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Concertgoers will soon live in their own personalized version of hell above and beyond the Ticketmaster convenience fee. Live Nation, Ticketmaster's parent company, recently announced a pilot program to ditch tickets in favor of advanced facial recognition technology.
For the pilot, Ticketmaster partnered with Blink Identity, a Texas-based biometric company that previously worked to implement biometric security programs in both Afghanistan and Iraq. The company claims it can make a positive ID in "half a second," even if those being scanned aren't looking directly at its cameras. Once scanned, the system flies through a potential database of tens (or hundreds) of thousands of attendees in an attempt to make a positive ID. Only then will it grant entry to the event.
Replacing physical (or digital) tickets with advanced biometrics systems, as you might have guessed, isn't without its critics.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by kazzie on Wednesday May 16 2018, @07:20PM
In some instances they're getting very strict.
In the UK, a woman bought tickets for her daughter and son-in-law to watch a musical in London. (Hamilton, IIRC) Only after buying the tickets did it become apparent that she was required to turn up at the venue an hour before the performance to exchange her booking reference for her tickets. That's obviously to discourage touts from reselling tickets, but it meant a several-hundred-mile round trip to London and back, and being an unintended tagalong on her daughter's day out. But there's more...
Because touts were turning up to collect their booked tickets and passing them straight on to their (paid-up) customers, the promoters of this musical were also stipulating that the ticket buyer had to watch the show, meaning that the woman in question was facing having to buy a third ticket and sit-in on the show in order to be able to use the two tickets she'd already bought!
(Apparently touts are now block-booking, say, 10 seats for such a performance, and increase their markup on nine tickets to cover the cost of the tenth ticket they have to use themselves.)
I heard this story on BBC Radio 4's Moneybox programme a few months ago. Unsurprisingly, after the media got involved, the promoters decided to let the woman transfer her tickets without further outlay or expense.