Park-goers will be required to have their fingerprints and photos on file with the city, the paper said.
This kind of usage can be confusing.
All fingerprint access control systems store a template generated from a person's fingerprint. It is not possible to "reverse engineer" a template into a complete image of the fingerprint that created it. In this limited use case it cannot be said that fingerprints are on file with the City.
Other fingerprint access control systems do store an image of the fingerprint as well as the template generated from it. In this use case, it is accurate to say that fingerprints are on file with the City.
The article implies that the system in place in Poway is of the latter sort.
Related thoughts about a different system can be found here.
