reading the article carefully and watching videos from the concert, I'm confident there is no facial recognition involved. The article is wrong either out of ignorance or the author lying on purpose to get attention. And you are spreading it uncritically 🙁

But the show Massive Attack put on is cool and worth spreading even though it's not as sophisticated as people think (and they are not claiming it to be)

Facial recognition is about gathering biometric data / images that can be compared against a database of faces.

They are very clearly gathering faces. These can then be compared to other databases to find other places you've been. That is surveillance.

The article does not seem to claim otherwise.

@eclectech I agree with @Vít Skalický, seeing the installation, I don't think there's any facial recognition, it doesn't try to identify individual people. Instead, it's running a face detection software with an AI (for a lack of better term) trained to identify general traits from faces that assigns a random label to each face, tracking them across the video stream.

I still understand the malaise, we like to think we're anonymous in a crowd, and just being singled out in such a display dispels that myth without even actually doing the thing people accuse it of.

Edit: Clarified what I think is running during the performance.

@eclectech Those are all valid questions, but a cursory look at the performance hints that everything runs locally. It detects faces like your phone or camera detects faces in pictures/video, and assign it an individual label that probably has little to do with the face itself (I've seen "fork bender" as a label). The uncomfortable trick, of course, is maintaining the same label on the same face as the camera pans, but this local fingerprinting doesn't need to compare these faces with any database.

It could, the same way your phone and your camera could, but this wasn't the intent of this installation.

@Vít Skalický