Topping up your tan? We’ll need your fingerprints first

TANNING salons are taking customers’ fingerprints before letting them access sunbeds in a drive to curb excessive use.

Fingerprint scanners are being used at hundreds of salons as an alternative to checking membership cards to verify the identity of customers.

Bosses have brought in the ‘Big Brotherstyle’ measures to stop tan addicts from using sunbeds more than once a day.

But critics said the move was ‘very worrying’, while computer experts raised fears that the sensitive data could end up in the wrong hands. Daniel Hamilton, director of Big Brother Watch, said: ‘Demanding customers hand over this kind of sensitive biometric data is both disproportionate and intrusive.

‘By taking fingerprints for such trivial purposes they are jeopardising the privacy of their customers for the rest of their lives.’

The Tanning Shop, one of the UK’S largest tanning firms, is among the businesses using the scanners, which can be bought for as little as £100 from the United States.

The company has already set up fingerprinting across 70 per cent of its 90 shops in the UK and Ireland.

All new customers are asked to provide four separate scans of their fingerprints. The biometric readers create a digital template, which is used to recognise regular clients and keep records of their tanning history.

The system is also designed to prevent under-18s from using sunbeds by borrowing friends’ membership cards.

The shop insisted that details were encrypted and stored in a ‘secure data warehouse’.

The records are deleted if an account has not been used for 12 months. A spokesman said: ‘ The majority of clients embrace not only the convenience of this method, but the account security it affords them.’

But Kate Macmillan, a solicitor for Collyer Bristow who specialises in privacy law, said: ‘The only way you can control your private information is through preventing it reaching the public domain.’

Michael Parker, of pressure group NO2ID, said: ‘ We have a problem with even police and government authorities having access to this data, so it is very worrying that retail salons can obtain people’s fingerprints when they do not have the same training or secure facilities.’