Four Baseball Teams Now Let Ticket-Holders Enter Using AI-Powered 'Facial Authentication'

'The San Francisco Giants are one of four teams in Major League Baseball this season offering fans a free shortcut through the gates into the ballpark,' writes SFGate.

'The cost? Signing up for the league's 'facial authentication' software through its ticketing app.'

The Giants are using MLB's new Go-Ahead Entry program, which intends to cut down on wait times for fans entering games. The pitch is simple: Take a selfie through the MLB Ballpark app (which already has your tickets on it), upload the selfie and, once you're approved, breeze through the ticketing lines and into the ballpark. Fans will barely have to slow down at the entrance gate on their way to their seats...

The Philadelphia Phillies were MLB's test team for the technology in 2023. They're joined by the Giants, Nationals and Astros in 2024...

[Major League Baseball] says it won't be saving or storing pictures of faces in a database — and it clearly would really like you to not call this technology facial recognition. 'This is not the type of facial recognition that's scanning a crowd and specifically looking for certain kinds of people,' Karri Zaremba, a senior vice president at MLB, told ESPN. 'It's facial authentication.... That's the only way in which it's being utilized.'

Privacy advocates 'have pointed out that the creep of facial recognition technology may be something to be wary of,' the article acknowledges. But it adds that using the technology is still completely optional.

And they also spoke to the San Francisco Giants' senior vice president of ticket sales, who gushed about the possibility of app users 'walking into the ballpark without taking your phone out, or all four of us taking our phones out.'

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