Use facial recognition to stop football violence, says police chief inspector
A police chief inspector in Scotland has called for facial recognition technology to be deployed at football matches as a tool for preventing crowd violence. The proposal puts live biometric surveillance of sports fans into the public debate.
Why this matters: This is how mass surveillance expands: one reasonable-sounding use case at a time. Football violence is real, but scanning the faces of thousands of fans who have done nothing wrong is not a targeted response. It is a dragnet. Every person who buys a ticket becomes subject to biometric identification by the state. Once that infrastructure exists at stadiums, the argument for using it elsewhere gets easier to make. The question is not whether anyone wants safer matches. It is whether the public gets a real say before their faces become the entry ticket.
Who should care: Privacy officers · Cybersecurity · General readers · Policy
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