'Nuclear bomb of privacy' or easy entry? MLB's face recognition gates delight and daunt

WASHINGTON — As eager baseball fans streamed into Nationals Park on Opening Day, unfettered by ticket stubs or mobile bar codes, it was a decisive victory for convenience.

And perhaps a tacit acceptance of the surveillance state.

Washington and three other ballparks have added touchless entry powered by face recognition this season, following up on a pilot program in Philadelphia last season. "Go-Ahead Entry" requires the user to submit a selfie via MLB’s Ballpark App. Upon arriving at the ballpark and after having any bags inspected, fans simply proceed, unfettered, through a gate.

No ticket, no phone, no printout necessary.

It was met with unanimous applause from fans using the feature at Nationals Park for the home opener Monday, who also were impervious to any worries that sharing their facial data might somehow invade their privacy.

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Privacy? For many, that ship has sailed.

“I always tell my son, I worry about privacy,” says Nationals fan Bob Malloy after he stepped through the kiosk with his wife, Maribeth.

“He’s like, ‘Dad, they’ve already got it all.’ Because of my phone, Apple’s got it. Microsoft has it. They’re going to do (face recognition) at the airport now.”

In this case, the proverbial They is Major League Baseball, which went to great lengths in hopes of assuring fans their data – in this case, face recognition – is secure.

Go-Ahead Entry was rolled out after three years of development, says Karri Zaremba, MLB senior vice president of ballpark experience and ticketing. It requires fans to take a live selfie within MLB’s Ballpark app, after which the image is discarded and the app converts it into a unique numeric token.

As the ticket-buying fan approaches the gate, the system looks for a match between the two numeric tokens. The approaching fan then walks unemcumbered into the stadium.

Fast. Frictionless, as Silicon Valley likes to say. And, MLB insists, secure.

“Something like this we wanted to be extra careful and considerate and thorough, which is why we spent a very long time developing, testing and vetting our solution,” says Zaremba.

“It has not been a cursory look.”

And now, MLB is charging forward with Go-Ahead Entry. It began at one gate in Philadelphia’s Citizens Bank Park in 2023, was expanded to multiple gates there and then, for 2024’s opening, to Washington, Houston and San Francisco.

By midseason, four more teams will add the technology, bringing the total to eight – nearly a third of the league’s 30 stadiums. MLB’s statistics indicate a 68% faster entry to the ballpark, with gates able to process entries at two and a half times the normal rate.

It is fast and it is free. Yet privacy experts wonder what cost might be extracted for convenience.

“Face recognition is the nuclear bomb of privacy,” says Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst and privacy expert for the American Civil Liberties Union. “It has a very real potential to be expanded. People need to ask themselves whether they want to live in a world where their face is scanned at every turn.

“We end up in a checkpoint society of constant scanning, where our freedom is curbed.”

Yet when it comes to technology, fans already lean toward the fatalist end of the spectrum.

'They've already got your face'

After a prompt on the MLB Ballpark app alerted Dennis Miles to the Go-Ahead Entry, he signed up with a hint of skepticism.

Not about face recognition, but functionality.

“I didn’t think it was going to work,” says Miles, who with wife Cathy winged it from Maryland’s Eastern Shore to D.C. for the opener.

“The first day of technology usually doesn’t work well.”

Yet there they were, skirting about 200 people in line, all because, as Dennis put it, “we took our picture yesterday.” He bounded up a staircase after entering almost disbelieving in its ease.

As for privacy concerns?

“They’ve already got your face, anyway,” says Miles. “You’re carrying a phone around – it knows where you’re going.”

That proverbial They – be it government agencies, a perceived Deep State, or Big 5 tech companies Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Alphabet and Microsoft – has seemingly stripped bare any privacy misgivings for a significant amount of consumers. The cursory scanning of terms and conditions has given way to the desire for the frictionless, and a what’s-one-more mentality when offering up personal data.

Hey, it’s all out there, anyway, right?

“I think the battle is far from lost,” says the ACLU’s Stanley. “I think over time, people will claw their privacy back. We are in a very bad place for privacy right now. It is true: People have a big feeling of helplessness and fatalism about it.

“I understand that reaction. But I think it’s far too early to give up the ghost. In some ways, it’s a little too glib to say we’ve given up all our privacy, because there are many, many ways we have privacy that we would still be very angry if it were invaded.”

For MLB, it was simply a matter of augmenting fan experience.

Zaremba says ballpark entry was one of the “pain points” consistently cited by fans, and to be sure, Go-Ahead Entry cannot mitigate all of it. Users still have to submit to bag checks, and fans in Washington have been conditioned to store their belongings in clear, zippered totes.

Yet come the summertime, when fans fairly roast while waiting at long queues to scan tickets saved to their phones, it will cut down on sweat and, probably, tears.

Just one member of a party must register for Go-Ahead Entry, so a family of four can stride in without breaking stride if just one of the adults is part of the program.

“We had an overwhelmingly positive reaction from the fans, real surprise and delight reactions,” Zaremba says of the rollout in Philadelphia last year. “The biggest complaints we got was, ‘When are we going to make it available everywhere?’ They wanted it at every gate.

“The idea is to not have to break stride. You can walk straight in, eyes up, and experience the awe of the ballpark without having to look down or wrestle with your phone or stop and stand in a long line.”

Easy as that.

'Entirely optional'

For Stanley, the concern comes with the template left behind, the one that leaves a “numerical representation of your face. And that template can be used to recognize you in other places.”

He doesn’t doubt that MLB has taken great pains to build a secure system, but cites past breaches as causes of concern, such as a U.S. Customs And Border Protection hack that resulted in nearly 200,000 number of license-plate images and traveler ID photos stolen from a subcontractor.

“Every security researcher recognizes that it’s much harder to defend than attack in the cyber realm,” he says. “Your defense has to be perfect, and the attackers only have to find one vulnerability.”

He sees face recognition as another power transfer from individuals to companies, a use of technology that “over time, has the potential to power everybody but the normal person.”

Fans wanting to retain that power, of course, can still get in the stadium the old fashioned way (say, 2021-22) and scan a bar code in their phone.

“This is entirely optional,” says Zaremba. “For people who are not comfortable, they also have the option of entering the traditional way. But we wanted to meet fans where they are and obviously, fans are on a spectrum of comfort level and how they want to experience and interact with baseball.”

And on this chilly Opening Day for dozens of early entrants, comfort, empowerment and freedom looked something like scanning a photo and walking in bereft of ticket and worry.

“Not one bit,” says Jeff Giuseppe, a Fairfax, Virginia resident who felt good vibes only after passing through the Go-Ahead Entry. “I’m not a criminal and I don’t do criminal things. I’m good!”

And besides, he notes, “Wherever you are, there’s cameras.”