Get used to face recognition in stadiums
Just because facial recognition has been established for one use case doesn’t mean it can’t or can’t be adapted for others. At airports, Delta Airlines began using facial recognition for self-service baggage drop in 2017, but after it expanded to ticketing and security, face scanning is beginning to be used. individual flight routes on airport screens and in some in-flight services. Clear also sells to Major League Soccer teams such as BMO Stadium, home of Los Angeles FC.
A small facial recognition pilot started last summer at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta with up to 100 NFL Atlanta Falcons season ticket holders, but plans to expand to 36,000 football club season ticket holders.” Atlanta United” when the MLS Season starts at the end of February.
Atlanta is rolling out the red carpet to make the face-recognition entrance feel exclusive and appeal to fans, but “I don’t want to require a face to do anything,” says Carl Pierburg, CTO of AMB Sports and Entertainment, which owns two teams and the Mercedes-Benz stadium. Company executives say they are looking for ways to use facial recognition to improve stadium performance, but only if a person chooses to participate. This may include checking a person’s age to sell alcohol or buy food and goods. AMB is also considering using fingerprints or Bluetooth signals from a smartphone app for ticketing and payments.
Despite high hopes for the technology, Mercedes-Benz Stadium does not use facial recognition to restrict access and prevent people from entering, Pierbourg says, something the French football club experimented with in 2020.
“I don’t think we’ll touch that,” he says. “It’s not that the safety of our fans isn’t important, but when you start scanning normally, there’s a line there that we have to really make sure we’re comfortable crossing before we start it.” He sees the difference between mass surveillance without consent and forcing people to choose a way to reduce the amount of time they spend in line.
Any entry system can be used for exclusion, and the slippery slope of mission creep is a problem, whether facial recognition is used by governments or private entities, says Albert Fox Kahn, executive director of the nonprofit Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. It has been a part of the NYC facial recognition debate for many years, from its use by the NYPD during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests to its installation in apartment buildings and public housing.
Fox Kahn suggests that stadiums will have a biometric economy that will power things like personalized advertising similar to those seen in Minority report. But once an entity is able to track almost anyone, this technology can also be used to control and monitor movements, powers ripe for abuse.
“Facial recognition provides rich and powerful tools that could potentially be used against all of us, and I am very concerned about the full range of applications that we will see,” he says. Even in a stadium that uses this technology exclusively for commercial purposes, “every private sector database is one court order away from being turned into a police tool.”
The use of facial recognition in private venues with tens of thousands of people raises the question of whether it is acceptable to use this technology on a crowd of people who have no choice whether to agree. Finding stalkers in the crowd at Taylor’s 2018 Swift concert raised similar questions.
In August 2020, a panel of three UK appellate judges ruled that South Wales Police violated privacy and human rights by subjecting him to identification without consent. The system misidentified more than 90 per cent of the people who were at the Cardiff City stadium during the 2017 UEFA Champions League game.
In addition to private face databases, approximately half of the US population is registered with DMV photo or photograph databases used by police in criminal investigations, and the nationwide HART biometric database developed by the US Department of Homeland Security is expected to include information on more than 270 million human. . The Prüm database, operated by the European Union, is expected to expand facial recognition capabilities in public places across all bloc countries. Meanwhile, commercial services such as Clearview AI and PimEyes are extracting facial data from billions of photos online.