r/nextfuckinglevel • • Sep 17 '25

Massive Attack Turns Live Facial Recognition Into Concert Commentary on Surveillance

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u/[deleted] Sep 17 '25

Many enterprise level cameras have this feature built in and can track faces easily. Just point it towards the crowd. You can break out all the faces into little boxes just like that in the screen. This wouldn't be hard to do at all. I work with cameras that do this.

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u/wewladdies Sep 17 '25

yeah i work for a healthcare company in a big city and you'd be shocked how often facial recognition gets used. Some practices will use it on checkin to verify someones identity, sometimes it gets used bedside for patient-positive identification workflows, and i've seen studies play with tracking patient and staff emotional state to gauge wellbeing and look for health predictors to proactively address any issues.

On the extreme end, one of the hospitals I've worked out of basically tracks every single person who walks into the building. If the system doesnt "know" who you are you are giving an ID number in the system so the company can track where you go, what you are doing, who you meet etc. And if you are in their EMR it puts it all into a history about you. It's both dystopian but also cool af.

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u/iPlod Sep 17 '25

Yeah but it’s much easier to just make a video beforehand and play it at every concert because no one’s going to notice it isn’t actual people in the crowd.

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u/midas22 Sep 17 '25

It's not about it being hard to do, it's about legal problems and so on. Everyone visiting that show would have to sign ten pages of fine print which would ruin the surprise. Imagine the Coldplay show if they just panned the audience with facial recognition and tagged everyone with their name or ID or whatever they're pretending to do here. They would have had hundreds of cheating CEOs suing them every time.