Ticketmaster could replace tickets with facial recognition

Someday in the not-so-distant future, you might be able to walk into a concert venue without waiting in line for your ticket to be scanned — because instead, the venue will automatically scan and identify your face.

That’s the experience that Live Nation and Ticketmaster suggested they’ll try to develop last week, when announcing an investment in Blink Identity. Blink is a brand new company that claims to be able to identify people walking by in “half a second,” even if they aren’t looking straight at a camera.

“We will continue investing in new technologies to further differentiate Ticketmaster from others in the ticketing business,” Live Nation wrote in a note to investors last week. It added that Blink’s technology could let you “ associate your digital ticket with your image, then just walk into the show.”

While that sounds convenient, it also means that concert venues would have to be outfitted with surveillance equipment. And on perhaps an even worse note, it means that Ticketmaster — a company everyone hates more with each new convenience fee tacked onto their bill — would need to develop a database of all its concertgoers’ faces, which a lot of people aren’t going to be comfortable with.

For now, there don’t appear to be actual plans to put this tech into place. It’s not even clear that Blink’s tech works as effectively as the company describes. But it’s clearly something Ticketmaster is thinking about.