Use facial recognition tech to stop football fan disorder, HM inspector’s report urges
A report from HM Inspectorate has recommended that facial recognition technology be deployed at football matches to help identify and deter disorderly fans. The proposal targets crowd disorder at sporting events and suggests surveillance technology as a preventive measure.
Why this matters: This is how facial recognition expands — one reasonable-sounding use case at a time. Football disorder is real, and nobody likes stadium violence. But deploying live facial recognition on crowds means scanning thousands of people who have done nothing wrong, just to catch a few who might. Once the infrastructure is in place at stadiums, the pressure to use it elsewhere follows quickly. The people most at risk are not hooligans. They are ordinary fans who never consented to having their face checked against a database just to watch a match.
Who should care: Privacy officers · Cybersecurity · General readers · Policy
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