Funny thing. Over the past few months, my gym changed the way members check in. Previously, they used membership cards with a barcode on the back. You come in, you hand your card and ID to the employee behind the counter, they scan your card, verify that your membership is active, and let you pass. But now they replaced the bar code scanners with fingerprint readers. I'm a big fan of technology for the sake of convenience, but this seems kinda sketchy.
According to the little informational handout they have, they don't actually capture your fingerprint. Apparently, the system just creates a unique pattern based on your fingerprint. Uh, huh. I ain't buying that story. I don't think I can blindly take their word for it. I'm sure the system is capable of capturing your actual fingerprint. Whether or not they store it permanently or temporarily in a cache is unknown. Either way, I can see a potential for a security breach. Which can lead to identity theft and other not so fun stuff.
I really don't know what their motive was to implement such a system. Maybe to make it easier on the employees? I'm sure they get overwhelmed during peak hours, scanning people's cards one at a time. But there's a flaw to all this. It's pretty easy to just come in during peak hours, pretend to place your finger on the fingerprint reader, and then walk on in. Typically, there's one or two employees behind the counter. And during peak hours, they're usually busy ringing up people that want to buy supplements or whatever. They totally ignore the people that are checking in. Hey! Free gym membership! Just blend in with the crowd, and you'll be alright.
I do have to say that I'm glad they're not forcing everyone to use the new check-in system. At first, they kept hassling me about it. And they warned (threatened) me that they won't be accepting the barcode membership cards anymore. But I kindly told them, no thanks. Apparently, many other members said no as well. Because they stopped bugging people about it, and they now manually check in members that don't want to use the fingerprint readers. Since I'm at the gym almost everyday, a few of the employees recognize me. They don't even bother to check me in manually. They just tell me to go on in. Ha!