Facial Recognition Technology To Be Used in Tokyo During 2020 Olympics

Yesterday, we learned about the collaboration between Intel and the organizers of 2020 Olympics. According to this cooperation, all athletes, sponsors, journalists or volunteers in Tokyo will be using a facial recognition system.  This system has been developed by Japanese electronics giant NEC jointly with Intel. This will help them to get where they need to be.

As it’s officially stated, Intel is collaborating with NEC to provide ‘a large-scale face recognition system for the Olympics.’ Ricardo Echevarria, general manager of Intel’s Olympics program talked about this recently. He said that the system is designed to let Olympics organizers ‘ensure smoothly secure verification for the over 300,000 people at the games who are accredited.’

Facial recognition gained momentum after the emergence of AI and neural networks. But many are alarmed about pervasive computer surveillance, leading cities like Somerville, Massachusetts, and San Francisco and Oakland, California, to bar police from using the technology.

In this regard, Intel didn’t comment on the privacy or data retention aspects of the technology. At the same time, NEC said that’s the purview of the Tokyo Olympics organizers.

As for the organizational part, NEC will deploy hundreds of facial recognition systems around the Olympics facilities. This will speed up ID checks for accredited people. As Echevarria said and as you understand, this is the first time the Olympics have used that facial recognition technology.

However, it’s not going to become a wholesale replacement for the old ways. Accredited personnel at the Olympics will still have to wear traditional ID lanyards. But if someone loses their lanyard or tries to get access with one that’s stolen, the facial recognition system will block them.

‘Facial recognition improves security and efficiency by being able to confirm a picture ID against the face of the person seeking to enter a facility with greater speed and accuracy than human staff,’ NEC said.

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