Of Ballparks and Biometrics

What happened

This summer Major League Baseball (MLB) and the Philadelphia Phillies are experimenting with facial authentication technology to enable “hands-free,” “frictionless” entry at Citizens Bank Park.

The pilot program, called Go-Ahead Entry, enables fans over the age of 18 to take a selfie inside the MLB app. This image links to any tickets associated with the fans account, allowing them to enter the stadium by simply walking through a facial scan camera, eliminating the need for physical tickets or barcode scans.

Jason Ritchie, who traveled from Maine for a recent four game homestand, compared the experience to the E-ZPass system on toll roads. “You don’t have to put your bags down,” he said. “You keep walking, and I don’t have to have my tickets out. I think it’s a great idea.”

While there have been a few hiccups, the pilot is going well, says MLB Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer Vasanth Williams. Phillies CTO Sean Walker is “hopeful this is just the way that fans transact in the ballpark in the future.”

So What

We are moving into a world where our faces, fingerprints, and eyeballs authenticate our identities and enable all sorts of activities, from protecting our data, to buying a beer to taking an exam. We wonder, however, about the potential for misuse. The same technologies that can speed transactions, secure our digital identities, and promote public safety can also be used for gatekeeping, discrimination, and control.

We know, for example, that facial recognition algorithms currently exhibit biases that make them more likely to mis-identify people of color; that Madison Square Garden Entertainment’s used facial recognition technology to bar some ticketholders from its venues; that the British government is exploring ways to expand its use of facial recognition; and that the company formerly known as Twitter just updated its privacy policy so that it can “harvest users 'biometric' information, including fingerprint, face recognition and eye tracking data.”

All these developments make it easy to believe the dystopic future George Saunders created in his short story My Flamboyant Grandson. In the story, the narrator and his grandson travel to New York to see a Broadway play. Along the way they are fed a steady stream of personalized extended reality (XR) advertising. This technology is so embedded into society that Citizen Helpers patrol the city to make sure people are watching the ads served to them. At one point, a  Helper catches the narrator disabling the ad-tech and fines him for this violation, something the narrator expects and accepts

This is not future many would prefer, but it isn’t inevitable. If George Saunders can imagine it, we can imagine and build a different one. That, for us, is the power of futures thinking: the more we identify, understand, and interrogate the forces that will play a role in the future, the better we can work to create the future we prefer. Foresight nurtures agency, which is, I believe, what we want for students.

Food For Thought

Below are some questions you might explore with students across all grade levels. We hope they stimulate thought and discussion about facial recognition technology's role in our society and the balance between convenience, security, privacy, and civil liberties.

Elementary School

• What is facial recognition technology? At this stage, the focus can be on understanding the basic concept. This could be tied to lessons about how each person is unique and how technology can recognize these differences.

• Why is facial recognition technology used? Discuss the various uses of facial recognition technology, such as unlocking phones or entering stadiums. Try to relate it to familiar experiences to make it more understandable for the younger students.

• How can we keep our personal information safe? This is a chance to introduce the concept of privacy and why it's important, even in a digital age. Discuss simple steps that kids can take to safeguard their personal information online.

Secondary School

• How does facial recognition technology work and what are its potential benefits and drawbacks? Older students can delve into the technical aspects of this technology, as well as discussing its ethical implications. This can also be tied to lessons about artificial intelligence and machine learning.

• What are the privacy implications of facial recognition technology? This question encourages critical thinking about data privacy. Discuss how personal data is used, stored, and protected, and who might have access to this information.

• How can facial recognition technology be misused and what are the ethical considerations? Discuss potential misuse of this technology, including implications for civil rights and liberties, and how it could impact different communities differently. Explore ethical questions such as how the technology should be regulated and the implications for consent, particularly in public spaces.

And here are a few questions that could help us re-consider our own practices and roles.

• How might we handle the ethical implications of using biometrics and facial recognition technology in our classrooms?

• In what ways might we need to adjust our teaching practices to ensure equity and fairness, especially considering the potential biases of such technologies?

• What do we need to learn so that you are prepared to apply these technologies responsibly? What assumptions and beliefs might we have to relinquish or revise?

• How might our students be our guides in this world? What literacies, skills, and understandings might they have that we do not?

A Scene from the Future

Honestly, we can’t top George Saunders. We recommend that you read My Flamboyant Grandson. While Saunders wrote the story more than twenty years ago, we believe it still serves as a relevant and provocative way to imagine futures in which our digital and personal identities are inextricably intertwined.

Generative AI Disclosure

We used Poe to access ChatGPT and Claude. This week we had these two AI chatbots provide feedback on our draft, do some copy-editing, which neither is great at yet, and compose a prompt we could use to with Bing Image generator. That prompt gave us a helpful start, but we had to simplify and modify to get it to produce something we felt fit the articles’s topic and tone.