Facial Recognition in Sports

There is an insidious elitism in English sport that suggests football (soccer) exists to keep scumbags away from rugby and cricket. I'll admit that the latter two are much better games but having grown up in a scumbag heartland, I have to say that the elitism is both hugely unfair and ever-so-slightly based on truth. At least the true behaviour of an incredibly small number of "fans" for whom football hooliganism was once a weekend pastime.

Once, but not so much these days. English football fans have become so docile that even those travelling with the England national team - once the scourge of Europe - got themselves into less trouble than the famously well-behaved Swiss at the last tournament. But there was a time, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, when a tiny segment of English fans enjoyed trashing restaurants and bars and fighting with police officers. Memories fade slowly, both abroad - where English fans are still held in contempt - and at home.

And at home, the debate has become decidedly technological as facial recognition and data sharing between football clubs, local authorities and law enforcement move from "pilots" to "limited use" to their probably inevitable mass adoption. It's difficult to explain the implications of this and almost impossible to predict where it might take us because Brits have an astoundingly confused relationship with our privacy and its technological erosion.

When Tony Blair tried to introduce mandatory ID cards, for instance, it caused an enormous public backlash, and their common use in the EU was turned into a line of differentiation between "individualistic and privacy defending" Britain and "socialised" Europe during the Brexit referendum. And, if you've ever wondered how something like GDPR could happen, a large part of the answer is that British legislators pushed for it in Brussels. And, if you own a website and scratch your head at who is going to the trouble of declining cookies, there's a good chance that you have British visitors.

But put CCTV cameras all over public places, and Brits will carry on as if nobody is watching. Let every shopkeeper film beyond their premises, and nobody will care. Let every homeowner install home security, and few Brits will even ask if their neighbour's camera sees through their windows. We've even made TV shows that laude our law enforcers' surveillance skills. Huge and well-funded (and thus fictional) police units are shown deftly using algorithms to sift through footage in which 99.9% of subjects are innocent civilians. Privacy concerns are rarely mentioned.

It is a very short hop from a society that so champions mass CCTV surveillance to one that blithely accepts facial recognition permeating everything. I think that's sad, and while I'll proudly boast my compatriots' ability to stand against many areas of tech encroachment, this isn't one of them - we are dependent on others for this. I found it encouraging, then, that a small group of New York Mets fans recently took it upon themselves to protest the use of facial recognition in express entry gates - basically automated ID verification that opens the gate and lets you into the ground faster than a human ticket checker can.

That's an implementation of facial recognition that most Brits would happily accept in grocery stores, so long as it shortened queues and made buying biscuits faster. But then, the technology didn't stir any real controversy until it was used at football matches last year to catch not only hooligans with football banning orders but also people with other criminal histories who had been placed on a "watch list" database. And that controversy was small.

And maybe it's my British mindset, but I'm very glad those people were being watched, that their faces were recognised and that they were caught. But I also think we've been too accepting of this particular means justifying such ends. The debate around facial recognition needs to get a bit hotter, in my opinion, a bit more grassroots, a bit more Mets.

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