Four Baseball Teams Now Let Ticket-Holders Enter Using AI-Powered 'Facial Authentication' (sfgate.com) 42
"The San Francisco Giants are one of four teams in Major League Baseball this season offering fans a free shortcut through the gates into the ballpark," writes SFGate.
"The cost? Signing up for the league's 'facial authentication' software through its ticketing app." The Giants are using MLB's new Go-Ahead Entry program, which intends to cut down on wait times for fans entering games. The pitch is simple: Take a selfie through the MLB Ballpark app (which already has your tickets on it), upload the selfie and, once you're approved, breeze through the ticketing lines and into the ballpark. Fans will barely have to slow down at the entrance gate on their way to their seats...
The Philadelphia Phillies were MLB's test team for the technology in 2023. They're joined by the Giants, Nationals and Astros in 2024...
[Major League Baseball] says it won't be saving or storing pictures of faces in a database — and it clearly would really like you to not call this technology facial recognition. "This is not the type of facial recognition that's scanning a crowd and specifically looking for certain kinds of people," Karri Zaremba, a senior vice president at MLB, told ESPN. "It's facial authentication. ... That's the only way in which it's being utilized."
Privacy advocates "have pointed out that the creep of facial recognition technology may be something to be wary of," the article acknowledges. But it adds that using the technology is still completely optional.
And they also spoke to the San Francisco Giants' senior vice president of ticket sales, who gushed about the possibility of app users "walking into the ballpark without taking your phone out, or all four of us taking our phones out."
"The cost? Signing up for the league's 'facial authentication' software through its ticketing app." The Giants are using MLB's new Go-Ahead Entry program, which intends to cut down on wait times for fans entering games. The pitch is simple: Take a selfie through the MLB Ballpark app (which already has your tickets on it), upload the selfie and, once you're approved, breeze through the ticketing lines and into the ballpark. Fans will barely have to slow down at the entrance gate on their way to their seats...
The Philadelphia Phillies were MLB's test team for the technology in 2023. They're joined by the Giants, Nationals and Astros in 2024...
[Major League Baseball] says it won't be saving or storing pictures of faces in a database — and it clearly would really like you to not call this technology facial recognition. "This is not the type of facial recognition that's scanning a crowd and specifically looking for certain kinds of people," Karri Zaremba, a senior vice president at MLB, told ESPN. "It's facial authentication. ... That's the only way in which it's being utilized."
Privacy advocates "have pointed out that the creep of facial recognition technology may be something to be wary of," the article acknowledges. But it adds that using the technology is still completely optional.
And they also spoke to the San Francisco Giants' senior vice president of ticket sales, who gushed about the possibility of app users "walking into the ballpark without taking your phone out, or all four of us taking our phones out."
How often do people go nowadays? (Score:2)
I'm going to see the Dodgers next weekend with my family. $700. Yup. This isn't the sort of thing you do every weekend. So, who cares what technology they use to let you in? It's a once in a few years occurrence!
Re:How often do people go nowadays? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, who cares what technology they use to let you in? It's a once in a few years occurrence!
Data is forever - and that includes the "faceprints" which people like you give away for the sake of convenience. To paraphrase Ben Franklin's quote from an entirely different context, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Convenience, deserve neither Liberty nor Convenience."
My problem with this is that everybody who accepts this convenience makes it much harder for those of us who wish to maintain our privacy and autonomy - things which may be considered either essential for or anonymous with liberty. The epithet "Judas" comes to mind...
Yes, MLB is pitching this idea as harmless and implying that the data won't be used for other purposes. If you believe that, might I interest you in a slightly-used bridge?
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Sorry - that should be "synonymous", not "anonymous". I can't even blame auto-correct for that one...
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They just want to see that the phone with the ticket can take a picture of the same person who shows up on the park's MRI system in the right spot. It's far too much data too keep this too long... so there's not much to be worried about.
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Too much data to keep? Bulletin Board Systems were storing and tagging tens of thousands of jpegs with ease in the 1990s. Today there are dozens of successful companies that are built on storing, searching, and retrieving images, including most of the major social media platforms. Storing a few hundred vectors or other hash data about each image is not a significant lift.
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Over 40,000 people fit in the typical MLB stadium... to store a selfie for every seat, for 81 hone games per season, with much higher res cameras....
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Even if they don't pay to keep the raw images, you only need to keep the relevant data points. Not the whole image.
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I'm going to see the Dodgers next weekend with my family. $700.
Hey, they need that money to help pay for an annuity to cover Ohtani's huge, weird contract.
(Yes, that's totally sour grapes on my part. My team, the Seattle Mariners, told us fans for years to "just be patient until the time is right"... and then, this off season when the time really was right, reversed course and cut its budget. So I've decided my budget doesn't have any room for the Seattle Mariners this year either.)
Re:How often do people go nowadays? (Score:5, Insightful)
I wouldn't spend $700 to go see Slayer much less a boring ass baseball game. That will buy a lot of BBQ and beer and you can watch it at home with no other assholes around.
Re:How often do people go nowadays? (Score:5, Insightful)
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If it was Astros at BlueJays... er, forgettaboutit!
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You could get a decent hooker for that kind of money. Would be a lot less boring too.
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The rest of the family might not enjoy the performance as much as you do. Get real.
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They can get their own hookers.
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For $700 I'd like a few luxuries, such as having a live human being greet you and check your ID.
Not saving or storing pictures? (Score:2)
[Major League Baseball] says it won't be saving or storing pictures of faces in a database
Then how does the system work? Once you upload your selfie, it must get stored *somewhere*.
Re: Not saving or storing pictures? (Score:2)
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If the system fails (auto entry) then you might have to.... actually show your ticket to a human ticket validator, just like all the other customers.
If the system works, you get no-contact entry into the venue. When it doesn't work, you don't really lose anything except expedited service.
That said, I wouldn't use it. I don't want to trade my facial pattern, DNA, fingerprint, or retinal pattern just to save half a second for them to scan a QR code on my ticket.
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How 'bout, if this system fails... no ballgame. Afterall, rain disrupts all forms of baseball. If this admission server is down, there's no way to authenticate an iPhone barcode. So, this selfie system is either up, or they're going to have to reschedule the game.
Twins (Score:4, Interesting)
Twins (not of Minnesota) get in free?
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OTOH, identical twins have often gotten off scot free for crimes because they couldn't prove which twin actually committed the crime.
It's also happened more than once - the prosecution couldn't prove which twin did it (they're identical) and thus it couldn't be proved that the one in custody did it.
It's a loophole in most country's criminal trial systems that you wonder why it hasn't been exploited more than a few tines.
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why it hasn't been exploited more than a few tines.
Yeah this loophole is a troubling situation without a clear solution. Let's play the game. There were 21593 homicides in USA (Wikipedia, list of countries by intentional homicide rate, 2022). About 0.3% of birth are of identical twins (Wikipedia, Monochorionic twins); about 20% of homicides are planned ahead ( https://www.proquest.com/openv... [proquest.com] homicides in Portugal 2008-2017; 19.3% premeditated according to table 3 page 35).
According to same statistics above, table 59 page 88, 41.4% of premeditated murderer
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Nobody gets convicted of murder solely because they look like the perpetrator (ok fine maybe, but it's rare). They usually have to have a motive too, and lack of alibi. So an evil twin would have to ensure that the good twin doesn't have a strong alibi (such as being with his wife or at his workplace etc.). The evil twin can't lie and claim he was with good twin's wife because that won't make sense or he'd have to be in on the crime. And assuming he knows when the good twin has a weak alibi, he'd have to no
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Eventually they'd produce "Two twins... one seat."
Old hype insufficient, we must use the new AI hype (Score:2, Informative)
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Facial Authentication, Powered by AI* (Score:2)
* ... and also 1000 low-paid remote workers in Mumbai.
Dark skin (Score:2)
Re: Dark skin (Score:2)
Why not just use BLE only to begin with?
Ticket resales (Score:2)
I imagine the actual point of this is the name scalping impossible.
Optional always becomes the default when it benefits the entity offering the service.
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Scalping is already banned. If you buy a ticket, there's only StubHub or seeking a face-value refund.
useful (Score:2)
This is very useful technology for hired assassins.
Sounds like free baseball tickets (Score:1)
for enterprising hackers. Though I suppose there's probably not a large overlap in the demographics.
It's money, security or both (Score:1)
1) Use facial recognition when entering a sporting event - Detect and eject known hooligans (UK since 2000), Detect known criminals, Detect persons exhibiting suspicions behavior (explosives)
2) Use facial recognition at concession stands - Detect same persons change since entering the event - drunkenness, money spent, unwelcome outcomes (fights),
3) Use facial recognition after the event - Detect orderly fans, detect how they interact in the parking lot (fan to vehicle mapping), build large database of possi