The theme parks are huge money-makers for Disney, and since admission is expensive, there is a lot of incentive for people to try and game the system. More than protecting you, the fingerprinting is to benefit Disney's bottom line.

For one-time tickets, I think the fingerprint is mostly just an analytic tool rather than to catch cheaters since the potential damage to Disney is limited. For these tickets, gathering biometric data allows Disney's analysts to count how many unique customers have visited in a given time period, like some holiday weekend, how many visitors are repeat visitors, exactly when do they come back, etc. Believe me, that kind of info is gold to Disney and its managers.

However, for season passes, which are expensive and can be used unlimited times, Disney tries to discourage "sharing" of passes as much as possible. In that case, your fingerprint (or probably more likely, the biometric hash value) must match the fingerprint originally used with the pass the first time or you won't get in. They may even take away the pass right there for violating the purchase agreement. But I'm sure they'd be happy to let you in once you walked over to the ticket booth and forked over the cash for a new ticket. They are a business after all and are only after your money. <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />