The Dome Is Watching You

On a recent Wednesday night in Los Angeles, I was ready to buy a hot dog with my face.

I was at the Intuit Dome, a $2 billion entertainment complex that opened earlier this month. Soon, it will be the home of the L.A. Clippers, but I was there to watch Olivia Rodrigo, queen of teen angst, perform a sold-out show. The arena was filled with people wearing purple cowboy hats and the same silver sequin miniskirt, all of us ready to scream-sing for two hours straight. But first, we needed food.

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Feeding yourself—or, really, doing much of anything—at the Dome requires the use of an official app. When you register, it asks for your name, phone number, email address, and zip code. If you want, you can also add your credit-card information and upload a selfie as part of the “Game Face ID” program. That last part, though optional, is a key feature of the venue: Facial-recognition cameras are absolutely everywhere. They’re embedded in large, basketball-shaped devices with circular screens. Some of them are planted in walls, while others stand alone atop black poles. They are the keepers of the Dome. If they recognize you, they will grant you prompt entry to the venue, club suites, and concession stands.

Creeping surveillance is a well-documented phenomenon at major venues: Many arenas throughout the country have used some form of facial recognition for years, typically under the premise that it makes the overall experience more convenient for customers. But the Dome is one of the first to package all of this in earnest, to create the ultimate smartphone-powered, face-recognizing, fully digitized stadium-going experience. It is a preview of a new generation of tech-supercharged event venues, a teaser for a world where you can’t even buy chicken tenders at a basketball game without first setting up an account.

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But on the night of the Rodrigo concert, I wasn’t thinking about any of this: I just wanted my hot dog. My boyfriend and I had made the conscious decision not to upload selfies before the event—I try to use facial recognition sparingly, for privacy reasons—but a long wait and technical difficulties left me feeling like I would have given up my Social Security number for some sustenance. After eight minutes in line, we finally approached the cameras. They weren’t working very well. Employees posted at each concession entrance had to manually help guests navigate the system, one by one. It took three minutes of tapping our phones and letting the cameras scan our faces to get the gate to open. (Even if you don’t enroll in the facial-recognition feature, the unit attempts to find a match when you approach.) Once inside, we quickly picked up our food from among the boxes neatly laid out for us, and left. An elaborate system that uses computer vision and yet more cameras—I counted more than 20 mounted on the ceiling—recognizes the selected items and automatically charges consumers accordingly. There’s no need to interact with another person or swipe a credit card—and certainly no need to fuss around with cash, which is, in fact, not accepted at the arena. Later, I found the receipt in my app: $26.40 for two hot dogs and a churro. (They were pretty good.)

There are, of course, a few caveats: If you do not opt in to the facial-recognition system, you can use the app’s “Identity Pass”—a sort of digital ID card that can be added to your Apple or Google Wallet—to gain entry to the concession stand. You can also choose to use a physical card or Apple or Google Pay to tap in and pay anonymously. Children as well as people with assistance needs may also forgo the app in favor of tap-to-enter wristbands. Yet there is no question that convenience is a powerful motivator for people to enroll in the facial-recognition system. A few days after Rodrigo’s performance, I returned to tour the Dome with George Hanna, the chief technology and digital officer for the Clippers. He told me that, overall, about 50 percent of guests have opted in to the Game Face ID program at the start of an event—but that, by the end, the number grows to 70 to 75 percent of attendees.

The system, he said, stores just the single selfie, which the camera compares to the person standing in front of it. Hanna told me there is no ambient facial collection, and that faces are only scanned by the devices in the context of a “transaction”: walking into the arena, trying to get into a club. He added that users can delete their selfie at any time, in which case the image is cleared from the Dome’s system immediately. People who aren’t comfortable with the system simply don’t have to opt in, he said.

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People have good reason to be suspicious about all of this. Last year, a lawyer chaperoning her daughter’s Girl Scout troop to Radio City Music Hall was denied entry to a Rockettes show after a facial-recognition system flagged her: She was on an “attorney exclusion list” that had been instituted to prevent firms involved in litigation against MSG Entertainment from entering venues owned by the company. The case made national headlines and angered privacy advocates, who saw it as a warning of the technology’s abuse potential. (In a statement to NPR at the time, MSG Entertainment said, in part, “While we understand this policy is disappointing to some, we cannot ignore the fact that litigation creates an inherently adversarial environment.”) Just last week, a group of privacy orgs protested against the use of facial recognition at a Major League Baseball game at New York’s Citi Field. In an open letter, Fight for the Future, one such group, argued that the technology is invasive and unnecessary, and that it should not be normalized.

On my second trip to the Dome, I decided to try facial recognition for myself. Hanna said that the system was working “light-years” better than it did on opening night. I uploaded a selfie to the app, and the orb on a stick let me inside in less than a minute. I was also able to get into the self-service concession area no problem.

This time I was able to use my face to buy a box of churros. As we wandered the stadium’s curving halls, I ate them, and asked Hanna a question that had been bugging me: How many cameras are in the Dome? “A lot,” he said. I let out a nervous laugh. “More than 10,000?” I asked. Fewer than that, he said, but demured on giving an exact number. He wasn’t trying to be cagey, he explained. He just didn’t know.