Rental Car - Thumbprint = No Rental Car

An anonymous submitter sends: "Wired is reporting that $$$ Rental Cars is requiring a thumbprint to rent a car... No thumbprint, NO RENTAL CAR FOR YOU!" I thought the rental car business was in trouble with the recent decline in tourism. I guess not.

Re:I like it!

[uslinux.net]

Isn't the only way that it could be of any use to them is if it was linked to some sort of national database?

No. Your prints are on paper, and no one cares about them unless you don't return your rental car. When that happens, Dollar can go to the police, and (assuming your drivers license and credit card were fake), they at least have something to go on. Sure, at *that* point they may be cross checked against the national FBI fingerprint database, but only if you don't return the car.

I can see potential usefulness and potential problems. It all depends on how its used. If it saves me $10 a day on a rental car, I'll submit to it (of course, at this point my fingerprints are already in the FBI database, since I applied for a security clearance a few years back).

Procedures and side-effects

[Observer]

The bit I don't like the sound of is (after discussion of another company's policy)

At Dollar, the rental agreement forms -- and thumbprints -- are stored at the company's corporate headquarters in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for seven years before they are trashed.

I wouldn't have any particular problem with giving a thumbprint provided it's retained only as long as is reasonable to cover theft of the vehicle and fraudulent use of credit card or other identity.

But seven years seems an awful long time to keep records of this sort. One hopes the records repository and the forwarding of the records are all secure....

I also wonder how long the company expects to keep a competitive advantage by doing this - one assumes that it will discourage at least some of the criminal fraternity from going there as a first choice, but if it works that well, other companies may well take it up.

Al