British band highlights dangers of facial recognition capabilities during live show

British band ‘Massive Attack’ surprised attendees at a recent live performance by using facial recognition software - scanning and analysing the crowd in real time - as a means to highlight the dangers of this emerging technology.

The tech dystopia around us highlighted.
Photo: XMU

Big Brother is Watching.

FACIAL RECOGNITION ON DISPLAY

British band Massive Attack is known for blending music with powerful visual messages about technology.

At a recent show, they used a simple face-detection effect combined with a fake “database” to highlight just how dangerous biometric technology can be.

Cameras captured audience members and their faces, processed them through recognition systems, and projected the results as part of the onstage visuals.

As can be seen, faces from the crowd appeared on a large screen behind the band, with each visible audience member displayed alongside a label like “persuasive” or “hoarder”.

Reactions about the band’s use of facial recognition seem to be mixed online. Some praised the display as a stark illustration of how easily surveillance is accepted, while other fans were uneasy about having their data used at a live event.

The band later explained that the live effects at their shows – comprising a fictional, randomly assigned ‘database’ – is satirical. No actual data was stored after collection.

The effect was designed to highlight how easily facial recognition can unwittingly capture people, with Massive Attack themselves writing how the government are “overreaching almost all other Western democracies with their use of public facial recognition … while there is no specific legislation regulating police use of these systems.”

In doing so, the band showed the audience how easily facial data can be collected and displayed – recording, analysing and storing images, often without consent from people.

Facial recognition is already nearly everywhere in Australia and most other developed nations now – from the shops we frequent, to airports and stadiums.

But most of the time, it’s invisible to us. We passively exist alongside it.

What Massive Attack did was strip away that invisibility to highlight how surveillance is prevalent even when we aren’t actively acknowledging it.

The band’s point was that, perhaps, we should.

BIOMETRIC TAKEOVER

Endowing CCTV systems with ‘smart’ capabilities – such as face, object and gait recognition – represents a quantum leap in surveillance power that needs to be handled carefully.

In recent years, there has been widespread and unannounced use of the technology in a range of venues, from hotels and clubs, to sports arenas and retailers.

Pubs and clubs argue more facial recognition will help ‘protect public’
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Bunnings Warehouse was recently found to have taken customers’ private biometric information without consent by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC), capturing the face of every person who entered 63 stores in NSW and Victoria.

Bunnings breached laws with facial recognition technology, commissioner says
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CHOICE found facial recognition technology was in use at the Sydney Cricket Ground (SCG), Qudos Bank Arena, Sydney’s Allianz Stadium, and the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG).

Report finds major stadiums in Australia are using facial recognition
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Since then, the country’s largest stadiums now all scan entrant facial data.

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Most importantly, the technology is used by authorities – like when Australian regulators found that a photo-scraper used by federal police was also harvesting sensitive personal information without consent.

Facial recognition app trialled by police broke privacy laws: AAT
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We are living in a biometric surveillance state, ladies and gentlemen, and soon all of these systems will be linked together in national Digital ID databases.

There are still ways to defeat the technology, such as adversarial masks and anti-surveillance clothing, but the fact still remains that Big Brother is here – and is watching us all.

Next time you stroll through the CBD of your major city or head to a game of football, just remember the images from this concert and realise that is exactly what is being seen by ‘the watchers’ in an undisclosed surveillance HQ.

Makes you see it a little differently, doesn’t it?