I did a day at Epcot and a day at MK about 10 days ago. I live local, so I bought nothing besides tickets, and a park hopper to get into MK without a reservation. Didn’t buy anything that had anything to do with photos. And yet, this morning they emailed me photos of me on rides to try and get to purchase.
So here’s my question. How do they know what rides I was on? There were no FP’s involved. There’s no scanning of Magic Bands before boarding a ride. Just me walking around and doing stuff. Nonetheless, they were able to sift through thousands of photos of faces of people on rides and identify which ones were me? Not the biggest deal in the world, but bordering on the weird and creepy
If you are wearing a magic band then they have readers around the photo points so that they can associate you with the picture. I like this feature, but I understand how it can be seen as creepy.
I don’t mind too much about Disney tracking me in the parks.
Yup, Magic Mobile acts the same as a Magicband, so if you activated it on your phone, they’re picking up the the phone and associating with your account, even if you don’t have magicbands.
Just as reassurance, neither MagicBand nor Magic Mobile transmit anything personal about you. So while it is transmitting, and someone could technically track the fact that a device is transmitting, the most they can gather is a unique ID. Some random number, most likely 128 bits long in size, or 3.4 x 10^38 unique possibilities.
Now, the receiver of this data would then need to know how to look this number up and match it to a record they keep in their system. When you register your Magic Mobile in MDE, or your Magic Band, you are giving them a way to associate this unique value with your account. So, tapping in or just picking up the device via Bluetooth sends this UUID, which is meaningless without a database to map it to.
No one else, outside of Disney, could use this UUID to do anything useful with. The BEST they could do is tell SOMEONE is in the vicinity. That’s it.
They also pick up the ticket cards I believe so basically anything you use for entry is detected by the photo point. Even if you do t purchase the memory maker package you can see the pics in case you want to buy a single photo.