Taylor Swift Has Ushered in a New Wave of Concert Safety — But Are We Ready For It?

By Yoonj Kim


A blonde in a ponytail. Teenaged brunette wearing eyeliner. Latina with glitter on her cheeks. All stared unknowingly into a concealed camera recording their facial statistics as they watched rehearsal videos of a beloved blue-eyed pop star at a concert, their images beamed 3,000 miles away to a Nashville command post to be cross-referenced against a database of known stalkers.


Such was the scene at Taylor Swift’s Reputation concert last spring at the Rose Bowl, where a kiosk discretely equipped with facial-recognition technology reportedly recorded fans without their knowledge or consent at her May 18 concert. Any time the news broke seven months later immediately after a security expert spilled the beans to Rolling Stone, the creepily dystopic revelation started with the fact that fans were essentially tricked into participating in a secret facial recording.


“I did visualize [the kiosk] however didn’t go through it,” Bianca Peralta, a Swift fan who was at the concert that weekend, tells MTV News. “I don’t think she should have had it at all. I understand it was to support her out with her security. Nevertheless, I mean, these are her fans.”


Facial recognition is a form of biometric technology that can indicate individuals based on live facial information — like walking passersby at a concert — using a special camera. This facial intelligence is compared against an existing database of images to calculate who the person is — or, in other cases, it may would be gathered to compile a new database. To this day, it remains unclear exactly how the technology from the Swift concert was utilized.


“Everybody who went by would stop and stare at it, and the software would begin working,” Mike Downing, CPO of Oak View Categorize and former policeman, told Rolling Stone in December. Downing knew about the secret surveillance as a visitor of the kiosk manufacturer. Oak View Categorize hasn't responded to a request for comment, and neither Swift nor her security team have issued any public explanation. The most pressing questions pertain to what happened with the fans’ facial images: Were they deleted, sent to law enforcement, saved in a private database?


As any owner of an iPhone X would know, facial recognition technology is entering — or invading, depending on your privacy stance — our lives from several unregulated angles. Apple’s Face ID requires a live image of the owner’s face to unlock the iPhone. Google’s Nest cam is able to know and recognize human faces at the doorbell. Airports like JFK and LAX have partnered with Homeland Security to conduct facial screenings in lieu of tickets at international flight gates. In other words, you could reasonably expect the existence of face-tracking technologies nearly everywhere you go.


this shows if you’re a privacy freak, it could be a good time to invest in an attractive ski mask or massive sunglasses. (Unless you stay in Illinois, that is — the only state that requires anyone using biometrics to get the consent of the people from whom they’re collecting information.)


“There’s no national privacy law at all,” says Jennifer Lynch, senior employees attorney at the Electronic Freedom Foundation. “Facial recognition has been used in other situations like casinos for years, mainly to track card counters […] Nevertheless what those systems don’t tend to do is take a picture of each person and store it in a database. I don’t know if that’s what was happening at Taylor Swift’s concert or if she was just looking for people who’ve been known to harass her.”


If I asked her if she thought the screening at the concert was against the law, she paused and replied, “I think it was ill-advised. It’s categorize kind of a Wild West.”


Taylor Swift greets fans while in at Wembley Stadium throughout the Reputation stadium tour.


Taylor Swift has had a disturbing variety of stalkers while in her career. And one could presume that the facial recognition was intended to keep not just herself although the concert-goers safe as well.


“I think it’s good for safety reasons,” says Stephanie Worth, another Swift fan who attended her Rose Bowl efficiency that weekend. “If you think about the Ariana Grande concert, had this been rolled out back then maybe something could have prevented that situation, because folks are fearing going to concerts.”


Assuming that most of them are not criminals or persons of interest, most attendees at the Swift concert likely did not need to worry about being singled out by the technology. Nevertheless, if, as an example, you were a Latino man in your early twenties with thick eyebrows, these features could have triggered alarms in the mysterious command post for fitting the profile of a known Swift stalker.


This particular man, Roger Alvarado, was recently sentenced to six months in prison for breaking into Swift’s home and taking a nap in her bed — a understandably terrifying scenario. However the example highlights an intrinsic civil rights distribute. A normal fear among critics is that the technology could perpetuate existing inequalities in the criminal justice system. A couple of statistics have confirmed intersectional bias in facial recognition algorithms, including one by MIT which noticed that lighter-skinned boys are subject to an error rate of only 0.8 percent while darker-skinned females are misclassified up to 34.7 percent of the time.


“We know stores discriminate against people of color if they think they find shoplifters,” says Lynch, referring to the possibility of security cameras making use of facial recognition to deter theft. “It would be young white girls who are shoplifting, yet the store is targeting young black boys, so if the store accuses you and puts your face in a database and shares that with other stores, it can would be you’re not allowed to go into stores anymore.”


It’s also likely that the Swift concert incident was just one cat that got out of a big, fat bag.


“It’s certainly an emerging technology,” says Jason Porter, a vice president at Pinkerton, a private global security firm upkeep celebrities and VIPs. “Clients have asked for it.”


Taylor Swift performs onstage at the Rose Bowl on May 18, 2018.


Whenever it comes to concerts and live events, a new wave of facial recognition is already upon us. Madison Square Garden had reportedly been using facial scanning without customer knowledge. “As piece of our ongoing efforts to protect this world-famous venue, we are doing everything in our power, including using facial recognition, to prepare it the safest place possible,” says a spokesperson from The Madison Square Garden Business.


Live Country and its subsidiary Ticketmaster also invested in Blink Identity, a facial recognition startup with links to the Department of Defense, which is now doing private beta tests to roll out at venues in the near future. Its immediate purpose could be to speed up the ticketing process and identify customers.


“We are focusing on building a technology that permits individuals use face recognition increase to be granted the ability to access to locations and services in a convenient manner,” says Mary Haskett, CEO of Blink Identity. “People will have the ability to enroll by taking a photograph of themselves with their cell phone. That will give them access to a special ‘VIP’ lane at venues.”


Whenever I asked her how they would make sure the security of their photographs, she mentioned they follow best practices for intelligence technology including encryption so that venues would not have access to personalized information. Since statistics leaks, hacks, and other breaches of privacy are constant threats, the encryption would provide a layer of protection in the case the database does get compromised. In back of that is the question of audience perception, with varying estimates on Americans’ favorability to facial recognition technology.


“We believe strongly that the use of face recognition technology should routinely be disclosed and should routinely be voluntary,” she mentioned. “If Taylor Swift had posted signs saying that identity technology was going to be used at her concerts to help protect her from stalkers, I don’t think it would have affected ticket sales at all.”


A September 2018 survey by the Brookings Institute, yet, noticed that only 33 percent of Residents of the United States were rewarding to facial recognition being used in stadiums.


Without consideration, in a time once concert safety has proven to be a key concern, it’s understandable that venues and artists will try out new techniques like facial recognition for enhanced crowd control. Yet if pleasing the crowd is also a concern, more needs to be done to address issues of consent and privacy.


“I’m not any much less of a Swift fan,” Peralta says. “But I also perceive this can be discriminating. Where is the line drawn?”