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Ticketmaster Hopes To Speed Up Event Access By Scanning Your Face (engadget.com)
Ticketmaster's parent company, Live Nation, has announced that they have teamed up with and invested in a face recognition company called Blink Identity. The ticket sales giant may have plans to scan your face instead of a ticket to grant you access to a venue. Engadget reports: In its first quarter financial report (PDF), Live Nation has explained that Blink has "cutting-edge facial recognition technology, enabling you to associate your digital ticket with your image, then just walk into the show." According to Blink's website, its system can register an image of your face as soon as you walk past a sensor. Blink's technology can then match it against a large database in half a second -- in a blink, so to speak. It's also apparently powerful enough that you don't even have to slow down for its system to recognize you: Just walk normally, and if the technology gets a match, it'll automatically open doors or turnstiles to let you in.
Scanning a ticket is never the slowdown at the entrance to a venue where I live. It's security do bag searches of people in front of who want to bring them into the venue. Of course it isn't really about security, it's about making sure you're not bringing outside food or drink so they can gouge you for food & drink at the venue. I've suggested to the venues that they should have lines for people that bringing bags to speed it up but they don't seem interested or "it would be confusing for other patrons".
I was just reading this earlier
https://www.theverge.com/2018/...
used by south wales police (uk) it identified around 2500 people as persons of interests and around 450 arrests were made but only around 200 were actual matches
is this likely to be better?
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
...and the companies involved will always be ethical and judicious in what they do with the massive amount of biometric data such a system would collect.
I mean, seriously, Ticketmaster. They're above reproach, right up there with luminaries like Monsanto, Haliburton, and Comcast. There's no way we could ever regret this move.
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The system is meant to replace manual identity checks, not ticket checks.
Uh, let's not blindly dismiss that first part; we should be asking why the hell manual identity checks are required in the first place, in order to even justify implementing a system like this.
Just tell them hell no. You're bitching about all the details but forgetting the big picture. Which is: hell no.
I want to know how they'll 3D scan your face when you're buying your tickets from home.
Apple sheep aside: How many people have a big brother style facial scanner at home?
And b) The gates aren't going to simply open and let you waltz right in, they'll still want to make sure you aren't smuggling your own drinks+snacks into the area.
Whatever the reasons behind this multi million dollar investment are, we can be sure it ISN'T for user convenience.
No sig today...
Whatever the reasons behind this multi million dollar investment are, we can be sure it ISN'T for user convenience.
Clearly. This either has something to do with security, or with cutting labour costs (less people at the gate - the security guard is now the person who also checks the occasional person who needs to show a ticket, instead of having both a ticket inspector and a security guard at each gate), or both.
There is no way this will be faster than with experienced (by which I mean, people who have done more than 2 shows) ticket people at the gates. Turnstiles and automatically opening gates...right. There's a reason why, during rush hour in many subway systems, they open one or two gates wide and put a ticket collector/inspector next to it. It's faster than the automated system.
In Soviet America, concert watches you!
Its called "Facebook" and you don't even have to go home to use it.
Seriously, if this system is not an offense against the GDPR, the GDPR is a total failure.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Better yet, don't go to the metal detector and bag search queue. Get rid of that Orwellian shit. Yeah, yeah, you can't make the world perfectly safe.
Also, what's wrong with scalping? If there's financial gain to be had, the tickets are mispriced in the first place.
Go to concerts at bars and small venues where entry is cash at the door and there's no security theater bullshit.
Pity the fool who goes in KISS makeup and confuses the system
Personally, this will guarantee I never go to another concert. Facial recognition is one step too far
You do know that there are smaller venues/artists that aren't affiliated with Ticketmaster, right?
Never going to another concert is like never eating another apple because red delicious apples suck.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
The problem is that Ticketmaster has what amounts to a monopoly on many of the larger venues in the US. Back in 1994 Pearl Jam, which at the time was one of the biggest bands in the world, tried to book a tour without using Ticketmaster and they found that they simply couldn't do it. And as the linked article indicates, Ticketmaster has only gotten bigger and more powerful since then.
Even simpler solution: respect the "Right of First Sale" and be happy you sold any tickets to begin with.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
This solution attempts to fix a problem that doesn't exist.
First off, as many have pointed out, it's the security checks that tend to really slow down admittance to an event.
Second: Slow admittance is a safety feature. You don't want tens of thousands of people rushing into the corridors of an arena all at once. Slow admittance spreads out the crowd.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Then don't see Pearl Jam. There are plenty of other artists in the world. In any little city over about 20k people I can almost guarantee that on a given weekend a bunch of people are playing music that you can go see.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Well, sure I can do that, and personally this issue doesn't affect me a whole lot anyway, because when I go to see music it's usually at a club rather than a big theater or stadium. But I think it's outrageous that I don't even have the *option*. For example: I would have liked to see Leonard Cohen's final tour, and that would have almost certainly required dealing with Ticketmaster. They're a horrible company that I don't want to give any money to, and that was true even before they began asking me to hand over facial recognition data.