [1] https://youtu.be/7N7Yha7dgxw?t=120 https://youtu.be/7N7Yha7dgxw?t=120 [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/cafr3l/fight_at_disneyland_toon_town/ https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/cafr3l/fight_at_dis...
yoaviram 4y ago
Why does the author not simply send Disney a CCPA data deletion request, either instead, or in addition to the rest of the countermeasures outlined in the article? With websites such as this one it literally takes less then a minute to do so (disclosure, I'm one of the creators): https://yourdigitalrights.org/d/disney.com https://yourdigitalrights.org/d/disney.com
dcanelhas 4y ago
AFAIK CV-Dazzle is a hand-crafted adversarial pattern for facial detection, specifically by a Viola-Jones style detector of Haar cascades. The painted patterns invert the brightness relative to the first few filter passed to put you under the detector threshold. Modern face detectors (and recognition) have much stronger priors for e.g. shape and illumination that there is a chance they can separate the intrinsic images related to shape, texture and illumination and still work. I still think there is some merit to the approach though, since modern systems are trained on data for what most people look like (and not e.g. the band members of Kiss). Even so, they are trained to be robust to occlusions. Likely the most successful approach at this point is facial prosthetics and contact lenses to hide your irises...unless theyre using IR to look at the blood vessels in your face..etc.
len_testa 4y ago
I follow Disney's theme park patents for fun. They've got two alternate methods for singling out guests. One uses shoe recognition (https://patents.google.com/patent/US9393697B1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US9393697B1/en). Another identifies individual guests who interact with a group (https://patents.justia.com/patent/9807350 https://patents.justia.com/patent/9807350), and builds a social graph based on that. Neither of these can tie back to personal information. But within the park, they seem intent on distinguish between individuals.

[dead]

Wearing a fat suit and one of those Mission Impossible face masks to the grocery store so the cashiers and security cameras can't catch my true aspect

fragmede 4y ago
Which sounds ridiculous to you and me, but if you're James ‘Whitey’ Bulger living in Santa Monica, that's not so crazy. https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/top-ten-fugitive-james-whitey-bulger-arrested https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/top-ten-fugitive-james-whit...

dom96 4y ago

Shameless plug: I'm fighting back against Disney's data capture by capturing their data right back[0] 0 - https://mousetrack.co.uk https://mousetrack.co.uk

deleted 4y ago

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birdman3131 4y ago

I am pretty sure blogging about this removes 90% of the supposed tracking protections.

no-dr-onboard 4y ago

Fun-ish story (for me, at least): I worked with a fellow who was incredibly privacy conscious. Now, that means many things to many people. I've worked in academia where people had time to do things like dynamically tunnel connections to their home VPN concentrator only to be piped out through their handrolled nameserver. That was old hat compared to this gentleman. During one engagement, he and I were holding a seminar on location about secure coding practices. He insisted on using HDMI cables without ethernet connections, piped to his own projector of his choosing, and spent about 10 or so minutes finagling device drivers to get the projector to work with his librebooted OS. After that we spent 10 or so minutes trying to setup a cellspot router to extend his phone signal so that he could phone home to a concentrator setup like I mentioned earlier in order for him to pull the handout pdfs from his home server (also librebooted btw, thanks for asking). Every bathroom break, and there were only 2 over 8h, he would disassemble his getup and take it with him into the stall of the bathroom. I don't know where this person is today, but I can only assume that the extent of his privacy consciousness has only continued to sink its roots deeper into his life. It struck me as a sort of paranoia that likely started off proper and good but grew malignant and degenerative over the years.

vorpalhex 4y ago
Depending on his threat model that isn't overwhelmingly paranoid, that is fairly sensible.
- rippercushions 4y ago
  Even the bit about taking the gear into the bathroom with him? The only threat model that thwarts is somebody physically tampering with it, which seems very paranoid to me.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    > The only threat model that thwarts is somebody physically tampering with it, They way you state 'the only' seems to present a total misunderstanding of the fact that physical access is the number one easiest way to compromise just about any type of computing device that exists. If for example you went to any data center and attempted to get physical access without permission you would quickly find yourself accosted by armed personnel as to prevent the physical tampering you're talking about. In my work I must keep my laptop on my person, or otherwise locked up when I'm not using it to prevent physical access by others. This is in now way unique in the computer security industry.
    - OkayPhysicist 4y ago
      For the vast majority of threat models, having someone you have a little bit of rapport with watch your locked computer is perfectly adequate. Realistically the bigger threat is someone stealing the laptop to sell, not as part of some targeted assault on your security. For that not to be adequate, your threat model needs to include field agents establishing a false sense of trust through some relationship, then leveraging that into an attack physical security. At some point you're getting really close to the "It's easier to bribe/blackmail/kidnap you" territory.
      - pixl97 4y ago
        In some businesses the risk of being blackmailed is high, but it also comes at significant risk of the blackmailed working as a double agent. If the affected agent has no idea they've been compromised it is unlikely they will change their behaviors in any manner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_maid_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_maid_attack I mean in the case of desktop hardware, it's exceptionally easy to inline a USB key capture dongle.

nfinished 4y ago

This must be what having schizophrenia is like

zucked 4y ago

On one end of the spectrum you have the people who don't give privacy any thought - they've downloaded and logged into every app under the sun and generally don't care that they're being surveilled. They mindlessly consume hours of curated TikTok videos and go about their day getting a barrage of targeted ads. And on the other end, you have… this. Buying burner phones and wearing facepaint to avoid facial recognition at a theme park. Imposing that on your _family_. As an academic exercise I guess it's interesting, but living this way must be truly exhausting. Me? I'll continue to be somewhere in the middle of these two polar opposites. I participate in society, but I don't willingly or knowingly give away more information than is required. I obscure or block what I can, but still sign up for and use accounts that can be tied back to me. I consider success as making it difficult to tie my data together - either such that I don't fit the majority pipelines and need extra attention, or I break hamfisted techniques altogether.

vorpalhex 4y ago
You're missing another approach: use legal coercion to clean up your data trail. Disney is in California. You have a right to request your data be deleted. Pay a firm to send them a formal deletion request every 90 days.
- zucked 4y ago
  I'm not a California resident so as far as I understand, that technique is not applicable in my use case.
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    It's not as dead as you think it is.
    - zucked 4y ago
      If I read between the lines, you're suggesting that I abuse the system and request my data be deleted anyways? No thanks.

lalos 4y ago

I've would be shocked to learn that Disney doesn't have the full path taken by each individual inside the park.

salty_pretzel 4y ago

I admire the author’s willingness to stick to their principles, but man it must be tiring.

ezfe 4y ago

There's some mistakes in this, most notably that the app is not a requirement to go to Disneyland or Disney World. I've been to both and I can confidently say I could go without installing the Disney apps. Tickets: At Disney World you can get a physical RFID card and at Disneyland you get paper tickets to enter the park. Maps: You could download a map online, find a paper map, or just ask around! Wait times: https://thrill-data.com https://thrill-data.com

fragmede 4y ago
How do you access Disney Genie (neé FastPass) without an app? Do you just wait in line?
- sumeno 4y ago
  You can use the website directly or go to customer service at the park
  - easton 4y ago
    To my knowledge at Disney World there isn’t a web client for Genie like there was for FastPass+, since it’s all day of you’re expected to do it in the park on your phone (I’d be happy to be proven wrong). Guest Services can probably still do it though, you’re right.
    - sumeno 4y ago
      You can book lightning lanes through the website (or at least you could last February). It's the most reliable way to get the ones that are very popular because the app is too slow, it's better to log in on a laptop from the hotel first thing in the morning.
jjulius 4y ago
>There's some mistakes in this, most notably that the app is not a requirement to go to Disneyland or Disney World. As the piece notes, this is about the tech stack itself, not the actual experience at the park. In the companion piece[1] that is linked to at the very beginning of the article, it's clearly stated repeatedly that the app is not required, but that your experience may not be as "ideal" as you would like as a result. [1]https://www.publicbooks.org/data-free-disney/ https://www.publicbooks.org/data-free-disney/

tonetheman 4y ago

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fragmede 4y ago

The cheapest method for defeating car licence plate recognition systems is just don't give them the plate to begin with. Just pull over and tape over the license plates right after you get off the freeway with two pieces of duct tape. Or remove the plates. Illegal, obviously, but weigh the chances of getting pulled over, vs those cameras in the Disneyland parking lot which don't take breaks. If you're white, and also not a drug dealer or a criminal on the lam, they'll just give you a ticket. If you're dedicated to the cause, here's a device available via Amazon Prime that will hide it on demand. Not sure how easy it would be to install on a rental car though, given that it needs power and you don't have a garage. https://www.amazon.com/license-plate-hider-gadget/s?k=license+plate+hider+gadget https://www.amazon.com/license-plate-hider-gadget/s?k=licens... For more plausible deniability, there's the leaf-shaped license plate hider: https://crast.net/161243/they-warn-of-a-leaf-shaped-magnet-that-is-placed-on-top-of-the-license-plate/ https://crast.net/161243/they-warn-of-a-leaf-shaped-magnet-t...

jwagenet 4y ago

I can’t help but feel bad for the kids in this situation. I’m sure while they are young it could be fun to play spy, but at some point the extreme aversion to data collection just becomes a new flavor of paranoid helicopter parenting. The author even mentions these overprotective tendencies in the Public Books companion!

petsfed 4y ago
Like, when does it stop being "we're playing spy" and becomes "daddy won't let me come over and play because he says your toaster told google about me". The face painting in particular (especially the OP's own admissions that its not clear how effective it is) feels like putting on tin-foil hats. If privacy concerns are that great, then the OP has an obligation to explain to his/her kids why they can't go to Disneyland. There are sibling threads that provide some valuable context as to who might actually need this degree of paranoia. Without that context, this feels like a prequel to a story like this https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/06/my-childhood-in-a-cult https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/06/my-childhood-i....
autoexec 4y ago
> I can’t help but feel bad for the kids in this situation. I feel worse for the kids whose parents don't care and have all their information collected before they're old enough to know better. They're handing children chromebooks and letting google collect their kid's test scores so they can sort children into 'smart' and 'dumb' buckets before they're out of primary school, letting youtube and tiktok babysit them the way previous generations did with television, making them carry cell phones at younger and younger ages etc. I think there's some solid middle ground there, but those kids will be much better off having been made aware of the issues and having their information at least somewhat protected.
- ojame 4y ago
  Can you provide a source for Google 'bucketing' kids based on their test scores?
  - 4y ago

advisedwang 4y ago

I suggest privacy advocates draw a distinction between potential sources of tracking and likely sources of tracking. Tracking by a credit card: 100% happening. If that's a problem for you you definitly should pay by cash or use a privacy preserving card like the author does. The app looking at history of WiFi hotspots to expose you: Pretty unlikely. Tethering to prevent "a record of a home wifi connection point" is really low value work.

FearlessNebula 4y ago
Yeah and what are the odds Disney is correlating their license plate scanners with anything in the park? I’d assume the license plates only get looked at if a crime occurs
- advisedwang 4y ago
  They actually list specific uses in a separate policy [1] > our use of the ALPR Data is limited to the following purposes: > * To enhance your experience while visiting such properties such as, for example, by assisting in locating a lost vehicle; > * To prevent unauthorized use of our facilities; and > * To detect, investigate and prevent activities that may violate our policies, be illegal, or otherwise impact the safety and security of our guests and/or third parties. [1] https://disneyland.disney.go.com/alpr/ https://disneyland.disney.go.com/alpr/
  - monksy 4y ago
    It's also probably the same reasons the casinos are using them to. Verifying who is there, why they're there there, CYA for when they screw up, and probably looking for reasons to remove you.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > I’d assume the license plates only get looked at if a crime occurs Why do you assume that? Disney is a major multinational corporation. It's hard for me to believe that such companies are willing to leave money on the table.

matthewaveryusa 4y ago

I like the take on this, using a burner phone to blend in. At what point is the lack of signal the signal? If I were Disney and my tracking system showed you as not ozzing out radio or AI not ever labeling your stills as "person staring like a zombie on the phone" I would red-flag the hell out of you.

rjmunro 4y ago
That's what I was thinking. Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1105/ https://xkcd.com/1105/
LesZedCB 4y ago
what do you mean red flag? do they track and mark people as "whales" then market the hell out of them? i'm unfamiliar with the latest tech involved there.
- frollo 4y ago
  No, it probably means you're getting assigned your personal security guard tracking every step you make until you leave property. And that the moment you look too awkward a very friendly guy is going to come to you and start asking questions.

labrador 4y ago

Meanwhile his kids roll their eyes at Dad's obsession with data collection while they're just trying to enjoy the experience

cyberlyra 4y ago
It's mom who's obsessed. Dad just enjoyed the experience ;)
- labrador 4y ago
  Ah yes, I jumped to conclusions on that one!

ocdtrekkie 4y ago

I'm a privacy-focused person, but when we went to Disney World I kinda just accepted I was going to visit their sandbox and they were going to know everything I did while I was there. I don't want them tracking my behavior outside the park, but in the park, it's their territory, and there are countless strategies they can (and do) use to monitor it. I think if I wasn't going with a wife and kid, it would've been fun to try to avoid data collection as the author did, but if you're also staying on resort as we did, your magic band is your hotel key and stuff too, so it's really kinda a whole-hog thing. We didn't exit Disney's municipal boundaries the entire time we were there, so it's not like they could track us anywhere else. I guess I made my vacation to Disney World sort of a vacation from being a privacy advocate, and just went ahead and cried at the sight of my credit card statement when I got home. (Hot tip: The "character dinners" that your vacation planner will recommend are obscenely expensive, and they will definitely know you are a Midwesterner if you dare ask for a takeout container when you are leaving. It's really great when you spend like $60 a seat for one person who's not feeling well enough to eat that much, and a kid who's going to barely sample the food.)

giantg2 4y ago

Seems they left out a huge point - they had a spouse/family amenable to this. My wife and her family don't give a shit about data collection. They have no imagination of how it could be used in the future, at which point it would be too late. Even the slightest inconvenience (like the marginally beneficial switching to DuckDuckGo, Private Browsing, turning off location, or broken links due to PiHole) are met with annoyed resistance. It's actually a struggle to get them to even lock the door when they leave the house...

kylehotchkiss 4y ago
I care about privacy and find switching to DuckDuckGo to be annoying! As the one also trying to take care of privacy concerns in my home, I try to go for the lowest-friction options: Adblockers, paid Google accounts which have history tracking turned off and aren't supposed to be monetized, trying to be Apple-product exclusive, keeping social media accounts private, etc. I'm not going to win any further compromises and am content with these good-enough solves.
- sockaddr 4y ago
  > Google accounts which have history tracking turned off You mean “Google accounts which have history tracking (display to the user) turned off”?

easton 4y ago

One minor note from a Disney nerd: Disney World no longer gives you the wristband (magicband) by default. You can buy one, but they want you to either use your phone or a RFID card they give you when you buy the ticket. The rumor is that they were never able to make effective use of the long range data collection beacons that used the bands. Alternatively (and more likely IMO), they realized that knowing how many people were in an area was a matter of measuring how many unique devices scanned for the Wi-Fi AP in that area, which would work even if you didn’t have a band or the battery in the band died (the battery was necessary for the long range functionality, you could still get in the park via RFID no matter what). Since they never launched the bands at Disneyland, they probably were able to do a a/b test and confirm that they didn’t get additional useful data from the bands (or that their data science team wasn’t able to use the data to improve guest experience, anyway).

ArtificialAI 4y ago
> Since they never launched the bands at Disneyland MagicBand+ was launched at Disneyland this past October.
- easton 4y ago
  Correct, I forgot that. They never launched them as a free accessory for guests to help with payments/room key/FastPass/admission/data collection though, like MyMagic+ at Disney World. They are mostly a wearable ticket now (and I presume they can be used as room keys/payments at Disneyland too, but it’s been a minute since I’ve been there).
flutas 4y ago
> The rumor is that they were never able to make effective use of the long range data collection beacons that used the bands. Alternatively (and more likely IMO), they realized that knowing how many people were in an area was a matter of measuring how many unique devices scanned for the Wi-Fi AP in that area, which would work even if you didn’t have a band or the battery in the band died (the battery was necessary for the long range functionality, you could still get in the park via RFID no matter what). IIRC both are true. MB was in development before phones were everywhere, so it's a long time pivot basically. Also the 2 reasons I've seen that the data was thrown out was not due to use, rather the data was VERY bad / corrupted and not as accurate as they needed.

rsync 4y ago

I think a lot about this subject and have a lot to say about this. Rather than nit-pick, I want to showcase this particular item: "I ended up going for the Disney lot, although they learned that they do have license plate readers. I was driving a rental car. Certainly, my name and driver's license are attached to that car, but that's through a different corporate database. A corporation that Disney does not own or have data rights to or share board members with ..." (and later) "Here I follow a different rule for obfuscation, which is to store data across corporate databases where the corporations have no prior relationship--or even an antagonistic one. I can be reasonably sure that, failing an acquisition, that data won't migrate." This is wrong thinking. Personal identifiers like phone number, license plate, address, etc., are commodities that are collected, digested and sold by many different third party providers. He's thinking about Disney somehow comparing their license plate reader data with Hertz or something through some unlikely corporate agreement. Far more likely is that both Disney and Hertz employ a third party data intel provider that gives them enterprise wide coverage and query for these, and other, identifiers while simultaneously acquiring the data to be made available via API to other "partners". A good example of this is Ekata and their reverse phone product which, until recently, was available via Twilio API lookup: /usr/local/bin/curl -s -X GET "https://lookups.twilio.com/v1/PhoneNumbers/$number?Type=carrier&Type=caller-name&AddOns=ekata_reverse_phone" -u $accountsid:$authtoken ... and would give you not only a reverse number lookup but also a list of "associated persons" as well as your address and number history. I feel assured that APIs like this exist for license plates, SSNs, IMEI, etc. I also strongly suspect that Disney and Hertz are both contributors to, and consumers of these APIs.

cyberlyra 4y ago
(Original author here). Yes I am aware of the identifiers that are sold through a third party data provider. Reading further, I also note that I decided not to care if Disneyland knows that I went, it was more about continuing to obfuscate my family, so I decided that was a risk I would accept. Of course, YMMV.
- matt-attack 4y ago
  Curious why you consider D+ asking for birthday and gender to be deal breakers? Why would you even consider providing real data to those question? Just simply make up a name, birthday and gender. That's what I do.

jacquesm 4y ago

The best and simplest way to evade data capture at Disneyland is to avoid Disneyland.

dredmorbius 4y ago
Disneyland is a metaphor for 21st century life. Avoiding that last comes at rather higher costs.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  The first and most important step: don't get a smartphone. That alone will reduce the value of your profile considerably.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34619336 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34619336>
Delphiza 4y ago
It is surprising that I had to scroll down so far to see this answer. Unlike government services, street cameras, and things that cannot be avoided, it is reasonably possible to avoid Disneyland altogether. I do it quite easily (but I am in a country that doesn't have a Disneyland). If OP doesn't want to participate in the Disneyland business model for monetisation of their brand, then don't do it (no Disney+ either, so that you don't have perpetually disappointed kids).

FearlessNebula 4y ago

What the heck is Disney doing with location data inside the park? And why facial recognition? To fight crime?

winterqt 4y ago

> Unlike an iPhone, my phone doesn't learn much about who is tethering to it, nor does it relay to the access point what is going on or who is accessing it. Anyone know what they're referencing here?

cyberlyra 4y ago
Original author here: My phone runs Sailfish, a mobile Linux OS (Red Hat).

mixmastamyk 4y ago

Disgusting. A few year back we took the family to DL. I had read that they were going to take our pictures and I thought "not a chance" and prepared for a fight. But I knew deep down they had me over a barrel. Gonna turn around and say no to the family (after an hour drive and $$$ spent for parking) at the front steps of DL? Paying cash not practical anymore either, was almost $500 for tix! For whatever reason at the moment we arrived they were not prepared for pix and we walked in unscathed, and without apps. Just like the good 'ol days of... 2010? Looks like I'll never be going back.

advisedwang 4y ago

Both this article and the non-tech companion article [1] skip over talking about why the author wants privacy. The failure to outline her objections makes the countermeasures seem untethered from any motivation; I think that is why so many comments here react negatively to the valuable anti-surveillance work she's doing here. This could be a issue by issue analysis. For example: "I don't want targeted ads -> prevent collecting targeting data -> use a privacy credit card". This is the easiest way to argue for privacy and can cover a lot of ground, however I worry it's too limited. This gives us the world of the "opt out" button which can fix a specific issue but somehow still leaves a really nasty taste about the surveillance world we are in. I'd love to see more writers make on-the-principle arguments for privacy. This author clearly has that depth of feeling so it's a real missed chance. [1] https://www.publicbooks.org/data-free-disney/ https://www.publicbooks.org/data-free-disney/

cyberlyra 4y ago
Original author here. I'm also in favor of more writing about privacy motivation, even if editors don't always want that all in the text they publish. I'm writing more about it at The Opt Out Project in addition to other places: for instance, the famous Pregnancy Experiment, where I kept my data about my (unborn) children away from digital detection: https://time.com/83200/privacy-internet-big-data-opt-out/ https://time.com/83200/privacy-internet-big-data-opt-out/

m463 4y ago

I went to disneyland and didn't want them to take my picture. That was a pain, but they finally relented.

euroderf 4y ago

So what's the chance that this set of countermeasures set off some red lights in the Disney master control room, and they put a tail on him/them for the rest of their visit ?

dredmorbius 4y ago
Trying similar tactics in Vegas and reporting on the shenanigans might be amusinteresting.

its-summertime 4y ago

And by opting out manually using these methods, they've gone from lost-in-the-crowd to unique, including with a publicly findable name, since the whole writing-an-article on it. Unless you tell the other side, "hey don't track me", they can (and will!) legally use your aversion to tracking as another data-point! of course, spreading tracking-avoidance methods helps with this! (as long as we can all agree on which methods to use...)

dredmorbius 4y ago
The activity and blog are clearly a demonstrative performance. Though there's always an appropriate xkcd: <https://xkcd.com/1105/ https://xkcd.com/1105/>

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

cyberlyra 4y ago

I'm the author of the original post. I'm happy to answer questions in thread.

josefresco 4y ago
How annoyed was/is your family at your privacy antics?
- cyberlyra 4y ago
  Not annoyed. Spouse is fully on board. Kids think it's fun, especially as we use data privacy to explain how systems work under the hood. Extended family is supportive. Maybe people are surprised to hear that, but that's been my experience so far.
dredmorbius 4y ago
Have you made any attempt to determine how effective such "personal responsibility" methods are at actually avoiding surveillance, and/or do you have any thoughts on how you might go about finding out? A follow-up on this topic, perhaps interviews with people who'd know, might be of interest. I do like the piece, as a demonstration of the difficulty / cost / inconvenience of actually opting out of pervasive surveillance. As a work of performance art your blog post is excellent. (A point several people commenting in this thread seem to have spectacularly missed.)
- cyberlyra 4y ago
  Thanks! You totally grokked what I'm doing with this--I appreciate it! Yes I do think a lot about the effectiveness of personal responsibility, and its limits. Certainly I could request my logs and data from every company, although that takes more time than opting out. In the meanwhile, I don't block ads as those as my only clues as to what a corporate database thinks it knows about me (obviously I use blockers to stop info flow from me to them, it's just that I want to see what they think they know). I also use lots of addresses and CC numbers so I can trace data migration and can identify the culprit if so ( https://www.optoutproject.net/what-email-address-should-i-use/ https://www.optoutproject.net/what-email-address-should-i-us...) As for if it's working... There are more quantitative ways to tell for sure. In the meanwhile, my Pregnancy Experiment started in 2013 and in the intervening ten years I have seen zero online ads for anything baby- or child-related, and I have only received an unsolicited catalog in the mail every three years (thanks to the above technique, though, I always knew who the weak link was). When I tell other moms that, their jaws drop.

libraryatnight 4y ago

We went to Disneyland end of 2021 and it was unpleasant. The staff seemed stressed, there always seemed to be one or two people being assholes about their masking rules (they were outside off, inside on at that point), and the usual Disney level of attention to every detail was just not there. We chalked it up to pandemic stress, but also thought maybe new leadership was going in a bad - like some conveniences previously available on the app no longer available as they were about to transition to a version where those services would be paid for or made more expensive. Anyway, my following opinion is based on pre-pandemic Disney. Disney for me is a little like Apple in that you're handing yourself over to the corporate overlords and are reliant on their benevolence. These companies take some freedom in exchange for a clean and consistent experience. I don't like the surveillance state either, but going to Disneyland with two families was easy because of the app. We pre-booked rides, pre-ordered meals and snacks, kept up with where groups went if there was a ride split. It was easy to give kids some spending money we knew was only going to get spent in either of the parks they had access to. If you go further and pay for the hotels nearby they're even more connected. And it wasn't creepy, because it's why we went. It was what I paid for. That experience you're trying to opt out of is a core part of their product. It's why their movies are on repeat in houses all over. It's why people will hand their kids and their grandparents alike and ipad. There's an expectation around what these companies provide and a certain level of assumed safety. Now, in Disney's case, since we are paying for it, if we could just get some privacy guarantees when we surrender to their systems I'd love that. I'd even pay extra for it. I'm so ready for people to start selling me privacy tiers. I can pay to get rid of ads, lemme pay to not have my data sold or tracked. I'll vote and harass my reps accordingly, I'll use blockers and unique emails across services, I'll teach my family to do the same, and if I'm at a protest or driving someone to an abortion clinic sure let's talk burner phones and face paint - but I also just don't have it in me to miss out on experiences with friends or family because of my objections.

kylehotchkiss 4y ago
I visited a few months after you did, the masking rules were gone at that point. Everything seemed pretty positive, other than the park just being absolutely crammed with people. I don't know how they'll be able to maintain quality long term until they can reduce the daily headcount, which means we'll all be stuck booking further into the future, but at least you'll be able to walk between rides in the evening.

frietzkriesler2 4y ago

I've long given up on keeping my data safe. What I mean is I try and restrict who has what data and provide junk when necessary but after awhile, there's only so much you can do. So I've done the opposite: I've made it impossible for them to use my data to target me. I block ads on all of my browsers, I regularly reset my advertising ID, and I hope that the amount of trash data I feed makes it even more useless. One day, I'll set up some sort of home server and use next cloud or something and finally move off of Google's garden.

this_steve_j 4y ago

As someone who regularly visits the parks and resorts, I don’t understand what they do with all this data. I use the iOS Disney+ app and their website to make reservations, and don’t attempt to block most of their ad tracking and telemetry. I’ve probably made 50+ visits to the Orlando parks and resorts in the last 3 years and our family spends considerable sums of money on their concessions. So why does every restaurant host and hotel employee ask if it is our first time at the restaurant/hotel? And why doesn’t the app use historical data to promote experiences we are likely to enjoy? Why do they always ask where we are from, if we are parking a vehicle, and whether we (still) have food allergies or preferences? Saving these preferences could save dozens of person-hours per family vacation and would not be difficult to implement, or at least to try. I believe they, like many companies, are just hoarding the data in the hope that one day Someone will come and figure out how to squeeze it or sell because Data Science. Or maybe it will become sentient and some creature will crawl out from the ocean of primordial data ooze.

judge2020 4y ago

> My understanding, from these conversations, is that it is still possible in Disneyland (not World) to evade because they rely on the app and credit card swipes to generate single user ID's, not on a wristband which is subject to infrared detection throughout the parks in Florida. MagicBands (via MagicBand+) has finally being introduced to DisneyLand Resort[0]. 0: https://disneyland.disney.go.com/guest-services/magicband-plus/ https://disneyland.disney.go.com/guest-services/magicband-pl...

jccalhoun 4y ago

This seems like a long way to go to avoid some place that you could simply not go to. I've never been to Disney. I hate kids, crowds, and lines so instead of trying to find some way to get around it I just don't go.

woodruffw 4y ago

There's something exceptionally funny about putting this level of effort into anonymizing your trip to Disneyland, of all places: I was never a "Disney kid," but my understanding is that it's milquetoast in terms of advertising profiles. "Likes and went to Disneyland" is probably roughly as strong as "lives in a house" and "grew up in the US" in terms of personalization signals. (This shouldn't be read as a criticism! I just think it's an amusing application of an otherwise valuable thought experiment/practice.)

mark242 4y ago

The comment I would have to the author is this -- it is all well and good to demonstrate how difficult it is to opt out of marketing surveillance. Great. Completely on board. The question is, how did this make your experience of the park any better? Other than personal gratification of "yay this awkward face paint is stopping cameras from recognizing me", what is it, exactly, that you got that the other 50,000+ people in the park didn't get? Because the completely opposite argument is much more compelling to the general public. Download this app, turn on your location data, and you get notifications for a little personal guided tour. Attach your payment information and you can mobile order food for a quick pickup and save time that you can spend going on the rides. Add your party contacts and you can set up fast-passes to jump the lines for your entire party all at once, again saving you time. If the idea of opting out (which again, great, admirable, etc) doesn't come with a clear benefit, nobody will do it, and the paper attached gets into Howard-Hughes-level of data paranoia.

cyberlyra 4y ago
OP here: This is what the article in Public Books is all about. A lot of the "benefits" the Park presents are made up, manufactured conveniences, accompanied by manufactured inconveniences that make it hard for others to resist. The Park makes people feel like they've get a lot of benefit out of playing along, while the park actually benefits from convincing people so easily to relinquish any control over their personal information. We should think more about whether a convenience or "benefit" on offer--a few dollars off, a few minutes shaved--is a lure designed to get us to sign our data away for their profit. What did I get out of it? Personal data autonomy.
- mark242 4y ago
  That is just fundamentally not true. Disneyland in particular has had a steady, growing problem over the past 15-20 years, accelerated recently with the rise of photo-sharing-sites like Instagram, where they are fighting a balance between keeping the parks accessible and affordable, while also trying to limit overall attendance. A family who books a vacation for a couple of days at Disneyland will struggle to see and experience everything that they want, for the simple reason that there are 50,000+ people (on quiet days!) all trying to do the same things. This isn't manufactured or made up. It is a real inconvenience, and one that existed before smartphones and mass data tracking. The real solution is in eliminating the annual pass program (and raising the ire of the millions of Southern California locals who go to the park on the regular) but that's for another conversation. "A few minutes shaved" is absolutely a tangible benefit, 100%, especially for a family who has paid thousands of dollars to travel, stay, and visit the park. "the app was a necessity, a non-negotiable" - that "non-negotiable" is because compared to the experience even four years ago, pre-app, your day does allow for more experiences, and I suspect you felt that while breezing through the Space Mountain line. Look, I do not work for Disney. Disney does not need me to "shill" for them. But "personal data autonomy" is not enough of a real, tangible benefit to the average person, especially compared to the real conveniences of even the slightest opt-in. It does not take a massive data surveillance program to know that our family are Star Wars fans. We literally do not care if the app is more likely to recommend we go on Star Tours more often. We do care that we're able to go on Star Tours without an hourlong wait.

blobbers 4y ago

Am I the only one who thinks “my life is so incredibly boring that you can track me all day, everyday”?

matt-attack 4y ago

Funny that the author considers D+ asking for birthday and gender to be a deal breaker. I'm always flabbergasted at people whose knee-jerk reaction to forms is to just fill in truthful data. As if it's a moral issue. I have a hypothesis (please prove me wrong): It is not amoral to default to completely fictitious information when prompted on the web. Signing up for D+? "Jose Conseco", Gender? Female. Buying some shoes at a random retailer? Just make it all up. EVERYTHING. Additionally, I've discovered that when paying by credit card, even the billing details can be entirely wrong, with the exception of zip code. There is just zero reason to provide your real address (assuming you're not having something shipped) for charging to a CC. Think about it, you're signing up for HBO Max and they ask for you name. I'm genuinely curious how many people think there's any valid reason at all to answer truthfully. Why does HBO Max need to know your real name? You're just there to watch to videos. This basically applies to close to 100% of places on the internet. Am I the only one?

userbinator 4y ago
Some may consider it fraud, and the legal system might have a say in that too. That said, I think there's a spectrum of acceptability for fictitious information that varies on the person and one requesting it. At one end is anything government or otherwise "real life" or "serious business" related, where I would not hesitate to provide real information. At the other end is accounts for various online-only entities, in which I tend to stay as far from my real identity as possible.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  "Fraud" is deception employed in order to take something of value from someone else. I don't see how this could be considered fraud.

oceanghost 4y ago

Disney uses all this data to "optimize" the park-- for profitability. They're not interested in you, exactly. They've gamified the park, which is what sucks about it now. I was very blessed to have the means to live near Disneyland and be able to afford yearly passes for a decade. I've been to Disneyland at least a thousand times-- and if you think surveillance is a new idea there, you are mistaken. True story-- I worked as a sysadmin for a number of years, and as such found it useful to carry a knife with me to open boxes-- as receiving equipment was a daily duty for me. My weapon of choice was a CRKT "snap lock" mini knife with a blade no larger than an inch. It was completely inoffensive, but it could open a package quite well and due to the design it was quite safe to keep in your pocket. They don't seem to make this knife anymore-- but be aware it was not the quite large "snap lock" knife CRKT still makes-- this guy about the size of a key. So, I arrive at Disneyland like any other day. Park in the mega-structure and when I arrive at the security gate, a very respectful gentleman in touristy clothes says to me, "Excuse me sir, can you come over here for a moment?" He pulls me aside-- he says, "The knife in your pocket. You can't bring that into the park." I am floored. How could he possibly know about a knife I literally keep on my key ring that doesn't even look like a knife? This is the day I learned that Disney employs security staff to pretend to be park guests. I said, "Yes, I do have a knife, but I think if I was allowed to show it to you, you might agree that it's not a weapon. If you disagree, then I'll give it to you, so it doesn't enter the park, but don't throw it away because it's a great knife, so consider it a gift." To his credit, I showed him the knife-- and he said something to the effect of, "That's fine. Have a great day at the park." To me, this was security done correctly. The guy identified a possible problem (my knife), and was allowed to exercise his own judgement about the situation.

Atheros 4y ago
Here [1] is a video someone recorded of a fight that happened in a Disney park. And here [2] is a Reddit thread discussing it. Expand the comments. Numerous people talked about Disney's infamous security and the apparent lack of it in the video. Not a single other person in that thread noticed the four plainclothes officers in the video, two of whom were present throughout almost the whole video. Can you find them? This day was grey-hat day. The first one shows up exactly 30 seconds after the incident starts. The one who does the choke-hold departs almost as fast as he arrived and acknowledges his coworker at 5:29. And no one saw them even from their armchairs. Caught on video and still complete ghosts. [1] https://youtu.be/7N7Yha7dgxw?t=120 https://youtu.be/7N7Yha7dgxw?t=120 [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/cafr3l/fight_at_disneyland_toon_town/ https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/cafr3l/fight_at_dis...

yoaviram 4y ago

Why does the author not simply send Disney a CCPA data deletion request, either instead, or in addition to the rest of the countermeasures outlined in the article? With websites such as this one it literally takes less then a minute to do so (disclosure, I'm one of the creators): https://yourdigitalrights.org/d/disney.com https://yourdigitalrights.org/d/disney.com

dcanelhas 4y ago

AFAIK CV-Dazzle is a hand-crafted adversarial pattern for facial detection, specifically by a Viola-Jones style detector of Haar cascades. The painted patterns invert the brightness relative to the first few filter passed to put you under the detector threshold. Modern face detectors (and recognition) have much stronger priors for e.g. shape and illumination that there is a chance they can separate the intrinsic images related to shape, texture and illumination and still work. I still think there is some merit to the approach though, since modern systems are trained on data for what most people look like (and not e.g. the band members of Kiss). Even so, they are trained to be robust to occlusions. Likely the most successful approach at this point is facial prosthetics and contact lenses to hide your irises...unless theyre using IR to look at the blood vessels in your face..etc.

len_testa 4y ago

I follow Disney's theme park patents for fun. They've got two alternate methods for singling out guests. One uses shoe recognition (https://patents.google.com/patent/US9393697B1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US9393697B1/en). Another identifies individual guests who interact with a group (https://patents.justia.com/patent/9807350 https://patents.justia.com/patent/9807350), and builds a social graph based on that. Neither of these can tie back to personal information. But within the park, they seem intent on distinguish between individuals.