Just because facial recognition was established for one use case doesn’t mean it won’t or can’t be adapted to others. At airports, Delta Airlines began using facial recognition for self-service to check out bags in 2017, but after expanding to ticketing and security, facial scanning is starting to use personalized flight itineraries on airport screens and in some in-flight services. Clear also sells services to Major League Soccer clubs, such as BMO Stadium, the home of Los Angeles FC.
Last summer, Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium launched a small facial recognition pilot program for entry with up to 100 season ticket holders of the National Soccer League’s Atlanta Falcons, but plans to expand to 36,000 season ticket holders at Atlanta United FC begin at the end of the MLS season. February.
Atlanta is rolling out the red carpet to make the facial recognition entry exclusive and fan interest, but “I don’t want to require a face to do anything,” said Carl Peerburg, CTO of AMB Sports and Entertainment, which owns the two teams. and the Mercedes-Benz Stadium. Company executives say they are looking at ways to use facial recognition to improve efficiency around the stadium, but only if the person chooses to participate. This may include verifying a person’s age for the sale of alcohol or the purchase of food and merchandise. AMB is also considering using handprints 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 to deny people entry, Peerburg says, something the French soccer club experimented with in 2020.
“I don’t think we would touch it,” he says. “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 go there.” He sees the difference between mass surveillance without consent and forcing people to choose a way to reduce the time they spend in line.
Any log-in system can be used for exclusion, and the slippery slope of a creeping mission is a problem whether facial recognition is being deployed by a government or a private organization, says Albert Fox Kahn, executive director of the nonprofit Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. He has been involved in the debate over facial recognition in New York for years, from its use by the NYPD during the Black Lives Matter 2020 protests to its installation in apartment buildings and public housing.
Fox Kahn envisions the biometric economy emerging in stadiums, enabling things like personalized advertising similar to what can be seen in Minority Report. But once an entity gains the ability to track virtually anyone, the technology can also be used to control and monitor movement, a power ripe for abuse.
“Facial recognition provides rich and powerful tools for potential use against all of us, and I’m very concerned about the full range of applications we’ll see,” he says. Even in a stadium that uses the technology purely for commercial purposes, “every private sector database is one court decision away from becoming a tool of surveillance.”
The use of facial recognition in private places with tens of thousands of people raises the question of whether it is acceptable to use the technology for crowds of people without a choice whether to connect. Finding stalkers in the crowd at Taylor 2018 Swift’s concert raised similar questions.
In August 2020, a panel of three UK appeal judges ruled that South Wales Police had breached his privacy and human rights by subjecting him to facial recognition without consent. This system incorrectly identified more than 90 percent of people at Cardiff City Stadium during a 2017 UEFA Champions League game.
In addition to private face databases, about half of the US population is in the DMV’s photo or photo 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 a person The Prüm database, which is managed by the European Union, is expected to expand facial recognition in public places in all countries of the bloc. Meanwhile, commercial services such as Clearview AI and PimEyes extract facial data from billions of photos on the Internet.
