Stadiums Are Already Using Facial Recognition at Games

As someone who works as a broadcast engineer at a Major League Baseball stadium and has interacted with numerous ballpark security employees, the use of facial recognition software is quite widespread in professional sporting venues, both to identify "do not fly list" individuals (banned, trespassed, known terrorist, etc.) and "VIP list" (local and larger politicians, high net-worth individuals, celebrities, corporate magnates, etc.) people.

It also dramatically reduces the amount of time it takes to locate missing children, which is an almost-daily occurrence.

as a westerner .. in the USA / California, ubiquitous facial recognition in public places is dystopian. Yet, a conservative Japanese colleague was recruited about six years ago, to fly to Houston and work for a client building facial recognition with DeepLearning. But, he was not told the name of the client. We had lunch in Berkeley and he bragged of the pay. I was literally angry, I said "this is not going to be allowed in the West" .. here we are.. His response? he took a cellphone photo of my face quickly without permission, and laughed at my ire. He laughed at me, and he made so much money in the last six years, managing an outsourced engineering team in India among other things, that he went from working-poor in the SF Bay Area to FIRE. That all occurred before Covid-19.

> The growing popularity of facial recognition at stadiums and music venues like Madison Square Garden has drawn criticism from privacy advocates who say the technology doesn’t work as well for women or non-white people.

I am so sick of this complaint. Although the easiest to reach for, it is also by far the weakest argument against facial recognition, and it becomes weaker every day as the technology improves.

And that’s not the problem that MSG made headlines for anyways. MSG banned a bunch of people involved in lawsuits against them, and those people were upset that they were turned away. The fact that facial recognition facilitated it is not relevant at an individual level. What is interesting is the scale of the control that such a system enables, that it questions our intuitions about this kind of thing.

No one questions that an individual establishment can ban an individual person for all but a small set of reasons. But what should make us pause is the fact that this same technology can be used to ban people from every store in the country simultaneously and permanently, whether or not they deserved it, and with no legal recourse.

Facial recognition and mass surveillance has been done at stadiums, casinos and all over cities for over 12 years.

I worked at a company in NY that designed and deployed the software that controlled the video feeds for stadium and casinos. We even had our software running when Obama went to a stadium in NY.

Our software certainly recognized faces, objects like backpacks and guns, detected loitering, etc.

Events were triggered for custom event setups and triggers like guns spotted or black listed people.

Fun fact, the original architects and owners of the company were Israeli (still are). My project manager was ex-mosaad and used to be a software developer himself.

I went to a SF Giants game the other day with StubHub tickets ready to scan. I entered the bridge side of the park ready to go through metal detectors. I walked through and there were no detectors but cameras at the gate. I was confused and just kept walking and then someone scanned my tickets. I literally felt like I could have walked in with contraband and nobody would stop me. Were those cameras that looked at me on the way in doing some sort of scanning to see if I looked like I was nervous or suspicious? Genuinely curious because that seemed really dangerous.