Taylor Swift did a show at the Rose Bowl in California a few months ago, and to make sure her many stalkers were kept at a distance, the venue was monitored with a facial recognition system.
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As reported by Rolling Stone, the venue featured a kiosk which played a highlight reel of Swift’s rehearsals but also had a bunch of cameras attached to it. Anyone who stopped to watch the screen had their faces scanned and sent to a command post in Nashville, Tennessee where it was cross-referenced with a database of the artist’s known stalkers, of which there are fucking hundreds.
“Everybody who went by would stop and stare at it, and the software would start working,” Mike Downing of Oak View Group told Rolling Stone.
Plenty of artists have used similar systems in the past, but there are, of course, warranted concerns over privacy. As The Verge points out, the legality of such surveillance is on the artist’s side in the US, as a show is technically a private event.
As facial recognition technology advances, we’ll likely see its use become more prominent in a number of ways, whether it’s replacing a ticket to an event by simply scanning your face upon entry, or surveilling an entire population like China is more or less already doing.
Either way, it has the potential to be pretty damaging if we’re not careful with how we use it.
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