Is Taylor Swift watching her stalkers?
Men have threatened to marry, kidnap or kill the popular singer
When Taylor Swift played the Rose Bowl in May, a kiosk was set up for adoring fans to view videos of her. But there may have been more to that screen than met the eye.
According to an interview in Rolling Stone, the kiosk took photos of people looking at the videos. The images were sent back to a “command post” in Nashville, where they were cross-referenced, using facial recognition technology, with a database of people who had been identified as potential stalkers of the pop star.
The use of facial recognition was revealed by Mike Downing, the chief security officer of Oak View Group, an entertainment company, who told Rolling Stone that he observed the technology firsthand as a guest of the company that designed the kiosks. “Everybody who went by would stop and stare at it, and the software would start working,” Downing told Rolling Stone.
Facial recognition is proliferating both as a technology to help law enforcement identify criminals and as a convenient feature to help consumers unlock their phones, among other functions. Its use is also growing in the entertainment realm: Madison Square Garden is among the venues employing it. The Swift team’s reported use of facial recognition, however, could represent a new tactic: luring people to step in front of the camera, rather than just scanning a crowd or waiting for fans to pass by.
It was not clear which company designed the kiosk, whether it was used at other concerts, whether any potential stalkers were identified and, if so, what was done about them. The Oak View Group and Swift’s representatives did not respond to requests for comment.
Only a couple of states have laws restricting the use of facial recognition and California is not among them. Nonetheless, many civil liberties advocates consider it to be among the most invasive surveillance technologies because it can be used to recognize people at a distance without their knowledge, curtailing their ability to go about their business anonymously in public.
“Obviously, stalking of celebrities is a real problem,” said Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union. “This is a somewhat sympathetic deployment of the technology but, nonetheless, there are a number of concerns about where this goes.”
Swift has had several docu- mented instances of stalkers. This month, Roger Alvarado agreed to a plea deal that included six months’ imprisonment in connection with a break-in at Swift’s New York City townhouse. The police said he had been asleep in her bed. In 2014, Swift discussed her need for a security detail in an interview with Esquire.
She spoke of “the sheer number of men we have in a file who have showed up at my house, showed up at my mom’s house, threatened to either kill me, kidnap me or marry me.
“This is the strange and sad part of my life that I try not to think about. I try to be lighthearted about it, because I don’t ever want to be scared. I don’t want to be walking down the street scared.”