The Pokémon Company Announces Facial Recognition System to Help Kill Scalping at Japanese Card Stores, Mandatory From Elementary School Age
The Pokémon Company has announced a facial recognition system for Japanese card stores designed to combat scalping, with participation required from elementary school age and up.
Why this matters: Biometric data collected from children is about as sensitive as it gets. Faces are permanent. You cannot change them after a breach or a policy shift. The goal here is stopping resellers, which is a real retail problem, but the solution enrolls kids into a facial recognition database just to buy trading cards. That is a significant amount of data to collect, and it is worth asking who stores it, for how long, and what else it could be used for once it exists.
Who should care: Privacy officers · Cybersecurity · General readers · Policy
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