Someday in the not-so-distant future, you might be able
to walk into a concert venue without waiting in line for your ticket to
be scanned — because instead, the venue will automatically scan and
identify your face.
That’s the experience that Live Nation and Ticketmaster
suggested they’ll try to develop last week, when announcing an
investment in Blink Identity. Blink is a brand new company that claims
to be able to identify people walking by in “half a second,” even if
they aren’t looking straight at a camera.
“We will continue investing in new technologies to
further differentiate Ticketmaster from others in the ticketing
business,” Live Nation wrote in a note to investors
last week. It added that Blink’s technology could let you “ associate
your digital ticket with your image, then just walk into the show.”
While that sounds convenient, it also means that concert
venues would have to be outfitted with surveillance equipment. And on
perhaps an even worse note, it means that Ticketmaster — a company
everyone hates more with each new convenience fee tacked onto their bill
— would need to develop a database of all its concertgoers’ faces,
which a lot of people aren’t going to be comfortable with.
For now, there don’t appear to be actual plans to put
this tech into place. It’s not even clear that Blink’s tech works as
effectively as the company describes. But it’s clearly something
Ticketmaster is thinking about.
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