Class Action Alleges Citi Field Visitors’ Facial Scans Were Illegally Captured, Shared with Third Party for Profit

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With the New York Mets on their way to the 2024 National League Championship Series, a proposed class action lawsuit alleges Citi Field, the team’s home ballpark, illegally utilizes facial recognition technology to capture visitors’ biometric data.

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The 18-page lawsuit against Sterling Mets, L.P. accuses the group of violating the New York City Biometrics Law (NYCBL) by using facial recognition tech at the Queens ballpark to collect facial templates for Citi Field visitors and then selling, leasing, trading and/or sharing the biometric data for profit.

The NYCBL was passed by the city council in 2021 in an effort to reign in the “unfettered power” of entertainment venues to use facial recognition and other types of biometric data-capturing technology at their facilities. Under the NYCBL, biometric identifiers include, but are not limited to, retina or iris scans, fingerprints, voiceprints, and scans of hand or facial geometry, the suit states.

The lawsuit shares a 2018 article about Citi Field that stated that facial recognition tech is “deployed through 11 cameras at the main fan entrance, and faces are checked against a blacklist” so as to keep out visitors who, for instance, have been previously arrested onsite for fighting, assault or larceny. The filing adds that Citi Field personnel also monitor the ballpark’s 187 surveillance cameras and 115 doors and card readers through the Genetec Command Center platform, provided by security software company Genetec.

The NYCBL forbids the sharing of biometric information for “anything of value,” the lawsuit emphasizes.

“[H]ere, the ‘thing of value’ is the contract between Defendants and non-party Genetec, and the profit made when Defendants save money on security and make further profit from a premium ticket price,” the suit summarizes.

Further, the case shares accounts posted to Reddit of Mets fans who claim that the facial recognition tech at Citi Field had been “weaponized against them.”

The class action suit alleges Sterling Mets, L.P. profits from its use of facial recognition by using the technology to keep manual security staffing costs to a minimum, and by selling tickets for concerts and ballgames “at a premium price” given that the ticket includes costs related to “this level of security.”

“[H]owever, had Plaintiff and Class members known that this premium price also included the surreptitious collection of their biometrics, they would have never paid premium prices (or bought a ticket to Citi Field at all),” the complaint contends.

The Citi Field lawsuit looks to cover all consumers who visited Citi Field for a sporting event or concert since the enactment of the New York City Biometrics Law on July 9, 2021 and had their biometric identifiers collected as a result of the defendant’s alleged conduct.

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