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Yankee Stadium to fans: Scan your thumb and skip the line

Welcome to the future, sports fans – you can use your smartphone to track trades, Twitter can tell you who's on the DL, and now your fingerprints can get you into the ballpark faster. Beginning August 7th, Yankee Stadium will roll out the Clear biometric security service to visitors, which allows fans to use a "Fast Access" line by registering their fingerprints and driver's licenses.

Registration for Clear will take place outside the stadium in tents, and activation is immediate. The Clear service has already been put into place at both AT&T Park in San Francisco and at Coors Field in Denver. Participants who sign up at the ballpark have the option of paying $179 a year to also use the service at select airports including Dallas/Fort Worth, Las Vegas and San Francisco.

Whether or not they care to provide their personal data to the service, fans will still need to have their bags screened before entering the park meaning lines will not be magically eliminated, just somewhat circumvented.

The MLB has mandated tighter security at all ballparks this season, asking for 100 percent of attendees to be screened before entering parks, so the step towards biometric security is clearly an attempt to provide better and faster security. However, with no details on the Clear site about how data is stored or protected, or what kind of security measures are taken with the fingerprint scanners (which can easily be tricked), staying patient in the regular line might be the more secure bet.

[Image credit: shinya/Flickr]