Over the years, Taylor Swift has dealt with a number of stalkers. She is one of the most famous people in the world, and fans track her every move. Some people have taken it too far, though, and she had to hire security and seek out restraining orders to protect herself. At one concert, she employed technology to identify stalkers. 

Taylor Swift used facial recognition software at a concert to look for stalkers

In 2018, Swift played a show at the Rose Bowl. Fans in attendance could visit a kiosk to watch clips of her rehearsing for the show. It served another purpose, though. While fans watched the videos, a camera scanned their faces and, unbeknownst to them, sent them to a command center in Nashville. There, their faces were cross-referenced with a database of her known stalkers.

“Everybody who went by would stop and stare at it, and the software would start working,” Mike Downing, the chief security officer of Oak View Group, told Rolling Stone.

A number of other venues began implementing similar software.

“It holds a lot of promise,” Justin Burleigh, Ticketmaster’s former chief product officer, said. “We’re just being very careful about where and how we implement it.”

She faced some criticism for the software

While many acknowledged that this could no doubt identify stalkers, people worried about the broader ramifications of using facial recognition software in this way.

“One set of questions concerns what, if anything, was done with all the photos that were collected at the Taylor Swift concert,” wrote senior policy analyst Jay Stanley for the ACLU. “Were they saved? Will they be shared with anyone or used for marketing purposes? Will the security people use them for tracking people’s movements and behavior and flagging those who are supposedly ‘suspicious’? These are the privacy issues that affect every concertgoer here and in any future uses of the technology.”

Stanley also took issue with the way the venue gathered the photos. Secretly photographing people with the kiosk felt like trickery to him.

“Another issue is the matter of notice,” he wrote. “In this case, security staff essentially tricked concertgoers into presenting a clear frontal view of their faces by setting up a kiosk playing a video of concert highlights, with a camera that captured the faces of those who stopped to gaze at it.”

He noted that he didn’t want companies to go on to use the images to track concertgoers in the future.

Taylor Swift was recently granted a restraining order against a stalker

A Los Angeles judge recently granted Swift a 5-year restraining order against Brian Jason Wagner. She said he has repeatedly come to her home and tried to make contact with her.

Per USA Today, Swift said she lived in “fear of imminent harm” because of Wagner’s alleged visits to her home and messages left for her and her employees. She previously had a temporary restraining order against him.