Celebrities as high-profile as Taylor Swift are bound to have stalkers. Of course to what extent these stalkers do is anyone’s guess, but obviously it’s not a good thing. For the most part celebrities typically keep bodyguards to help keep them safe, but Taylor Swift might have employed more hi-tech levels of protection.
According to a report from Rolling Stone, it seems that during Swift’s concert earlier this year, the musician might have actually employed the use of facial recognition technology that allowed her and her security team to identify her known stalkers, presumably so that they can keep an eye on them and their location to make sure that they’re not up to no good.
The facial recognition tech was hidden in a kiosk which showcase Swift’s rehearsal clips, and whenever someone looked in the display, that’s where the facial recognition tech would kick in. The images would then be sent to a “command post” where they would be cross-referenced with a database of her known stalkers.
We have to applaud the clever use of the technology, but at the same time there are some pretty obvious concerns, such as privacy. For example who owns the photos of the concertgoers who had their faces scanned without their permission? How secure are those images? Are they kept or deleted after? These are some the nagging questions that probably need to be addressed in the near future. In the meantime facial recognition tech is becoming more popular as we’re starting to see it being adopted at more airports around the world.