It seems that nowadays every company is trying to look towards and plan into the future and are looking for the next big technological advancement that could help keep their company two steps ahead. Ticketmaster is the latest company looking to do just that and they have an idea that could be changing the way you enter your next concert/festival.
Live Nation, the parent company of Ticketmaster, has recently announced a partnership with Blink Identity. Blink Identity is facial recognition company, that being said Livenation hopes to use that same company to implement facial recognition at concerts and festivals all over that would eliminate the need for any paper or digital tickets.
The way this process would work is that it would register an image of your face as soon as you walk past one of the company’s sensors. Blink’s technology would then match the image against a massive database in practically a millisecond that would then grant you access to the venue or permit you entry into a festival etc.
The testing phase has begun and is underway for this alternative and Live Nation even explained in a recent meeting with investors that Blink has, “cutting-edge facial recognition technology, enabling you to associate your digital ticket with your image, then just walk into the show.”
While in theory this may sound like a great alternative one can’t help but wonder what risks this could pose nowdays with servers being compromised and companies sharing users data unknowingly without users realizing it. After all the program using a massive database with millions of user’s faces stored in it brings up the questions of who would have access to it.
Other variables that may pose some issues would also be on how the software would be able to detect a user’s face months after the ticket purchase is made possibly due to any changes the user undergoes between the purchase and the date of the event.
Unfortunately, Live Nation and Ticketmaster are notorious for forcing users to do things they may not be particularly fond of, so we’ll have to wait and see how this is all rolled out and implemented.