Montgomery County residents: Playing Marco Polo soon will require security clearance.
Beginning in the fall, residents will need to scan their fingers to enter the county’s recreation centers, as the gyms, pools and even senior centers turn to technology usually reserved for military posts or intelligence-gathering havens — not a lively night of Bingo.
County officials say switching from plastic cards to finger vein scanners will save the recreation department $50,000 annually, but privacy advocates call the measure intrusive and unnecessary.
“It’s a crazy idea,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “We’re not talking about Langley, right? It’s not appropriate for, say, a community pool.”
The technology will be rolled out in the fall at the Germantown Indoor Swim Center, the Holiday Park Senior Center in Wheaton and either the Marilyn J. Praisner Community Recreation Center in Burtonsville or Potomac Community Recreation Center. Next year, the finger scanners will be expanded to the county’s 33 recreation centers, according to county officials.
The little-publicized plan has led to privacy concerns among some gym rats, recreation officials acknowledge, but they expect the skepticism to fade in coming months.
“This will get people in and out quicker, and now they won’t have to carry a card around” said, Judy Stiles, spokeswoman for the Montgomery County Recreation Department. “Our residents are smart. They will see that this is not intrusive.”
She said those wary of the finger scanners can opt of the system and sign in the old-fashioned way ?– pen and paper. The scanners will not collect fingerprints and the information gathered — name, address and membership type — cannot be accessed by any other county agencies, she added.
The equipment scans an individual’s vein patterns under near-infrared light, which is made into a photo. The image is then converted into a bar code for entrance.
No matter how well-intentioned, though, some critics call the transition a wasted effort.
“This is just going into a gym,” said Melissa Ngo, a privacy rights lawyer in the Washington region. “It seems to be creating a big infrastructure that’s not necessary.”
Montgomery County’s recreation department is the first in the region to use the finger scanners, but the practice is becoming increasingly commonplace nationwide. In some school systems, for example, similar technology is used to identify students who qualify for reduced-price lunches.
County officials say there are no plans to use the system in other departments.
