Taylor Swift is using a cutting-edge technology to prevent stalkers from attending her concerts.
Swift’s security team has been leveraging facial recognition technology to keep her known stalkers as far away as possible, according to Rolling Stone. They first pulled off this relatively enormous task earlier this spring, when fans watched a Taylor Swift concert rehearsal from digital kiosks. What they didn’t know, however, was that these digital stands were mapping their faces to see if any of them were recognized as Taylor Swift stalkers. Creepy.
Rolling Stone reported the following:
Taylor Swift fans mesmerized by rehearsal clips on a kiosk at her May 18th Rose Bowl show were unaware of one crucial detail: A facial-recognition camera inside the display was taking their photos. The images were being transferred to a Nashville “command post,” where they were cross-referenced with a database of hundreds of the pop star’s known stalkers…
…Despite the obvious privacy concerns — for starters, who owns those pictures of concertgoers and how long can they be kept on file? — the use of facial-recognition technology is on the rise at stadiums and arenas, and security is not the only goal.
It’s not clear if these databases capture and keep onlookers’ faces or how long they might hold on to them. But one would suspect they might, seeing as they’re trying to gather a database of stalkers. Swift’s team hasn’t commented on the matter but this technology is reportedly on the rise.
Ticketmaster recently invested in Blink Identity, a startup that uses facial recognition technology to identify people in half a second (or so it claims). It hopes to start using it as an enhanced safety feature to make getting through security lines easier, perhaps eventually eradicating the use for paper or digital tickets altogether. Think TSA pre-check, but way creepier and likely more expensive.
It’s Taylor Swift’s world, we’re all just living in it.