The National League Football has a fun surprise for all of its fans visiting every single one of its 32 stadiums this season: an introduction to life under techno-hell.
This new implement is marketed, of course, as a “safety” and “convenience” tool.
It will empower individuals to “streamline and secure” blah blah blah corporate jargon blah blah blah….
Related: TSA Rolls Out 'Voluntary' Face Scans at Over a Dozen American Airports
Via The Record (emphasis added):
The National Football League is the latest organization to turn to facial authentication to bolster event security, according to an announcement this week.
All 32 NFL stadiums will start using the technology this season, after the league signed a contract with a company that uses facial scans to verify the identity of people entering event venues and other secure spaces.
The facial authentication platform, which counts the Cleveland Browns’ owners as investors*, will be used to “streamline and secure” entry for thousands of credentialed media, officials, staff and guests so they can easily access restricted areas such as press boxes and locker rooms, Jeff Boehm, the chief operating officer of Wicket, said in a LinkedIn post Monday.
*Clearly there is no conflict of interest when the owner of an NFL team manages to get a league-wide contract for a tech firm they are investors in — everything looks totally above board here, and they surely have the fans’ safety at heart when making these business deals. Let’s not be conspiracy theorists.
Continuing:
“Fans come look at the tablet and, instantly, the tablet recognizes the fan,” Brandon Covert, the vice president of information technology for the Cleveland Browns, said in a testimonial appearing on Wicket’s website. “It’s almost a half-second stop. It’s not even a stop — more of a pause.”
“It has greatly reduced the amount of time and friction that comes with entering the stadium,” Covert added. “It’s so much faster.”**
The Browns also use Wicket to verify the ages of fans purchasing alcohol at concession stands, according to Wicket’s LinkedIn page.
The use of facial recognition or authentication technology, particularly when applied to thousands of people who are scanned in the course of doing their job or entering a sports stadium, has long concerned privacy advocates.
In addition to concerns about the technology being used to track people's locations, privacy advocates and academics say that facial recognition technology intensifies racial and gender discrimination because it is more frequently inaccurate when identifying people of color, women and nonbinary individuals.
**Translation: “Give me convenience or give me death!”
Note that any qualms about this technology do not appear in this article until the tenth paragraph. When they do pop up, the essential problem we should be concerned about is that it adversely affects the non-binaries, not that it’s an Orwellian power grab by out-of-control tech firms that are going to capture this data and find some way to monetize it, probably involving selling it to China for pennies on the dollar.
Although perhaps this kind of techno-authoritarianism may have been inevitable, the Bush-era War of Terror, at any rate, accelerated the program immensely, when Americans were cajoled into submitting to whatever the government said needed to be done in the name of defeating al-Quaeda.
At the PATRIOT Act signing, which sounds oddly much like the NFL face scanning rationale:
The law allows our intelligence and law enforcement officials to continue to share information. It allows them to continue to use tools against terrorists that they used against — that they use against drug dealers and other criminals. It will improve our nation's security while we safeguard the civil liberties of our people. The legislation strengthens the Justice Department so it can better detect and disrupt terrorist threats. And the bill gives law enforcement new tools to combat threats to our citizens from international terrorists to local drug dealers.
—President George W. Bush
March 9, 2006
