I went to Dome and bought food with my face

One 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 to be home to the LA Clippers, I was there to see Olivia Rodrigo, the queen of teenage angst, perform a sold-out concert. The arena was packed with people in purple cowboy hats and matching silver sequined miniskirts, all ready to scream and sing for two hours straight. But first, we needed food.

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To feed yourself—or really do anything else—in the Dome, you need to use the official app. When you sign up, the app asks for your name, phone number, email address, and zip code. If you want, you can also add your credit card details and upload a selfie as part of the “Game Face ID” program. That last part, while optional, is a key feature of the facility: facial-recognition cameras are absolutely everywhere. They’re embedded in large, basketball-shaped devices with circular screens. Some are embedded in the walls, while others stand alone on black posts. They’re the Dome’s guardians. If they recognize you, they’ll grant you fast-track entry to the facility, club suites, and concession stands.

Creeping surveillance is a well-documented phenomenon at major venues: Many arenas across the country have been using some form of facial recognition for years, usually on the grounds that it makes the overall experience more convenient for patrons. But the Dome is one of the first to seriously pack it all in, to create the ultimate, smartphone-enabled, facial-recognition, fully digitized stadium experience. It’s the harbinger of a new generation of tech-supercharged venues, a world where you can’t even buy chicken nuggets at a basketball game without first creating an account.

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But the night of Rodrigo’s concert I wasn’t thinking about any of that: I just wanted my hot dog. My boyfriend and I made a conscious decision NO to upload a selfie before the event — I try to use facial recognition sparingly, for privacy reasons — but the long wait and technical difficulties made me feel like I’d trade my Social Security number for a bite to eat. After eight minutes in line, we finally made our way to the cameras. They didn’t work very well. Employees at each point-of-sale 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 open the gate. (Even if you don’t sign up for facial recognition, it will try to find a match when you walk up.) Once inside, we quickly grabbed our food from the boxes carefully laid out for us and headed out. The sophisticated system, which uses computer vision and even more cameras — I counted more than 20 mounted on the ceiling — recognizes the items we’ve selected and automatically collects the customer’s fare. There’s no need to interact with another person or swipe a credit card — and there’s definitely no need to dig around for cash, which, by default, isn’t accepted at the arena. Later, I found the bill on my app: $26.40 for two hot dogs and a churro. (They were pretty good.)

Of course, there are a few caveats: If you don’t opt ​​for facial recognition, you can use the app’s “Identity Pass”—a kind of digital ID card that can be added to Apple or Google Wallet—to access the concession stand. You can also choose to use a physical card or Apple or Google Pay to tap in and pay anonymously. Kids and those with special needs can also forgo the app in favor of the wristbands. But there’s no doubt that convenience is a strong motivator for people to sign up for facial recognition. A few days after Rodrigo’s performance, I returned to tour the Dome with George Hanna, the Clippers’ chief technology and digital officer. He told me that overall, about 50 percent of attendees had opted for the Game Face ID program at the beginning of the event—but that number jumped to 70 to 75 percent by the end.

The system, he said, stores only a single selfie, which the camera compares to the person standing in front of it. Hanna told me there is no face-collection in the environment, and faces are scanned by the devices only in the context of a “transaction”: entering the arena, trying to enter the club. He added that users can delete their selfies at any time, in which case the image is immediately removed from the Dome system. People who don’t like the system simply don’t have to, he said.

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People have reason to be suspicious of all this. Last year, a lawyer who coached her daughter’s Girl Scout troop at Radio City Music Hall was barred from a Rockettes concert after facial recognition flagged her: She was on a “lawyer exclusion list” that was established to prevent companies involved in litigation against MSG Entertainment from entering its facilities. The case made headlines and angered privacy advocates who saw it as a warning about the potential abuses of the technology. (In a statement to NPR at the time, MSG Entertainment said, in part, “While we understand that this policy is disappointing to some, we cannot ignore the fact that litigation by its nature creates a hostile environment.”) Just last week, a group of privacy groups protested 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 visit to the Dome, I decided to try out the facial recognition. Hanna said the system was “light years” better than it was on opening night. I uploaded a selfie to the app, and a ball on a stick let me in in less than a minute. I also had no problem getting into the self-service area.

This time I could use my face to buy a box of churros. As we wandered the stadium’s curving hallways, I ate them and asked Hanna the question that had been nagging at me: How many cameras were in the Dome? “A lot,” he said. I let out a nervous laugh. “More than 10,000?” I asked. Less than that, he said, but hesitated to give an exact number. He wasn’t trying to be sly, he explained. He just didn’t know.