You could easily miss the exclusive Les Ambassadeurs casino in London. Just off Hyde Park Corner, it sits at the end of a quiet side street populated only with chauffeured black vans waiting to whisk wealthy guests to five-star restaurants or soccer games.
The casino’s sole imposition on the street is a red awning above the door. A wall of fragrance, floral and citrus notes to the fore, hits as you cross the marble tiles to be greeted by a receptionist.
Owned by Paul Suen Cho Hung (孫粗洪), a China-born businessman who also counts Birmingham City Football Club as a UK trophy asset, “Les A” is among the most exclusive gambling dens in the British capital, charging ￡25,000 (US$31,563) per year for membership. Most of its more than 20,000 members visit from Asia and the Middle East, and include billionaires, royalty and celebrities. British retail billionaire Philip Green reportedly won ￡2 million at one of its roulette tables in 2004.
Illustration:Yusha
An integral part of how the casino lavishes services on its members is by monitoring their movements on the premises — with the help of facial recognition cameras. Of the 400 cameras in the building, 10 are linked to a face-scanning system. Whenever a member enters the building or one of its private gambling rooms, staff get pinged on their phones.
Clients, for their part, accept this Orwellian scrutiny as necessary to enhance their experience.
“It’s the expectation,” said Ryan Best, the surveillance and security manager at the casino who set up its facial recognition system up in 2018, adding that several luxury hotels in nearby Mayfair have introduced similar “early warning” systems to alert staff to arriving VIPs.
Ambassadeurs’ serving staff and croupiers — women in ballgowns and men in tuxedos who glide around the premises — all have phones with the encrypted chat app Wickr. If a high roller enters “The Palace” gambling room, where gold gilding decorates the walls above thick oriental carpets, a facial recognition camera mounted in the corner automatically pings staff via the messaging app.
The VIP’s favorite host then heads up to the room, or staff can discuss how best to accommodate the guest, Best said.
The casino’s members are graded in tiers from 1 to 10, with 1 being the most important, such as tycoons and sports stars. The higher the ranking, the more closely they are monitored. The network of face-matching cameras in each of the gambling rooms lets staff map where prized customers and their entourages are headed, although it does not track when clients visit the bathroom or public areas outside the building.
It stands to reason that casinos would pioneer high-tech surveillance for the affluent, having been at the forefront of using visual screening for years, albeit to recognize cheats.
In the past three to five years, casinos have ramped up their use of the technology as high-definition cameras have become more accurate, and server costs, for processing and storing facial images, have come down.
Best and his team still use the technology to detect the bad guys, he said.
The casino’s blacklist comes from three different sources: a database of about 1,000 gamblers who have put themselves on a national self-exclusion list; another 300 or so people who have been convicted of committing a crime in a casino; and a bespoke list of a few former clients who behaved badly on the premises. If the system flags any of them at the entrance, a receptionist double checks that the software is correct and then politely asks them to leave.
However, tracking VIPs has become the main use case for facial recognition at Les Ambassadeurs, and it augurs a more tracked and automated future for the rest of us. For all its controversy, facial recognition is fast becoming a popular tool for convenience, used ubiquitously to unlock phones and, increasingly, to pay for things. Sports stadiums and airports have offered facial recognition kiosks as an alternative to tickets, while Mastercard Inc this month began testing a facial recognition payment system for stores in Brazil, with plans to roll it out internationally soon.
Facial recognition is typically used to either validate your identity, or to search for a face in a crowd — usually someone suspected of a crime. What is unusual about Les Ambassadeurs is that it is using the latter, surveillance-based approach employed by police, to keep its favorite customers coming back.
“It’s all part of that white-glove service,” Best said.
It is also a signal for where surveillance-based technology might be headed — a form of real-world customer tracking that gives businesses new sources of data, and which consumers could easily embrace if it seems to make life more convenient for them.
Might Best ever use emotion-analysis software to check if a VIP is getting grumpy and needs some food, or eye-tracking tech to flag when gamblers are glancing at a croupier with suspicious frequency?
“That’s a bit intrusive. It’s overkill,” Best said, adding that his human staff monitor the behavior of clientele adequately. “It’s all about balance.”
However, other casinos are already pushing the limits of what Best and many others find acceptable. In the global gambling hub of Macau, casino operators have used hidden cameras to track how their customers behave at betting tables to judge which ones are most likely to lose money, and to assess their appetite for risk, a 2019 Los Angeles Times report said.
Facial recognition’s even-more controversial cousin, facial analysis, has been used in Chinese schools to monitor pupil attentiveness, or in Chinese workplaces to track emotion.
Zoom Video Communications Inc is developing a mood-analyzing tool for its video-conferencing software, the Protocol news Web site said.
Technology often had a jarring impact on our dignity and privacy before, for better or worse, finding wider acceptance thanks to the benefits it ostensibly offers. Think of all the behavior tracking by Facebook, or the way Amazon’s Ring doorbells share footage with police.
It is not hard to see a future where hotels, restaurants and retailers develop their own early warning systems for when their favorite customers show up on site. Although for people lower down the social rankings, that might not be so much fun.
Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is author of We Are Anonymous. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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