WHAT ISÂ BIOMETRICS, FACIAL RECOGNITION & SURVEILLANCE AND WHAT DOES IT HAVE TO DO WITH SOCCER?
BIOMETRICS, FACIAL RECOGNITION & SURVEILLANCE
Biometric identification uses a person’s physical characteristics to identify them. Biometric identification is uniquely powerful because we often leave traces or expose biometric data when in public spaces, it is personally identifiable information, and it uses features that individuals generally cannot change to avoid surveillance. Biometric identifiers include:
- Face prints
- Fingerprints
- Palm prints
- Walking patterns
- Iris features
- Voice prints
- DNA
WHAT DOES THIS TECH HAVE TO DO WITH THE FANS?
This year, the world championship in soccer is being held in Qatar. The world championship in soccer is the largest and most watched sport event in the world. This event gathers a large number of people from all over the world and therefore, to hold this event, a huge organization is needed to make everything go as smoothly as possible. This year, stadiums across Qatar will be equipped with cameras to record fans and this technology is called biometric surveillance tech. As the organizers said, this technology aims to ensure safety at the stadiums, but we can also see the problem that this technology causes, which is privacy. Millions of fans will be recorded and saved with the help of this technology. Face prints, fingerprints are just some of your personal information that the organizers can access.
WHAT IS THE CONSEQUENCE OF USING THIS TECHNOLOGY IN SOCCER MATCHES?
This technology has been applied before throughout European stadiums. Apart from the privacy that is threatened by this technology, there were other problems that this technology caused. During some matches during the recording of people, there was a wrong identification of people and therefore those people were banned from entering the stadium because according to this technology they were identified as wanted criminals. It remains to be seen if there will be the same mistakes like this in Qatar, and even if there are not, it sounds a bit unnecessary to record and collect personal information of people which will later use it for various purposes and various experiments.
As a result of these things and a few other things that happened in the organization of this championship, there were big riots of fans, especially in Europe. Some fan groups even called for a boycott of this World Cup. This technology has quite an effect on the fans and it remains to be seen how they will react to all this happening in Qatar.
Sources:
-https://epic.org/issues/surveillance-oversight/face-surveillance/
-https://www.wired.com/story/soccer-world-cup-biometric-surveillance/
-https://www.inquirer.com/wires/ap/fans-across-german-stadiums-call-qatar-world-cup-boycott-20221114.html