Come closer.
Step up to the kiosk.
Watch right here.
You're about to see Taylor Swift's concert, sure, but stop for a second before you get to your seat and watch rehearsal videos of Taylor Swift and her talented team practicing dance moves for the worldwide Reputation Tour.
What concertgoers did not know is that a facial recognition camera was hidden inside the kiosk, grabbing images of those who stopped to watch the videos.
Rolling Stone broke the story and explains what little they know:
The images were being transferred to a Nashville “command post,” where they were cross-referenced with a database of hundreds of the pop star’s known stalkers, according to Mike Downing, chief security officer of Oak View Group, an advisory board for concert venues including Madison Square Garden and the Forum in L.A. “Everybody who went by would stop and stare at it, and the software would start working,” says Downing, who attended the concert to witness a demo of the system as a guest of the company that manufactures the kiosks.
That's right, it was a demo for potential customers.
This kind of technology could be huge in the entertainment industry, where death threats are met with restraining orders—and then, no decent way to know if the suspect is near the star in public spaces.
Known stalkers would have to be recognized in person by different security details, and likely with the challenge of stalkers who modify their hair and accessories.
Facial recognition can cut through all of this.
This particular incident that has been revealed happened on May 18, 2018, at the Rose Bowl concert in southern California.
Our SecureWorld team also went to see Taylor Swift in 2018, in St. Louis after a day of cybersecurity collaboration. We even saw a kiosk playing these rehearsal videos, but we have no way to know if the facial recognition system was also in use there.
From a security standpoint, can you imagine trying to find threats in this audience as Swift floats above the crowd?
Rolling Stone and other publications claim that Swift has received many, many rape threats and death threats.
I believe it.
While I was a local market TV meteorologist in Portland, Oregon, for two decades, I received two death threats and many angry voicemails and emails saying I needed to be fired.
Women in TV news have it much, much worse with all kinds of creepy and threatening comments during the course of a career.
I can only imagine what the top stars in the world have to endure. It would have to be exponentially worse.
So personally, I'm okay with facial recognition at a concert if it helps lock up dangerous fans.
SecureWorld keynote speaker Rebecca Herold is CEO of The Privacy Professor. She hits on one of the big privacy and cybersecurity questions this type of facial recognition system brings up:
All that data collected through smart devices are not only often stored within the device itself and/or the apps controlling them, but the data is also usually sent to cloud services, often through third-party apps, and then also shared with a wide variety of other third parties.
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And there are more questions:
• Who gets the concertgoers' images?
• How long are the images kept?
• Are the images erased if you are not a match to a Taylor Swift threat?
• Is the database itself secure?
As we wait to learn more, we can't help but wonder: Will the Taylor Swift facial recognition experiment be mentioned at a regional SecureWorld conference in 2019? We'll see what the Advisory Council puts on the agenda.
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