Ticketmaster Wants to Replace Your Tickets with Your Face

Event ticketing giant Ticketmaster has partnered with a facial recognition software developer in an effort to create a concert experience that doesn’t require a physical or digital ticket at all — just your face.

Ticketmaster parent company Live Nation has announced that they are partnering with a facial recognition company called Blink Identity, Engadget reports. According to Live Nation’s first quarter financial report, Blink Identity has developed “cutting-edge facial recognition technology, enabling you to associate your digital ticket with your image, then just walk into the show.” Blink Identity claims that they can register a users face the moment they walk past a sensor, matching the users face against their massive database in half a second.

Blink Identity’s facial recognition software is purportedly so fast that event attendees will not even have to stop walking for it to identify their face and grant them access to the venue — they simply have to walk towards the entrance and if the users face is recognized, the turnstiles or door will allow them to enter. This new form of ticketing may be convenient for some, but there has been many issues with facial recognition software in the past. Aside from issues of user privacy and the “creepy-factor” due to some users not liking the idea of having their faces scanned, often facial recognition software is simply not accurate.

Just recently, Asian users of Apple’s new iPhone X, which features a facial recognition feature, claimed that the device was unable to recognize them. Recent research has also claimed that facial recognition software is quickly able to identify white males but often struggles with other ethnicities and women. This could easily result in users that paid for their ticket to a venue being denied entry due to a software malfunction.

Blink Identity has previously done work for the Department of Defense and has a strong reputation, but that doesn’t mean they’re immune to mistakes. Furthermore, the issue of hackers now being able to steal biometric data as well as other personal and financial details presents a scary new risk to users. Whether this new partnership between Blink Identity and Ticketmaster will be successful is not clear, only time can tell if users will adopt this new facial scanning technology.