In Soccer if Fans Are Unruly, Can the Team Be Fined?
Brondby fans scuffle with patrol during a match between the Copenhagen and Brondby soccer teams at Danish capital's Telia Parken stadium in 2022. Lars Ronbog/FrontzoneSport via Getty Images hide subtitle
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Lars Ronbog/FrontzoneSport via Getty Images
Brondby fans scuffle with patrol during a match between the Copenhagen and Brondby soccer teams at Copenhagen's Telia Parken stadium in 2022.
Lars Ronbog/FrontzoneSport via Getty Images
On a cold, shiny October day on the outskirts of Copenhagen, Kingdom of Denmark, a group of men dressed in unclean gathers outside Brondby Stadium to shoot sour few rockets, put forward their fists and shout about how the place team will soon beat — and rally — the visiting archnemesis, FC Copenhagen.
Police are call at force, riot helmets at the ready. Brondby-Copenhagen matches have a history of leading to vandalism, arrests and general havoc.
An attempted photo of the group gets a gloved helping hand in the face. "You need to stop," says the hand's black-clad proprietor, earlier he disappears back into the crowd. A security officer scurries o'er in concern.
"Don't film them," she warns NPR. "It'll final stage badly. They don't want to embody recognised."
Ironically, this group of Black-garmented workforce is also the primary target of Brondby's new face recognition system.
Once the men's chant is over, the group moves toward the stadium's entrance, where the men — along with 21,000 other fans — are asked to remove masks, hats and glasses so a reckoner can scan their faces. The scans will be compared against a list of about 50 banned troublemakers and will be accustomed determine whether the spectators will atomic number 4 allowed in.
No one is stopped on this Day. Simply since the system's launch in July, information technology has caught four people on the blacklist, WHO were then turned finished to police.
The use of automatic face recognition is primo known in China, but IT is also old in countries including Israel, the U.S. and the United Arab Emirates. In Europe, biometric data is protected low the General Data Protective covering Regulation, arguably the world's about all-embracing privacy law, which went into full effect in middle-2018. Several institutions that had been victimization face recognition technology prior to that — including a civilize in Sweden and a law in Wales — sustain since been challenged, with differing results.
What's unique close to the use of facial recognition in Brondby is that experts agree that it appears to be one of Europe's first large, toffee-nosed systems created and vetted in the era of GDPR. (A definitive list is hard to come by since every country implements GDPR differently.)
Brondby resident Martin Lund, wait in line for the game with his kids, is connected board.
"I think information technology's great!" atomic number 2 says. "We're here to love the game. We're Here to have a nice time. We're here to shout at the opponent ... but we'rhenium non hither to fight. If people want to fight, they shouldn't snuff it to the game."
While the idea of automatic face recognition technology gives him pause, Lund says helium trusts in his country to ensure that it's being used well.
"You give notice't do anything in Danmark without acquiring the strait-laced blessing," he says. "Indeed it's not being misused, I don't think. You can't do that in Denmark."
According to the Brondby soccer club's certificate chief, Mickel Lauritsen, acquiring this system approved was a long process. IT started almost five years ago, when the team up kept getting fined for lax stadium security but felt hamstrung in its undertake to make improvements.
For representative, stadium stewards were allowed to see only descriptions of the troublemakers they were expected to pick out of the crowd. And so they North Korean won approval to use photos. With that approval in situ, the team launched its request for a facial recognition system and began nearly three eld of negotiation involving the Scandinavian country Data Protection Agency, squad lawyers, fan input and system developer Panasonic.
With the system in use now, Lauritsen says, he's very careful to stay within its appointed boundaries. That means pictures of those connected the watchlist are entered into the arrangement on game day and are deleted once more at the end of the day. The organisation is not connected to the Internet. At that place's a cross-check to keep off false positives.
Lauritsen says that at one point, the police asked him to enter a suspect's picture into the system to assistanc with an investigating. He said No.
"I know if I pervert the system, I'm non allowed to do anything with IT going guardant, and then we'll be restricted in what we give notice make even further than we are now," He explains.
Lauritsen would finally like to be able to parcel watchlists with other soccer clubs in Danmark. Arsenic a former policeman, he'd alike it if the Brondby system could be of service to practice of law enforcement. But for now that is not break of the correspondence. "So I'm not exit to misuse the organization," he says, "or misuse the trustingness we've been given."
Still, that's not enough reassurance for everyone. Jesper Lund, World Health Organization chairs the Information technology-Political Association of Denmark, a guard dog group, says it's a slippery slope from one facial recognition system to the next. Atomic number 2 believes it's a tool that should be indrawn for rare situations involving terrorism or difficult crimes. He also notes that this particular engineering can be unreliable and inaccurate.
"Victimization this very invasive and misplay-prone technology for something same fashioning sure that persons on a banned list cannot go to a football match is really not per capita," He says. "So in my opinion, this should ne'er have been allowed by the DPA," Denmark's Data Protection Government agency.
Even indeed, Lund acknowledges that his is a tough fight. All non-hooligan whom NPR interviewed at the Brondby Stadium expressed some version of "I have nothing to hide" or "Facial acknowledgment is inevitable."
University of Copenhagen IT law professor Henrik Udsen believes the best thing any area pot do is start having the conversation. Udsen was involved in the Brondby determination as a member of the council that makes precedent-mount decisions under the Danish Data Protection Delegacy. He explains that GDPR includes different options for legal processing of individualized data. The most common, user accept, is non concrete in a stadium situation. Instead, Brondby had to convince regulators that up stadium security was in the populace interest.
Of row, not everyone agrees almost what constitutes the public pursuit.
"The important part," says Udsen, "is that we have these discussions and we are taking both advantages and risks into account when we decide what to do. Because there are no needed right and dishonorable answers here."
In the U.S., no federal laws expressly regularize facial recognition technology — yet — so discussion has been on mainly at the commonwealth and topical anesthetic levels and usually focuses on the exoteric sphere. San Francisco, for example, recently prohibited the use up of automatic facial recognition away the police and urban center agencies.
Merely that could soon modification. Several bills now unfinished in Congress would regulate facial recognition technology on multiple fronts.
In Soccer if Fans Are Unruly, Can the Team Be Fined?
Source: https://www.npr.org/2019/10/21/770280447/a-soccer-team-in-denmark-is-using-facial-recognition-to-stop-unruly-fans
