Facial Recognition,Masks, Temperature Checks in Sports.

I get the temperature checks and the making sure the masks are on coming into a stadium now because of Covid-19 and Clear has been around for a bit at Citi Field and the airports for a while now but you had to sign up for it. When does it get out of hand? Do you get tracked throughout the stadium to see if you are wearing your mask? Does it check to see where you are shopping? What you are getting to eat? Does it stop you from drinking too many beers? What other uses do they use it for. I know the Mets have had the facial recognition working for a while now so does it actually help or hurt?

 From AXIOS.com

Multiple professional sports teams are considering facial recognition systems to make admitting fans to stadiums as touchless as possible during the coronavirus pandemic, Wall Street Journal report.

How it works: The New York Mets and the Los Angeles Football Club are testing facial recognition technology in their stadiums, according to the WSJ.

• Los Angeles FC is trying an app called Clear, made by Alclear, that would let fans take and upload a selfie to their accounts and link it to their existing Ticketmaster profiles.
• At the stadium, one camera would measure the fan’s temperature, while a second would determine whether the fan is wearing a mask. The fan would pull down their face covering to allow the camera see their faces and admit them if they have purchased a ticket.
• The Mets are using Alclear’s recognition system to authenticate players and staff as they enter the stadium and take their temperatures. The MLB team is considering using the technology for admissions as well.

The big picture: In their current form, stadiums could be the perfect environment for COVID-19 to spread because of the proximity of fans.

The next big wave of technology at the ballpark could be facial recognition, as MLB and Tickets.com are working with CLEAR to introduce biometric ticketing at participating ballparks in 2019.

This new partnership will extend Tickets.com’s API to CLEAR’s biometrics systems, allowing CLEAR members who link their CLEAR profile with their MLB.com account to gain entry with just the tap of a finger or, in the near future, facial recognition technology. This new biometric ticketing technology will be piloted at select MLB ballparks later this season, with broader roll-out to CLEAR and Tickets.com-enabled ballparks beginning in 2019. Tickets.com, an MLB wholly owned ticketing technology company, is the primary ticketing partner for 23 MLB Clubs. With this partnership, CLEAR becomes the Official Biometric Identity and Ticketing Partner of Major League Baseball.This was from 2018 posted on ballparkdigest.com.

And this is from March 2019 posted by Sagacious News

If you think that I am exaggerating and that this is just another fear-mongering story, I leave you with this gem of a quote taken from the N.Y. Times article.
“The days of having 40,000 to 60,000 people in the stadium and not knowing who they are, I think those days are going to disappear,” said Charles Carroll, a senior vice president at IDEMIA. 

Last year, the N.Y. Times revealed that Madison Square Garden was secretly using CLEAR facial recognition to spy on fans.

“It is unclear when the face-scanning system was installed. The people familiar with the Garden’s use of the technology, who were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about it, said they did not know how many events at the Garden in recent months have used it or how the data has been handled.”''

For years, I have been warning sports fans that the MLB, NFL, and NHL have been using facial recognition. So it was not too hard to guess that the N.Y. Times was talking about CLEAR.

As a recent Madison Square Garden announcement confirmed.
“We are pleased to welcome CLEAR into the Madison Square Garden family,” said Ron Skotarczak, executive vice president, marketing partnerships, The Madison Square Garden Company.

Read more here.