-
Welcome to the WDWMAGIC.COM Forums!
Please take a look around, and feel free to sign up and join the community.
NextGen / FP+ / Magic Band. The official truth starts to appear
- Thread starter marni1971
- Start date
I think it is blatantly obvious where I was going...and I'm wondering if people have a problem with it? (it being the fact they are being tracked)
Goofyernmost
Well-Known Member
Yup! And that is the plan. That nice toll free trek down I-95 will be disappearing soon.When they do the same to I-95 they will be rolling in the dough
ParentsOf4
Well-Known Member
A couple of points to consider:
- The device is tracking a car, not a person. Anyone can be driving the car. As I've mentioned before, my concern is with being tracked bodily. Now if the government passed a law saying I must drive only that car ...
- With its system of checks-and-balances, I trust democratically elected governments considerably more than private corporations. The U.S. government (Federal and State) has crossed the line many times but, in general, has shown itself capable of self-correcting when it comes to civil liberties.
P.S. Full disclosure, except for a summer job decades ago, I've worked in the private sector all my life. I know what we focus on and what we'd consider doing if it wasn't against the law.
dhall
Well-Known Member
It's not that the consumer is entitled to do business or not -- it's setting limits as to
- how much information the company is entitled to require from consumers in order to do business
- what the companies are allowed to use the information for
- how/when/why the companies are allowed to disclose the information to third parties (and what constitutes a third party -- separate divisions of the same company?)
I wanted to get a check cashing card from my local grocery store once -- they asked for my social security number, which I refused to give them. My understanding of the law is that they are not allowed to ask for that, but it didn't stop them.
It's fairly common to see a small business post a sign giving a minimum that must be purchased before they'll accept a credit card. None of the major credit cards actually allow this -- the business is in violation of the contract they signed with the issuer, but that doesn't stop them.
The lines are fuzzy wide gray lines, and they're moving, generally not in the direction that favors consumers. Can you or I just walk away from companies that have unreasonable expectations? Sure -- but that doesn't make the expectations any less unreasonable. If all of the alternatives carry similarly unreasonable expectations? Then we're screwed, and that's where we need the line between what's reasonable and unreasonable to be enforced.
A couple of points to consider:
Corporations focus on profits. Democratic governments protect our liberties. All of our constitutionally protected civil liberties have "reasonable" limits. Let's get laws passed governing the reasonable use of tracking devices and we should be good to go. Of course, we need to get past all those lobbyists trying to influence the creation of such laws.
- The device is tracking a car, not a person. Anyone can be driving the car. As I've mentioned before, my concern is with being tracked bodily. Now if the government passed a law saying I must drive only that car ...
- With its system of checks-and-balances, I trust democratically elected governments considerably more than private corporations. The U.S. government (Federal and State) has crossed the line many times but, in general, has shown itself capable of self-correcting when it comes to civil liberties.
P.S. Full disclosure, except for a summer job decades ago, I've worked in the private sector all my life. I know what we focus on and what we'd consider doing if it wasn't against the law.
You, in particular, have focused on being tracked bodily. But a majority of the opponents on here have no been so specific. My main problem with what you responded with is in bold. Have you not been paying attention lately? I always keep an eye on the sky nowadays for drones since this administration seems to think killing Americans on American soil based solely on suspicions of terrorism. Or forcing you to enter into a business contract that you otherwise would not and then financially punish you if you don't. Of course all this is in jest, and I'm not trying to get too political here (but am intentionally taking jabs), but government isn't too concerned about protecting civil liberties. At least if a corporation violates civil liberties and enough paying customers get fed up with it and vote with their dollars, the corporation then has incentive to change. The government will tell you (literally) just to shut up and take your medicine.
Say, @ParentsOf4 you don't happen to have a smartphone with Google Maps on it by any chance do you?
(I kid, I kid)
ParentsOf4
Well-Known Member
LOL, no smart phone, no tablet.You, in particular, have focused on being tracked bodily. But a majority of the opponents on here have no been so specific. My main problem with what you responded with is in bold. Have you not been paying attention lately? I always keep an eye on the sky nowadays for drones since this administration seems to think killing Americans on American soil based solely on suspicions of terrorism. Or forcing you to enter into a business contract that you o therwise would not and then financially punish you if you don't. Of course all this is in jest, and I'm not trying to get too political here (but am intentionally taking jabs), but government isn't too concerned about protecting civil liberties. At least if a corporation violates civil liberties and enough paying customers get fed up with it and vote with their dollars, the corporation then has incentive to change. The government will tell you (literally) just to shut up and take your medicine.
Say, @ParentsOf4 you don't happen to have a smartphone with Google Maps on it by any chance do you?
However, in the spirit of full disclosure, I had a vested interest in the technology in a previous life.IMHO, where appropriate, the courts have been stepping in slowly but surely to turn back some of our elected officials' more zealous deeds. Just consider the courts decisions on the Patriots Act to see the system generally works when it comes to civil liberties. We are one Supreme Court justice away from returning to the days of the Warren and Burger Courts.
One of the problems with what Disney is doing right now is they are not coming clean. Consider, for example, the RF disclaimer buried in their multi-page "Terms And Conditions". For even the very few that bother to read it, there is no mention about being tracked. Yet in his letter to Rep. Markey, Iger coyly referred to it, writing "We will not share location information collected in connection with the MagicBand ..." Gotta like the term "location information".
Disney is doing nothing illegal by tracking us and that's my point. At what point does it become illegal?
One crazy idea I had was for a law requiring anyone using tracking technology to post a sign in front of each device large enough to be read by anyone whose position was being tracked. (Think of signs posted at the theme park entrances, entrances at each attraction with RFID readers, etc. "Your location information is being recorded.") Do that at WDW and the public very quickly would demand something be done.
The government wouldn't even have to step in. Once people realized how closely their positions were being monitored, enough might be "creeped out" to cause a drop in attendance, forcing Disney is take them out on their own.Corporations often don't want you to know what they are doing because it hurts business. Simply require them to disclose what they are doing and they quickly learn it's financially not worth doing.
Genie of the Lamp
Well-Known Member
Geez the more I see this thread, it reminds me of the Occupy Wall Street movement and that slogan "People before profits". If you're a classical economist/advocate, you argue that Disney is in a competitive market(key force) and that they're is nothing wrong with they system they are abiding by now. However, I see Disney becoming/having that mindset that they are a monopoly or at the very least an Oligopoly. They say they are in the experience business and no one can do what they do. Since that is the case, I can definitely see and agree with most that we need someone be it govt,etc. that we need to strike to Disney that they start "putting people or in this case workers(or consumers) before profits in which result in higher paycheck for the Disney Execs". Just something I learned in my MicroEcon college class.
lego606
MagicBandit
I'm still not getting this whole "Disney will track me individually" thing. What motive would they have? Why do they care about where Guest 329284920 went? That gives them no strategic information.
As large, demographic groups, this whole thing makes sense. Disney would probably very much like to know how many, say, girls 9-12 visit Snow White, so they can go round up a few more friends for her. Or which segment of people get and use Fastpasses for what attractions. Marketable data is what matters to them, not where you went.
I saw above that a "possibility" was that should you spend $200 in the Emporium, you get a Fastpass+. I see no laws against that, and they have all the business reason to. Is it expensive? Yes, but it rakes in the money at minimal cost to them. I get why one may have qualms with such a system but I'm not sure why its an issue.
As large, demographic groups, this whole thing makes sense. Disney would probably very much like to know how many, say, girls 9-12 visit Snow White, so they can go round up a few more friends for her. Or which segment of people get and use Fastpasses for what attractions. Marketable data is what matters to them, not where you went.
I saw above that a "possibility" was that should you spend $200 in the Emporium, you get a Fastpass+. I see no laws against that, and they have all the business reason to. Is it expensive? Yes, but it rakes in the money at minimal cost to them. I get why one may have qualms with such a system but I'm not sure why its an issue.
dhall
Well-Known Member
They can use approximate location as a selection criteria for targeting advertisement. Suppose the lines are currently short at Pecos Bill's -- they could advertise to everyone currently in Frontierland & Adventureland to try and fix that.
I believe that they will track how long individuals spend in particular areas -- not that they want to know how long I linger in the Emporium, but they have to know that about me to figure out the average time that people like me linger in the Emporium (which is something they do want to know). That puts them in a position to measure how that value changes over time as they experiment with different layouts, different product mixes, different background music, heck, different practically anything.
It's also possible that they'll use tracking of individuals as their way to measure queue length, although that requires a level of precision that I'm not convinced they'll have.
ParentsOf4
Well-Known Member
For me, the issue is not what their motivations are or what they intend to do with the information. It's irrelevant. The issue is that they are tracking me at all. I don't want to be tracked for any reason. I don't want the world to become a place where it's acceptable for my children to be tracked as "terms of business", with powerful corporations getting to decide what those terms are.
You are not being tracked by Cinderella, Mickey Mouse, or Walt Disney. You are being tracked by a multi-billion dollar corporation run by a CEO who made $40M last year while simultaneously planning to cut 10% of the workforce after record profits, forcing those who remain to work even harder while Iger received a 20% pay increase. It's a company that has let its most valuable physical asset slowly decay, cutting maintenance budgets to save a few bucks while simultaneously raising prices at triple the rate of inflation. While its competition up the road is spending billions adding great new attractions, it has spent over a billion on datamining so it can figure out ways to extract even more from its "guests". It's a company that buries its disclosure in a mind-numbingly long "Terms and Conditions" and, even in those as we've seen from Iger's letter to Markey, doesn't come clean. It's not a company that instills great confidence.
Even if Walt Disney were still alive, still running the company, I wouldn't want them tracking me. Given what the company has become, I really don't want them tracking me.
jakeman
Well-Known Member
When I used to play Roller Coaster Tycoon I would randomly pick up guest and drop them in the lake. Maybe that's what they are planning?
Gabe1
Ivory Tower Squabble EST 2011. WINDMILL SURVIVOR
Oh my. A burden to be that nuts-oid. I feel better 'bout my thought of theft. Good Lord.
lego606
MagicBandit
I understand your point about being tracked as the "price of business", but I still feel this really matters on how it is presented. Wannado City in Florida (if they're still open) tracked kids within its gates so that parents could safely separate from them and still be able to find them via a kiosk system. Would most parents object to such a system? While RFID is definitely more difficult to implement such a system for, and the Disney parks are definitely a different environment, I would find it hard to complain about such a system.
And all that has nothing to do with tracking. You can make whatever moral judgements you want about the company, but the pay of their CEO or how they choose to spend their money, has, in the end, no bearing on how it uses the capabilities of the RFID system.
I agree with you about the T&C and the Markey piece, but as this is a system that has not been released and is still, to some extent, in testing and I imagine some information is unreleased. There is no MagicBand page on the WDW site as of yet, there are no MagicBand distribution locations in the parks. Until the full, official "copy" on what MagicBand does is released, I am unable to pass judgment on whether they have presented that information in a more public way.
Rob562
Well-Known Member
Actually, queue length is one of the easiest things they can implement in the NextGen system.The system doesn't need to be able to track someone as they wind their way through a queue. They only need to know the start and end times of their wait.
All it takes is two readers that can read the "broadcasting" portion of the band, one at the entrance to the queue and one at the front of the line. Calibrate the readers so they only detect bands within a foot or two, and voila, you've got a system that can calculate the wait times of most band-wearing Guests who enter the line.
Sure, it'll get some mis-reads of bands that were grabbed by one reader and not the other (Guests who approached the entrance but then turned around and left, or a Guest who happened to have their arms raised over their head as they walked past the waist-high reader), but an intelligent programmer can have the system ignore those "outliers".
It'll certainly give the system a lot more data to use to calculate the wait times than the current FLIK cards where only one card is handed out every 5 minutes or so.
They could even go a step farther, and install a reader or two within the queue. That way you avoid those early-morning instances where a queue fills up quickly, but the standby time isn't accurate yet because it's based on people who were there early in the line but there are still "actively being timed" FLIK cards still somewhere in the queue but are stuck in the now backed-up line. (Sometimes attractions will manually adjust those incorrect wait times, or they'll "trick" the FLIK system into displaying a longer wait time by scanning a card at the entrance but holding onto it for a little while before handing it out) So if the band is read entering the queue and at the mid-point, the system would know that the queue is somewhere between the mid-point and the front of the line. Won't work for Standby lines that are often being re-configured, but on something like the Soarin queue where it's pretty much the same thing all the time....
-Rob
the-reason14
Well-Known Member
So anyone purchasing tickets within the next few weeks will get a wrist band?
There is a simple solution to this problem ...Don't got to Disney.
By entering their property you are subject to their policies (right or wrong not debating that).
Anyone that argues that they want to go to Disney and not be "tracked" then tough noogies.
Monty
Brilliant...and Canadian
- In the Parks
- No
No. At this point no-one knows when [if?] the Magicbands will start being used in earnest. They have done and will likely continue to do some sporadic testing with CMs and/or guests, but a full implementation date has not been announced as yet.
Monty
Brilliant...and Canadian
- In the Parks
- No
There's no indication that Disney will "track" anyone anyway. The technology being put in place would give them the potential to do so technically, but no-one has shown that they have any intention or any reason to actually do so.
My personal opinion is they will use the RFID to identify individuals as they enter or progress through specific attractions as a way to incorporate their first names into interactive functions, identify groups of guests in a particular park area to target special FP+s or text message tips for rides nearby that currently have short wait times, restaurants that have short queues or available ADR spots, etc... There may be a level of basic crowd control/monitoring done was well. Tracing every movement of every guest in real or near-real time would be a monumental undertaking with little or no ROI, so I highly doubt they would waste the money on building the capability into their infrastructure.
Cosmic Commando
Well-Known Member
The weird thing is, I support Next Gen. Just made an unnecessary post based on an interesting fact I read. Obviously, I forgot inflation. So, I bow down to my superior, elder intellects.
