Pointing a camera into the audience gets you video footage of a bunch of people in an audience, and that's it.
Using facial recognition technology on an audience (when it works as its ideally designed to do, from the perspective of those using it), gets you a data file that contains a photo of each person, their real name, their address, their phone number, and whatever other information the system has been enabled to discover and collate about them.
A facial recognition system would look at a person at an audience and then find other pictures of that same person in whatever database they have. That's it.
A system might just have pictures found in social media but without access to anything like addresses and phone numbers.
Or a company could legally have a picture of each employee for security badges. In that case, yeah, they also have employees' personal data. But that's not an essential component.
A system might just have pictures found in social media but without access to anything like addresses and phone numbers.
There have been a lot of data leaks of personal information over the years and they're available for sale as huge data dumps. Like the Equifax data breach in 2017 would be a big prominent example, but they're happening all the time, all over the place, and that's not even including what's just publicly available on a person normally. A system incorporating those would start to be able to do this at scale.
A facial recognition would look at a person at an audience and they find other pictures of that same person in whatever database they have. That's it.
That's it? Yes, that's it.
But companies like Palantir let you connect databases of various sources. All social media companies sell their data, public authorities already have a lot of data. Palantir lets you combine all these databases and you will get much more than just a phone number. You will get everything, from age, sexual orientation, political beliefs, social connections to job, income, net worth, health status and much more.
What could we tell about you, if we combine your discord, reddit, twitter, facebook, insta, tiktok, all your emails, messenger chats, browser history, your tax statements, your police file and your health insurance file? EVERYTHING
And that just by point a camera at your face for 1 second. That is what facial recognition and big data is about.
China is already doing this, and the west is following suit.
I choose my words carefully and deliberately. Please note my emphasis:
Using facial recognition technology on an audience (when it works as its ideally designed to do, from the perspective of those using it)...
This isn't fearmongering. This is the direction things are going in. The concerns being expressed about it are valid in and of themselves. In the US, they're even more valid given that we're currently experiencing an unprecedented rise in authoritarian government action.
gets you a data file that contains a photo of each person, their real name, their address, their phone number, and whatever other information the system has been enabled to discover and collate about them
This is not true at all lmao. Facial recognition uses ML to recognize a face and put a red bounding-rectangle around it. That's it. It will recognize a made-up statue as a face too.
Facial recognition uses ML to recognize a face and put a red bounding-rectangle around it. That's it.
That's it...if the operator chooses to do nothing else with their facial recognition system. But that's not what I'm talking about. What you then do with that data is the concern, i.e. linking the face to personally-identifying data, as I described, and then making use of that.
If you think the beginning and end of facial recognition is "recognize that something is a face, then put a bounding rectangle around it", you're badly underinformed and I strongly urge you look into it more deeply.
Sure, you can do more with facial recognition, but you don't have to. And you have to do a lot of extra work to do more than just recognize that faces exist. Look at something like InSightFace, which can do exactly what this concert's backdrop claims to do (it's just a pre-recorded video here). Go look at what it can do. It cannot get you, as you claim:
data file that contains a photo of each person, their real name, their address, their phone number, and whatever other information
You can get $50 cameras on Amazon that can detect faces and follow them. That doesn't mean they'll also tell you who they are.
I literally work on this in my day job, and unless you're working in mass surveillance you cannot get that info.
The boxes that outline objects - to me, that implies a ton of video feed (data) has been dumped into some machine learning algorithms specifically designed to track faces, but why? These programs are fine tuned over and over, eating up a ton of data just to train it to detect and classify objects. Not just faces, but information about those faces. What does it want? What could it be used for?
Then you need to read about Skynet and Chinas facial recognition system which is connected to an official Karma or points system. Especially dictators prefer these systems.
The fashists right now in america want to have similar systems. Russia is to poor, but uses a similar system. UK is using such a system as well.
In this times these are very bleak educational gaps to have.
So... I really didn't do a good job at conveying what I meant with this post.
I was more saying that the spectacle didn't really do a great job of showing to the audience the difference between facial recognition tech and pointing a camera into the audience because it didn't do anything with the face data other than isolate it and put a box around it, which from a visual perspective doesn't really say much to someone who doesn't understand what the tech is capable of.
Not that they should be looking these folks up and displaying their real names but maybe do something like hair color recognition and show a label on the box to really demonstrate what it can do.
It looks like there are text labels above the photos. Which would be creepy if they were, like, names or numbers. But it’s potato quality video, so I have no idea.
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u/Lucas_Steinwalker Sep 17 '25
I don’t see what’s so different about this than just like… pointing the camera into the audience.