I’m thrilled to see facial recognition applied against people in a position to speak out loudly against it. A lot of people seem OK with it when it’s policing the bad parts of town. This is their reminder that it can be used against them, too.
Is it facial recognition that's the problem here, or the policy itself? In theory, they could hand out pictures of everybody who wasn't allowed in to the security staff and use low-tech facial recognition to enforce the same policy - assuming it was scalable, would it be OK then? I remember reading that IBM got into trouble when it first computerized its personnel files because some exec noticed that the computer could scan through all the personnel files and fire people who were close to retirement to save on paying out their pensions. It would have been prohibitively expensive to pay a person to do that, but with the computer, it was a quick SQL query (or whatever query language IBM used back then). The problem wasn't that the personnel files were computerized, it was that they were being used in a very evil way.
You're right: it's the policy that's bad. However, facial recognition is what makes enforcing that policy possible, and society and the law haven't changed quickly enough to deal with the repercussions.
For instance, say 18 year old "Joe" gets caught stealing soda from a fast food place. The manager kicks him out and bans him from the store. Fast forward a decade, when Joe walks back into the store with his wife and kid to buy a quick meal.
Without facial recognition: Joe's grown up and matured. The manager was either replaced years ago, or doesn't remember the incident, or vaguely remembers but doesn't care about it anymore. Joe and his family pay, eat, and leave.
With facial recognition: the system notices that someone on its "do not allow" list has entered the store and summons police to deal with the trespasser.
When human judgment is involved, we rarely deal with absolutes. A lifetime ban isn't really for life. It's until both parties grow up and the situation cools down. A ban on a competitor's employees isn't absolute. Maybe you won't serve the owner, but if his dishwasher comes to your place on a date, you're not gonna hassle the kid. We're really, really bad at designing automated systems that handle nuance. It's way easier to write code like `if photo_hash in banned_people: ...`.
Can you imagine getting into an argument with a bartender and being asked to leave - and then you can't go into any other bars either? Yikes!
Reminds me of the hidden low-level-banking-employee blacklist that some would end up on for not forcing enough customers into expensive products they didn't need.
Or the opiate painkiller registry that doctors use to centrally track folks who come to them for painkillers, and which by the way counts any painkillers you might have gotten from the vet for your dog.
Blacklisting is something we already recognise as wrong; banning who you want from your own establishment is fine, but passing around a list of people and banning them on someone else's say-so isn't. Perhaps the laws against it should be enforced, or strengthened.
Except sometimes an establishment is part of a multinational conglomerate. Eventually some level of due process is going to be needed in certain instances.
I think in many contexts this would be desirable. If someone was belligerent and gets banned for starting a fight on Delta airline, I wouldn't want to sit next to him on my United airline flight. Venues should have the freedom to use whatever judgment/algorithm they feel will keep their customers safe, including sharing lists of troublemakers. If the list is too inaccurate, it stops doing its job and becomes a net-no-help to the venue using it.
That's how you end up with redlining or worse. It's too easy to slip a few "undesirables" into the list you're sharing, and as long as you don't do it too often then your list remains a net-positive so people keep doing it. (See also the guy who put his ex-wife on the no-fly list).
For something like starting a fight, you can go by actual court records, which are public and have processes in place to correct them if they're wrong (and we have rules about e.g. when convictions should be expunged). Just sharing lists of names is too abusable.
This list amounts to a social credit system that some cities in China have implemented. I always thought that was something we’d like to avoid in the US. The fact that it’s privatized in the US and a government list in China makes no difference: is it any different to be blocked from taking a bullet train in China than to be blocked from flying in the U.S.?
I have several concrete problems with these lists.
1. Secrecy. I should have a right to know if I’m on the black list.
2. Due process. There is no process to being put on the black list. Partially because you don’t know it’s happening, there’s no way to contest it.
3. Permanency. The punishment should fit the crime. If you do something at 18 that shouldn’t be a lifetime punishment. However being on a secret list of names and faces distributed between companies is a lifetime punishment.
> If the list is too inaccurate, it stops doing its job and becomes a net-no-help to the venue using it.
This is an extremely optimistic take. In reality, what is the threshold of false positives where the list stops being useful? One percent? Five percent? Hell, even if the list is 10% wrong you’re still denying people who should be denied 90% of the time. And there will always be a stigma against people who are on such lists. “You must’ve done something to get on that list.”
I didn't say anything about farting. I don't want to board an airplane with someone who has a history of assaulting people. If airlines could build an accurate list, I would have no problem with them sharing the list and effectively banning those people from flying. The "accurate" part I admit is the hard part to get right. As another replier suggested, maybe base it on public arrest records or something. But assuming it could be done accurately, of course it should be implemented. Do you want a loose cannon who has assaulted people in the past on a tin can with you at 50,000 feet?
This isn't about having your best day. I've had many bad days, yet somehow never assaulted anyone.
And I'd rather live in a society where the punishment for assault is meted out by a court of law, via a trial if necessary or appropriate, and not via some privatized blacklist with no means of due process.
> I don't want to board an airplane with someone who has a history of assaulting people.
> Do you want a loose cannon who has assaulted people in the past on a tin can with you at 50,000 feet?
If this someone paid whatever price a competent court of law imposed on them, then I have no problem boarding a plane with them. People make mistakes, even grievous ones, and even ones that you or I wouldn't make on our worst of days. The law encodes the penalties for those. Beyond that, what you're advocating for is extrajudicial punishment.
Maybe farting isn't on your list. Maybe it's on somebody else's list.
That's a key problem here. People don't agree on what's acceptable and what the proper criteria for forgiveness is.
If somebody did one of your more unambiguous transgressions, like assault (proven to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt, i hope?), but reformed themselves, how do you know and who decided that? Maybe they did it because of a drug habit, mental illness, some other extreme condition that they've now worked past. Maybe they really don't want to do it again, and would not.
These are the types of problems that can arise when you split the world between good and bad people. Not everyone who does something you disapprove of is irredeemable.
A big problem here is, what is the airline's incentive for the list to be accurate? If it has a whole lot of false positives, in absolute numbers it's still too small to put any real dent in their business - there are millions and millions of other customers. What you really need is transparency, oversight, an appeals process, and guarantees that human judgement is in the loop - all things that come "for free" with the court system, but would have to be recreated from scratch in any corporate-run extrajudicial penalty system.
Schools are using id scans to ban people and prevent sex offenders from entry (yes.. It's good.. But some of those people have kids enrolled). This has been rolled out heavily already. (I believe this is called rapidscan)
Please keep in mind that some people on the sex offender registry are only there because they were peeing in public, or because they were sexting while underage.
Scale is also an issue. So many things are either owned by a megacorp or run via a centralised platform. Getting banned by a store pales in comparison to being banned by Uber, Google, Visa, etc.
Just as most websites today use captchas run by one or two companies, we may see a scenario unfold where most brick and mortar businesses use a facial recognition blacklisting system run by one or two companies. Get labelled as trouble by the system and you'll be banned by every store in town.
That’s a great point. For that matter, imagine that being maintained by Verisign or the like. Get a ding on your social credit report, and voila, you can’t walk into a grocery store anymore.
What’s weird to me is MSG had to get pictures of all this law firms attorney’s and enter them into their facial recognition database. It seems wasteful and really petty. They probably pulled from they law firms website.
> A lifetime ban isn't really for life. It's until both parties grow up and the situation cools down.
This is especially worrying when no humans are involved. If your Google account gets banned by some automated bot for whatever reason, you might find any attempts to create new accounts be considered "ban evasion".
Regardless of the fact that you have very few options for things like ad networks or publishing Android applications, even before you consider losing access to your e-mails or any servers you might have.
I’d amend that: it’s always the policy that should be modified in the longer run. Sometimes it’s wholly appropriate to pump the brakes on the tech that would allow mass application of the bad policy.
It rarely if ever actually works out for the simple reason that, if one jurisdiction pumps the brakes, there's a dozen others willing to floor the other pedal on the same thing.
Why is the policy bad? They are preventing employees from a law firm in active litigation with them from attending their venues while the litigation takes place. It's not some draconian thing.
I'm certain you didn't read the article. The link between the woman and the litige case is very tenuous.
She doesn't work on the case, and the venue has nothing to do with the case either, besides that a huge corporation owns both the venue and the restaurant under litigation.
I did read it. MSG notified the law firm of their policy while the litigation is ongoing, twice.
> "MSG instituted a straightforward policy that precludes attorneys pursuing active litigation against the Company from attending events at our venues until that litigation has been resolved. While we understand this policy is disappointing to some, we cannot ignore the fact that litigation creates an inherently adverse environment. All impacted attorneys were notified of the policy, including Davis, Saperstein and Salomon, which was notified twice," a spokesperson for MSG Entertainment said in a statement.
(a) Conlon does not practice law in New York where Radio City Music Hall is located.
(b) Conlon is not an attorney pursuing active litigation against the MSG Entertainment. She works for a NJ-based law firm who representing another party in litigation against an unrelated restaurant which now happens to now be owned by MSG Entertainment. She's not part of that ongoing litigation.
(c) > A recent judge's order in one of those cases made it clear that ticketholders like her "may not be denied entry to any shows."
(d) > "The liquor license that MSG got requires them to admit members of the public, unless there are people who would be disruptive who constitute a security threat," said Davis. "Taking a mother, separating a mother from her daughter and Girl Scouts she was watching over — and to do it under the pretext of protecting any disclosure of litigation information — is absolutely absurd.
Refusing her entry doesn't even make sense according to their stated policy, and it is absolutely _draconian_. She doesn't work on the case—she just happens to work for the same company. If this firm was representing a client suing Meta or Google or Apple, would it be okay for Meta/Google/Apple to ban all attorneys from using all of their services? This type of behavior just discourages firms from taking on clients suing large companies.
The law firm was notified ahead of time, twice. Lawyers expect others to abide by such notifications, do they not? They act like this was a crime against humanity, when they were told ahead of time that they were not allowed in their venues during the ongoing litigation.
Does the law firm have 100,000 employees? According to their website, they have about 29 attorneys in the firm. Bringing up companies the size of cities compared to that is completely ridiculous and irrelevant. And companies like Meta, Google, Apple, etc. will absolutely enact draconian policies when IP and other litigations are going on. The secrecy and policies those companies put in place likely go well beyond simply not letting a lawyer part of a law firm that is suing one of your businesses into your building.
Why does it matter where she's licensed? It's irrelevant.
Lawyers play these little games all the time. I'm not necessarily for the policy or the use of facial recognition to enact it, but they were told ahead of time. They should know better. If they wanted to argue the points ahead of time and get approval, they could and should have.
How is that relevant? A stupid and harmful policy is stupid and harmful, regardless of who was notified and how. If I send an email to Google to notify my displeasure, it is not reasonable to expect all Google employees to be aware of it and avoid my business.
Despite the fact that personally punishing individual employees for a beef your holding company has with some of their colleagues is stupid. There is no other way of putting it.
> Lawyers expect others to abide by such notifications, do they not?
There is so much wrong here. Lawyers are not omniscient. They also expect companies to abide by their own terms of use, and routinely ignore unfounded or groundless “notifications”.
> Bringing up companies the size of cities compared to that is completely ridiculous and irrelevant.
So, where’s the limit? What company size makes this reasonable?
> And companies like Meta, Google, Apple, etc. will absolutely enact draconian policies when IP and other litigations are going on.
So, it is draconian after all. Show an example of individuals being booted off Google’s or Apple’s platforms only because of their employer.
> Why does it matter where she's licensed? It's irrelevant.
But then, none of the points you’ve made are, either.
I started out reading the article wondering 'OMG, what is it that this mom could've possible done that she's banned?' and then when it says "lawyer at adversarial law firm" I immediately switched to "oh yea, makes total sense".
None of the counterarguments here stand up to scrutiny.
"Isn't involved in litigation" and "not a Security threat" - she is totally a security threat: today she's a mother of a girl scout and is not working on the case, and tomorrow she's a loyal employee helping out with the case.
"Part of girl scouts trip" - Does she have a firewall in her brain between personal and professional?
'Conlon said she thought a recent judge’s order in one of those cases made it clear that ticketholders like her “may not be denied entry to any shows.” - You know what the best thing about America is? Our endless appeal system.
This entire article is a non-story (someone denied access to a business), and yet, it's somehow making the rounds. The paranoid cynic part of my brain is interpreting this entire situation as "A law firm that sent in an employee for some snooping, and then got caught, and now is making some noise in the papers." The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
What she's alleging seems to be: the MSG conglomerate is using their large footprint to punish law firm employees unrelated to their dispute using venues also unrelated to their dispute. Doing it out of spite sounds possibly legal, if petty. But the other possible intention would be to try to dissuade law firms from taking a case against any MSG property, to try to deny legal representation to the plaintiff. Not a lawyer, but surely there's a law against that?
"Unrelated to their dispute" is a fuzzy category. How would the venue actually know that she's unrelated to the dispute? They're not going to have access to the internal management chart of the law firm in order to be able to precisely delineate in every case exactly who gets admitted and who doesn't. And it's unreasonable to force them to create some sort of bouncer appeals board to let people present evidence to show that their position at the law firm is unrelated to the dispute.
Remember everyone arguing that Twitter pre-Musk is a private company, so they could ban anyone they wanted? This is the same thing, only in a physical location.
> How would the venue actually know that she's unrelated to the dispute? They're not going to have access to the internal management chart of the law firm in order to be able to precisely delineate in every case exactly who gets admitted and who doesn't.
The venue knows not, but that venue is a tiny cog in an empire owned by the parent group.
The parent group compiled the ban list by trawling the large law firms website for images .. and the parent group knows which offices and groups of personnel are involved in a specific case.
With large and potential trans national groups doing this it has a parallel with, for example, one country banning an entire countries citizens from entry or doing business .. on the basis that a small group of citizens took action that was undesired.
Very large companies have very large numbers of employees and many different activities on the go.
Should, for example, several thousand people be banned from watching streaming television because 15 people in the company they are associated with are involved in a class action against a media group?
> The parent group compiled the ban list by trawling the large law firms website for images .. and the parent group knows which offices and groups of personnel are involved in a specific case.
Do they? I don't work in law but at every company I've worked we adjust who is working on what based on needs at the time. Why wouldn't a law office temporarily shift more people to a case if they needed some extra manpower?
Assuming that whether or not the lawyer is working on their case is the deciding factor, the venue (actually the conglomerate that owns them) are the ones who chose to come up with this retaliatory scheme so the onus is on them.
Calling not being able to be a consumer of the company their firm is suing punishment seems to be a bit of a stretch. And it's only during the duration of the lawsuit.
And again, why are the lawyers so surprised when they knew ahead of time? If they had asked, it could have even been pre-approved, and thus a non-story. If anything, I'd almost consider this to have been an intentional act by the law firm because they knew ahead of time and took their Girl Scout troop anyway, knowing it could look bad for MSG.
> Calling not being able to be a consumer of the company their firm is suing punishment seems to be a bit of a stretch. And it's only during the duration of the lawsuit.
What if the company was Google? What if it was a healthcare provider with a patented/proprietary treatment?
As a matter of fact, didn't we recently have articles in hn where people were commenting they are reluctant to charge back to Google because they don't want to risk losing their gmail and the rest of it?
> I'd almost consider this to have been an intentional act by the law firm
Good for them. The legal system is the only way corporations can be effectively held accountable. You can hate lawyers as much as you want but this is directed at us via proxy. Lawyers litigate for clients.
"Sorry we can't take your case. We use Google products extensively."
For whatever reason, I’m just not seeing it. Everyone keeps bringing up Google. Why? They are in a completely different industry and largely irrelevant from what I can see. And like I said, those companies will absolutely shut stuff down during IP litigations. When I was at a company being sued and vice versa for IP infringement, the entire company was told not to use the other company’s software products, and if you absolutely had to, then you needed to apply for specific one-off permission. That happens all the time, and it’s practically the same thing.
The law firm is a personal injury firm, which in my experience and understanding can be (not always) very shady. Why is it required that MSG let lawyers suing them come into their venues while being sued? One could argue that the policy should be targeted towards certain venues and lawyers, but that is a lot of overhead that is solved by a simple, blanket policy.
I honestly don’t see the outrage here. Sure, there are a lot of what ifs that make this seem worse, but those hypotheticals are not what seemed to happen here.
And it’s the law firm showcasing punitive action. They’re now suing MSG for the denial for something that basically seems like a stretch of a loophole. I almost would guarantee the law firm did this on purpose, and that’s why I can’t stand lawyers. They don’t play by the rules everyone else has to, and they get to make the rules.
This is not a black and white issue, and there are valid points that can be made pro or con of either side. Even the likely possibility (I agree with you on that) that this was all planned does not change this. This fuzziness of the line that would obviously delineate right vs wrong is the issue.
That is why I added that "proxy" bit in there. One could argue for the position of law firms or the position of corporations, and I am urging you to now consider it from the pov of lonesome you, the possibly innocent bystander, caught between these two powerful social forces. You may still reach the same conclusion but it is a distinct analysis and you should do it if you haven't already.
It's obviously a terrible thing if firms stop blocking people who might have some problem. It's going to be used in terrible ways. I hope that because lawyers are involved they'll manage to destroy this as a general thing companies can do.
This is kind of an ironic case because I've noticed that lawyers make themselves immune to non-compete clauses via state laws in most states. In California famously, regular employees are generally immune to N.C. In my state lawyers are not impacted by NC by law, but regular devs are subject to them, even sandwich makers have been blocked from changing jobs. There's been a big battle from devs to get rid of them, it hasn't yet passed the state legislature. My own leg rep said she didn't think there was a problem - of course she's a lawyer. The lawyer and business class wants to keep them.
Because employees are not their employers, and have a life outside of work in which they still do stuff? Seriously. Yes, it is draconian.
Besides, if the law firm really wanted someone in there for hand-wavy reasons, why would they not just hire someone for it? Blacklisting is petty, counter-productive, trivial to abuse, and solves nothing.
So what? There are a lot of laws and policies based upon where you work that restrict you in your personal life. The lawyers can get over it. This is a non-issue, and I suspect the law firm did all this on purpose to drum up another lawsuit against MSG.
Retaliating against a law firm's employees for doing their jobs by representing their clients is absolutely draconian. Especially for a large company doing this with unrelated properties.
If it were protection .. to prevent a lawyer from witnessing something at a public venue that might be used as evidence agains them ... then there is no protection possible.
A sensible law firm would not use one of their employees with a public image available, they'd use a contracted private investigator to gather evidence.
This smacks of punitive behaviour to not only punish the law firm (for doing their job) in a petty manner, but to also intimidate any other law firm thinking of taking them on.
Eg: Hypothetically if Disney were to ban all members of any company that challenged Disney on ride safety .. how would that appear?
Protection from what? The lawsuit has nothing to do with the MSG venue, but rather with a restaurant somewhere else that MSG owns; and this lawyer isn't working on that case anyway.
What is an easier policy to enact? A subset of people that they can’t exactly determine for a subset of their venues, or a blanket policy covering all employees of the small firm at all their venues?
Making the ban be for fewer venues would be way easier.
Or just, like, not doing this at all. This is James Dolan, the owner of Madison Square Garden, being petty as usual and banning people from the venue who annoy him. e.g. Spike Lee for saying bad things about him, Woody Allen for the wrong reasons (he refused film ads for Dolan), &c
I am under no obligation to contort myself to assume good faith on his part in the face of a pattern of behavior that indicates otherwise.
I'm not sure I see what's unfair here. They were notified. If they wanted to negotiate around it, they could have done ahead of time. They're lawyers. They should know to read material they're sent.
I see it as things returning to how they were. In a small town, the person running the fast food joint often did work there for decades and everyone recognized everyone. Theft was hard to get away with because you don't just blend in to the masses like a modern city. Now tech is allowing us to hold people accountable again.
I think that’s a romanticized memory. While holding people accountable is good, so is eventual forgiveness. If you steal a candy bar from Old Man Smith at the town’s only gas station, and he’s the kind to hold grudges, you’re boned. Never mind teens trying to buy condoms when every cashier in town knows them.
There’s a happy medium in there somewhere. You don’t want to let repeat offenders off scot free, but there needs to be a cooling off period, too.
The problem with automated facial recognition technology is that it makes what used to be infeasible suddenly routine and cheap. In the past, would the security folks at Madison Square Garden have even thought about implementing this kind of policy? No, of course not; it would have been obvious from the very beginning that such a policy would have required far too many resources to feasibly implement. At best, they'd have been able to hand out pictures of a few folks, known to be bad actors, and told their security personnel, "Hey, watch out for these people and don't let them in." It's highly unlikely that a random obscure attorney working at the same firm, but not specifically tied to the litigation at hand, would have made it onto that list.
However, today, with facial recognition, it's possible for Madison Square Garden to have blacklists consisting of thousands, or even tens of thousands of people and check against them just as quickly and as easily as if they were a list of a dozen people. That's a qualitative change, and I think it's valid to treat it as a separate kind of thing than a bunch of security guards, each with a stack of photographs.
It’s already happening. You can’t leave most municipalities without and LPR scan and interstate corridors are covered by face recognition capable cameras. The Feds can track your progress from Maine to Miami in near real time.
Imagine muggers with this tech. Imagine gangs with cameras guarding approaches to their turf – watching for rival gangs, cops, and people who have been placed on the all-gang database of marks and narcs.
> Is it facial recognition that's the problem here
Yes I think so. Some technologies are inherently no good, lacking
any obvious positive use cases, but enabling obvious abuse. It is a
mistake to shift the blame to "policy" or malevolent actors and claim
the technology is merely a neutral enabler. No. The technology itself
contains a gamut of evils.
If you had to identify the eventgoer in advance for a non-transferable ticket, then she would have been banned for the same reason and no facial recognition would have been involved. Would that be okay, in some way this is not?
Are you asking me personally? Or to respond with a general
philosophical principle?
In either case no.
On the first count, no, because I don't believe in
"non-transferable" tickets for arts and entertainments. The holder
has every right to give or sell their purchased property to family or
friends and "non-transferable" instruments violate that first-sale
right.
On the second point, no, because the singular specific "okay" case
(even the tear-jerking one that saves poor fluffy dying from kitten
cancer) has no bearing on the profound but nebulous harms inflicted on
society by an essentially rotten technology (on a purely Utilitarian
principle)
Both. Id argue that in addition to the policy being bad, she probably didnt agree to her image feeding into the dataset backing the facial recognition, which raised some spicy privacy questions: how did this private company get the image? Under what terms of use?
I think anyway, IANAL but I believe this law prohibits the collection of, in this case, images/facial recognition, etc.
So, you can take my picture in public and keep it on your phone, you cannot upload it to say Instagram without my permission, all kinds of recent lawsuits about it. I think the intent of the law is to prevent my picture from winding up in say Instagram without my permission but for sure it cannot be used in the way it was used in the article - to scan it and prohibit me from entering an establishment. Apparently, no matter what state I go to....
I’d argue the technology takes what was, at one time, a relatively benign and reasonable policy and weaponizes it.
There’s a level of enforcement where a reasonable policy or law becomes unreasonable.
Cameras on every street corner enforcing every infraction, no matter how minor, is an extreme. There’s a threshold before that extreme where the policy combined with the enforcement becomes unreasonable.
I think the combination of policy and enforcement outlined in the article is well over the line.
The problem is not that it provides new opportunities, the problem is determining which of these opportunities are acceptable to pursue, and under which circumstance.
I don't like the "this is bad because it allows current laws/practices to be efficiently enforced" attitude that a lot of people seem to hold.
Oh no, in my opinion, by all means, make it 100% efficient, cheap and easy to enforce _EVERY_ policy under the sun.
We need to get on with cleaning up and amending policies until it's not a complete shit show.
Any policy should be written as if it will be effectively and quickly applied to 100% of the cases, and if that makes it look shitty, then it is and must be fixed.
The idea that it would be prohibitively expensive to manually look at each employee’s age on paperwork compared to the cost savings of denying pensions is extremely dubious.
Just because you have someone on camera committing a crime in this age of deep fakes is no guarantee that they are guilty... But it definitely provides police with a suspect to investigate further.
The most devastating tool for fighting crime is not increasing the penalties or making jail more miserable. No, the most effective way to stop crime is by drastically increasing the chances of getting caught and correctly sentenced.
I’m wholeheartedly against facial recognition in legal systems. The fact is that they don’t work well, and they specifically have a bad tendency to identify the wrong black person much more often than they misidentify white people. From [3] below:
> Asian and African American people were up to 100 times more likely to be misidentified than white men, depending on the particular algorithm and type of search. Native Americans had the highest false-positive rate of all ethnicities, according to the study, which found that systems varied widely in their accuracy.
One. Hundred. Times. The camera may say it recorded John Smith breaking into a house, but it’s incredibly likely that it was actually Ron Jones. Who’s the jury going to believe, though: John Smith who was at home with his girlfriend at the time, or the hugely expensive video system that the city just bought?
Facial recognition doesn’t work. It’s bullshit tech, and we should stop using it until we make it deliver on its promises AND decide how to deal with its ramifications.
I'm afraid you have it exactly backwards. The problem isn't that it doesn't work -- the problem is that it does work. And to the extent that it isn't perfect, well, it's still improving all the time. You cited a 3-year-old article reporting on data from up to eleven(!) years ago -- an eternity in this field. Not even worth reading at this point.
The racial bias issue is still important for now, but it's fast becoming irrelevant. We should be asking ourselves where our priorities lie even if bias weren't a concern.
I think it's possible that multispectral imaging may solve the difficulties these systems have with dark skin. However even if this were resolved, I would still oppose these systems because I don't want to live in a panopticon prison society, even if all the technology works correctly and never makes a false accusation. I think such a society is aesthetically disgusting.
Furthermore, an accurate system is not the same as a morally just system. A ubiquitous system which recognizes people with 100% accuracy could be used for evil if it ever fell into the wrong hands. Such powerful systems should never be created in the first place, the juice isn't worth the squeeze.
I agree that It's good when used to fight property crimes and bad when used to stifle political dissent. But does anyone really believe we can avoid it at this point?
I agree wholeheartedly. I’m waiting for the day a legal defense team presents video counter evidence of the judge, jury members and Elvis all committing the crime the defendant is being accused of.
A video completely indistinguishable from the video presented by the prosecution. Not sure where we go from there.
In that case, we look at the bailiff, point at the judge, and say "Take em away, boys".
No we look at the primary suspect's digital footprints and analyze metadata, look for other nearby video feeds, etc. We try to see if additional evidence is corroborating.
Oddly, me too. Things change only when a representative sufficiently well connected person/high status individual is inconvenienced by the current system. Lately, this seems to be the way to actually change things.
<< A lot of people seem OK with it when it’s policing the bad parts of town. This is their reminder that it can be used against them, too.
What is fascinating is that AI recognition did not reach individual homes yet ( say.. won't let you add family members to 'approved' members to open doors, but maybe I should not be giving ideas ). I did hear about it being a toy for the rich though.
I don't think what a lot of people think about facial recognition is very relevant for its adoption or evolution?
CCTV and facial recognition are both used around the world accross cultures and political systems and not 1 citizen voted for (or against) them. Not in totalitarian regimes nor in countries that pretend to be democratic.
It’s because we aren’t governed by a democracy, we’re governed by a massive administrative state. Some middle manager vying for a promotion decides adding cameras will benefit him in some way, privacy be damned. For example, TSA recently started doing facial recognition in airports and most passengers were just happily going along with it last time I went through security. The public is expected to submit and comply, there’s no democracy anywhere in that process.
I get the lack of resistance to the TSA thing. I’m not saying my opinion here is the correct one, but here’s how I see it:
That ship has sailed. You no longer have a reasonable expectation of privacy in an airport. Courts have ruled that safety concerns override privacy considerations inside them. Alright, well, if this is the system we’re stuck with, then we might as well make it efficient. Now we have TSA PreCheck where you can give up all pretense of personal privacy in exchange for a relatively pleasant airport experience. And the facial recognition kiosks I’ve seen don’t seem inherently more invasive than having a human security guard doing their functional equivalent, and we’ve had that for many years.
I’m not thrilled about the situation, but feel powerless to change it. It seems like the majority of my countrymen think this a good tradeoff, so I can’t say I’m fully on the right side of the argument anyway. So if stuck with a system I can’t change, and most people don’t want to change, if this makes the practical experience of dealing with that system faster and less unpleasant, then fine. So be it.
That system was created to avoid what you mention earlier, privileged people in society being inconvenienced and feeling motivated to speak out against these systems. Instead of subjecting the movers and shakers to the full brunt of the TSA, such people are allowed to opt out of the tyranny for a small (to them) fee.
You're overselling this a bit. TSA Precheck is $78 for 5 years. If you are able to afford to travel by air and do so more than a few times a decade, it isn't that cost prohibitive.
I've gotten plane tickets for less than $78. I think asking that much for what they're actually doing (checking your name against their terror watch list, then flipping a flag on your row in their database) is obscene. It should be free.
It's not free, because if it were free then everybody would apply for the lineskip privilege and it would cease to be a lineskip privilege because now everybody is in that line. So, like amusement parks selling lineskip passes, they price it high enough to discourage most people from buying it.
I don't mind a security guard checking my ID. I do mind some random contractor building a facial recognition system that does it automatically and saves my picture and my identification information for all time without my consent or control.
Sure, I’m with you on that. As a one-time transactional system, like verifying that the person presenting an ID card is the person on its photo, fine. I don’t want it going into a permanent database.
Unfortunately not an option and will likely never happen. Nothing has been deleted since around 2005, when storage costs plummeted below the price of selling the data instead.
And they need that money. They don't get anything from terrorists they haven't stopped. If there were a single one, we probably would have heard of it.
As you said the ease of precheck is relative. It would be the standard if it weren't for the security theatre.
I also don't see how we can ever get rid of it. There is a large psychological component on the topic of safety and flying. That we cannot get rid of it again is a problem though. Doubt we can have low security planes for those that don't want to be screened.
With the merge being approved, there were now only four Corporations. Sure, there were many off-world Corps, but they didn't have any meaningful affiliations and were really just a novelty for Roamers. Everyone, from birth, was employed by a Corp. Mind you, employment doesn't endow a title, salary, benefits, or duties. It just meant you were permitted access the various amenities it provided: transportation, tech, telcoms, housing, food, water, and of course, a social access permit.
Corps are a lot like the "Sponsored Nation" concept from the 2300s, but without the discrete geographical boundaries. This makes it, by design, as some argue, too easy to find one's self in violation of Corporate policies. Usually someone makes a wrong turn or enters the wrong door and winds up in front of an Adjudicator.
Since the merger, however, enforcement of overlooked policies has been on the rise. Given the complexities of the merge conditions, it became very difficult to remember who was employed by whom, which inevitably led to misassociation with non-colleagues. What used to be a social faux pas, paid for with a sheepish smile, would now find you among the Unemployed.
Just "inspired" by the article and the potential implications of companies buying companies and finding yourself no-longer permitted in some establishment.
I am torn actually unsure on what would be morally correct:
1. I, as an individual, am allowed to deny entry to persons I dislike from my private property.
2. I, as an individual, am allowed to deny entry to persons affiliated with a business I dislike from my private property.
3. I, as a business owner (eg: a restaurant), am allowed to deny entry to persons I dislike (eg: a previous patron who was violent) from my business.
4. I, as a business owner (eg: a restaurant), should I not be allowed to deny entry to persons affiliated with a business I dislike (eg: the next door restaurant employee who is copying my menu) from my business?
Your totally ignore the key element here: a new technology is allowing denying entry at a whole new scale. Nobody really has an objection to organization blocking a single individual who is might cause trouble. But blocking an entire class of people is a) newly enabled* and b) much more harmful to society.
If a venue kicked out a lawyer who was actively working on a lawsuit against the venue, nobody would bat an eye. But kicking out every person on payroll at any firm that has a lawsuit against any venue in the parent company, the scale has now transformed this into a different thing.
The next step people worry about is that this same technology could be applied to more than just busniess you dislike. Why not block people who have disparaged your business on social media? Why not block people with poor credit scores or a criminal history?
So you could draw a line between (3) and (4), but you should also be adding
5. I, as a business owner, should I not be allowed to invent new ways to deny entry to entire categories of people.
* obviously blocking people on visual characteristics like skin color is already possible. And that is widely regarded as unacceptable!
Who cares what technology they use? They could also check ids at the door and cross-reference their naughty list. Everything seems to involve an id check these days.
Maybe there's some contractual issue here - they sold you a ticket, that establishes a contract, they're breaking the contract by denying you entry. They should have performed the naughty check earlier in the process?
I think it's all pretty stupid but occupation isn't a protected class.
It matters because of scale. Our current laws and social norms are based on a world where it's not feasible to check against a list of 1,000,000 disallowed people. Technology now allows this, and we should re-assess whether our laws and norms should change with this new reality.
Obviously I think we should add some new checks. Perhaps every blocklist should be transparent and have an appeals process. Or maybe blacklisting should be time-limited. Or maybe expand the list of protected classes.
Agreed. For me, the issue is that this restriction is upheld at point of entry and not point of sale.
I get it’s a harder problem to restrict who tickets are sold to, but if a venue like that wants to get petty about who can attend their shows then the responsibility is on them to communicate that before the event.
To flip this another way, in any other normal circumstance, when you get banned from a venue you’d get a very clear communication telling you so. There is no ambiguity, you know you’re banned. Yet here the venue is still happy to take peoples money but doesn’t want to admit them. They’re basically having the best of both worlds.
Well, I'm sure she was refunded or that would be another part of the suit.
Now, look at these 2 situations.
"Hello, I see you are buying this ticket, but since we're not going to let you enter we will prevent you from buying it"
is much different from.
"Hello, I see you got a baby sitter and took an uber to come down here and now we're refusing you access to a place you had a ticket for, on a reason you could not have possibly predicted"
There is an accrual of many other costs on the second one that are not refunded.
Of course, there is also the fact she entered as a group (girl scouts) and most likely was not the purchaser. To get group rates, many venues make you purchase all the tickets by one person.
Given the power imbalance here, I'm inclined to side with the individual refused entry. MSG can claim whatever they like. They refused access to an event open to the public to someone who was apparently unaware of their policy. It could easily have been that MSG communicated their intent poorly or not at all. It could also be that the law firm ignored them.
What MSG did was petty and doesn't make only them look bad. Given how iconic they are, to me, they make New York City look bad.
I'm not sure I'd ever want to visit MSG. I work for a well known subsidiary of a well know NYC-based company. Who knows, maybe I'll be on the list one day! I see something like this in the news and think I'm not missing much having never been to NYC. Clearly, MSG hasn't thought through the optics of this. Or, if they did, they think they're too big to need to care. I hope they have another think coming.
But unless you are familiar with all the properties of MSG you still don't know which place may or may not allow entry.
If google sends you an email saying you may not use any services provided by google - that's one thing. But what about Youtube? Is that owned by Google or Alphabet? Does Google being upset with you actually mean that all of Alphabet properties are out of bounds?
How much of a business needs to be owned by a corporation before they can ban you from it? 51%? 20%? 5%?
Should you get a letter from each and every business individually?
This is a crazy path to go down that would lead to the fracture of society.
They refused an individual not acting on behalf of their employer though. I'm not sure that notifying their employer is sufficient. If they want to bar an individual acting for themselves, they should have notified the individual.
In a lot of cases the face value of the ticket isn’t the biggest expense.
You can have travel costs, parking, lunch (whereas you’d otherwise cooked at home), possibly some time off work. And that’s before you touch on the emotional expense of being excluded from an activity you were looking forward to and which your friends and family were let into.
While these are all expenses that the patrons happily take on, that is under the assumption that they are allowed to enter the venue.
I know I’d feel pretty peeved at having gone through all of that for nothing. It just adds to the frustration of the day.
A theater ticket is not like booking with an airline. The venue doesn't assign a validated name to each seat. In this case it was likely one name for the entire batch of tickets in their group.
They're sold as non-refundable.* (Non-refundable by the buyer's request.. yes you can kind of take it to the resell market.. but now that's being invaded by the people who sold the ticket)
Everyone in this thread has already recognized how many faces so far today with their eyes and nothing blew up?
Look at the personal computer? It is just a better place to hold your recipes. We basically live in 1980 + having a more efficient way to hold your cookie recipes instead of in cumbersome recipe books.
It's not that simple. Scale and ease of use matters. That is why when the government attempted to cross-reference the various administrative (mostly paper) files in a single database, around a single social security number, using a computer, it caused a huge scandal, the project was abandoned, and an independent regulatory agency was created in order to prevent something like this from happening again (and also deal with other data privacy issues).
To be fair, in the article, the venue management claims to have told the law firms involved about the ban well ahead of time:
“All impacted attorneys were notified of the policy, including Davis, Saperstein and Salomon, which was notified twice," a spokesperson for MSG Entertainment said in a statement.
Whether or not that notice was in fact adequate, it seems like they’re at least sensitive to giving the impression that they communicated the ban very clearly ahead of time.
A quantitative difference can create a qualitative difference. See all the discussions around cops tailing people in public when the laws were set during a time where that involved an actual officer following them the entire time, vs tossing a $20 dollar gps module on their car and being able to track the person at will
This is in fact more practical than setting up face detection system, all you need to do is ID scanner and some simple OCR system to cross check the name on ID against blacklist, each person entering slaps ID against scanners (similar to how you do it with boarding passes at the airport or with public transit passes at gates), after one second either red or green light flashes. Shouldn’t take more than 5 seconds per person.
Here's how we know this isn't true: they evaluated how to do this at scale, chose facial recognition, and then implemented it successfully in a 6,000 person stadium.
That is not, in fact, how boarding passes at airports work. Identity checking is done by TSA, in a step that is very often the bottleneck and consumes enormous amounts of manpower and physical space.
As you say, they could accomplish the same thing by checking IDs at the door. Given the choice, I'd personally prefer an explicit ID check that I know is happening and is inconvenient for everybody rather than one that leaves me oblivious to the fact I'm being tracked and researched.
The technology isn't really important, but its what makes this possible. Without it, no one would do the alternative of employing dozens of people to look at faces and search them in record books of people they want to ban.
I'm also critical of the legal argument - too often in HN someone will about stuff that isn't illegal. My question is: so what? This is a forum for discussions, not a tribunal. We are not judging, we can argue that something is shitty, or that laws should be changed.
You can always refuse random ID checks. Of course the business still has the right to refuse service to you, but by law you don't have to ID yourself to random businesses.
Reminiscent of how things like license plate readers are legal, but maybe only because the legislators didn’t imagine a day when every person could be surveilled constantly, retroactively, everywhere.
I can't help but wonder how they got the pictures of all the employees from this law firm? Perhaps headshots on the 'about us' section of the web site? I can't wait to see yet more legal disclaimers added to everything...
There are many markets where our face is just another data point for sale. At some point most of us have been ‘tagged in a photo’ whether we know it or not.
It’ll be interesting to see if MSG is forced to report the source they used as part of the legal proceedings.
>Why not block people with [...] a criminal history?
Would be interesting to see the future where (almost) every business would refuse to deal with anyone with criminal record. Would we see lower crime rates if getting caught meant you basically couldn't function in society anymore? Or would that just spiral people who get a speeding ticket into mugging people for their groceries?
Imo it's fine if they can explain why and they're not discriminating against a protected class (or one that should morally be protected).
Obviously this woman should get her money back, and imo they should comp her for the pain/expense related to arranging her schedule/travel/lodging around this show since she wasn't denied at point of sale.
>Your totally ignore the key element here: a new technology is allowing denying entry at a whole new scale.
What's your opinion about Facebook or Twitter blocking people? I'm pretty sure they block people using computer technologies, and that these technologies let them do it at scale.
I do think there should be limits to automated decision making by these companies. It doesn't necessarily mean "no blocking" though. For example Twitter and Facebook both have published rules and an appeals process, which is two steps in the right direction.
Another good example is Google Account suspensions. These seem to be for unspecified reasons with no appeal. Given the damage losing your google account does, I think its fair to expect more from that.
Generally speaking I'd like to see tech provides be some kind of common carrier - where they have an obligation to provide equal service. However one exception that I would make is automatic discovery (ie algorithmic feeds, recommendations etc). On the balance of common good I don't think users have a right to their posts being shown to users that don't follow them or whatever. (frankly I think algorithmic feeds are the root problem of social media).
The technology is just means to an end. Would you be ok if security had a big wall with printed pictures of undesirables and kicked her out due to this?
Not so easy to enforce, because most ticketing systems don't require the name of every single attendee. Adding that requirement would be really really bad for the sales funnel, and also require tickets to be 100% non-transferable.
And much less disruptive to the target, because they get told in advance and don't drive and park and go in and plan only to get kicked out.
If I do not want X at my establishment, then what does it matter whether X is picked out of a single file line by a bouncer or picked out of a crowd by a security camera? I don't want them there. In what manner they showed up is irrelevant to me.
And you're comparing apples and oranges. This is a specific person who is a lawyer for a firm which is actively working against MSG, not some nebulous class of individual.
> This is a specific person who is a lawyer for a firm which is actively working against MSG
Has there been allegations that the firm or its partners/employees have acted maliciously with respect to MSG, or are they just representing a client within the standard scope of practice for the legal profession?
It doesn't matter. They're legally forbidden to ban classes of people from service. They're perfectly within their rights to ban specific groups because of actions they've taken against them.
A cop can follow you on the public streets legally, recording where you go, who you talk to and want you say. But imagine drones cost 5cents, would we want the cops to be able to launch a drone to follow every single person every moment they are on a public street?
No, that would be a dystopia.
Technological change means the consequence of a law changes. And so perhaps a different set of laws achieves our societal values better in light of a change.
I just picture someone worrying about people dialing phone numbers while driving in the car in 1990? What a stupid thing to worry about since obviously the cord won't be long enough.
People aren't going to want to have a phone on them at all times anyway and risk possibly breaking or losing the phone. It will just hang on the wall like the rotary phone in a stand so you know where it is but you won't have to worry about the pesky cord anymore.
Technological progress is a linear process that is always good with zero higher order cultural effects based on how new features are used in practice.
Face recognition? What could possibly go wrong. I recognize faces literally every day!
> Your totally ignore the key element here: a new technology is allowing denying entry at a whole new scale. Nobody really has an objection to organization blocking a single individual who is might cause trouble. But blocking an entire class of people is a) newly enabled* and b) much more harmful to society.
So you're okay with the principle of denying individuals entry to a private business, but you're NOT okay with businesses enforcing this with technology? How does that make any sense?
The two ideas are not incompatible. Consider that it’s much easier to drag and drop a list of faceless names and categories into a “Deny” list on a GUI, than it is to argue to a mother’s face that she cannot attend an even with her daughter’s Girl Scout troop because she happens to work at the same firm as some opposing lawyers. There is, or was, a higher cost associated to this action. Denying people access was OK back when you had to really care about it. The easier it gets, the more likely you are to exclude people that it just sounds like a good idea to exclude. The issue, of course, is that this leads to a world where your child gets excluded from playgrounds and theme parks because you had the wrong opinion on the Internet back in your 20s. Maybe you were too woke, or maybe you weren’t woke enough. We’d all be happy to forget about it after a few years, except that facial recognition databases won’t let you forget about it until the day you and all your progeny have died.
I'm saying there's a difference between blocking 10 people and 10,000, or 1 million. And I'm saying that technological change allows the latter, and we need to be cognizant of that when we decide what we're going to accept in society.
The scale means we need to get the reasons to discriminate exactly right. This is society fracturing/shaping technology here.
We've struggled to get to the point where we can legally say "No discrimination vs skin colour/sex/sexual orientation etc etc".
Facial recognition AND being able to build your own Farley files for every individual means you can discriminate on any other factoid you want.
The obvious "No woke/lefties" or "No conservative/righties" lines are obvious drawcards but the filter could be about anything - however trite - with whatever timescale.
Did you say something negative on social media 10 years ago, about a flavour of chewing gum? You and everyone who liked/shared your comment are banned from that brand structure now!
Did the mother brand even own the brand you dissed at the time you made the comment? Irrelevant! Timescale for selection of candidates for banning AND implementation of ban is completely arbitrary too!
But I think the parents 4 questions are still an appropriate starting point for productive discussion. Are these rights that an individual or organization has? Technology is secondary.
If your answer is yes to all 4 is yes, the answer to 5 is also yes.
If your no or conditional to some of them, then you can discuss where the line should be drawn (e.g. numbers, characteristics, or technology allowed)
I kinda get what he's saying and there isn't an easy answer. Things done bit by bit are often different than things done at large scale. Especially when automated by tech taking out the individual human element. The nuance between people making informed decisions vs algorithms dictating action off generalized heuristics can get muddy.
Just think of anonymized user data. Individually that info isn't really all that important, but taken at massive scale it can lead to worrying trends. Consider something like the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
They're okay with the principle, AND they're okay with the technology, what they're NOT okay with is using the technology to microneedle and retaliate against tangentially innocent people.
The technology didn't decide to single the lawyer out, some manager or legal person did. It's not the tech that is wrong, it's the people's use of it.
When you invent a hammer someone is going to use it to hit someone else over the head with it. It is an unavoidable foregone conclusion. Now, instead of a hammer in which society thinks they are useful and that anyone should have one, lets look at more controversial things like guns. In the US we tend to think everyone should have one, other countries tend to think the opposite, and are crime statistics reflect that.
And I would hold the same is true when it comes to 'business crimes'. The US will likely uphold that businesses can use advanced technology against the general public, and countries in the EU will more than likely prevent businesses from discriminating with it.
There is a reason we have laws regarding technologies. People will abuse them and the law is there to punish those who are abusers.
It has not transformed into a different thing. It is the same thing it was before. A person can deny someone access to their private property. The law is not “A person can deny people access to their private property but only in slow inefficient ways…”
What if it was an inverse, say you could only enter a business if you are a member of X group? Now most of the planet is banned from your property except a small group of people that qualify for X, where X could be as specific as “straight white males”.
It seems to me, some people just want the idea of the law but not the enforcement of it. Probably for their own self interests, mainly: getting access to someone else’s cool private property.
You can't be against cancel culture but for all the tools that allow its implementation.
In most civilized countries including the US you couldn't put up a sign that said straight white males only. In the US you cannot discriminate based on protected classes including not not limited to Race, Religious belief, National origin, Age, Sex.
Ability to recognize and ban people at scale is absolutely a game changer whether you want to acknowledge it or not. It is not remotely "the same thing" because it allows previously impossible consequences and failure modes. You are thinking too small if you are considering only this silly show. This kind of feature is in many cases in theory commendable and logical but equally problematic.
Consider shoplifters an odious bunch if there ever was one. Were I a shopkeeper I would certainly want to keep a fellow that ran out with some goods from coming back and its only friendly to share such a naughty list with my fellows. Steal from one and find yourself unwanted all over town. What could go wrong?
What if I DID pay for the goods but I was incorrectly flagged? For instance came back in with my just paid for goods to get something I forgot and went out a different exit.
What if said flagged person now cannot reasonably obtain food or other critical resources? For instance more than a few private enterprise operate public transit resources and a huge portion of the US has exactly one ISP. For instance I work for one ISP and utilize another. If they banned people who work for the competition I would literally have to move.
What if the person did wrong 10 years ago and has turned their life around since? Computers never forget and communicate across jurisdictions.
What if flagging is used not to punish actual criminals but merely those we disagree with politically?
What if its used to punish those who write negative reviews or do too many returns. Statistically if our supply chain has a certain amount of broken trash and we serve millions of people a certain number are going to get a much higher than average number of broken things or have more than average bad experiences.
I for one have seen both return fraud and plenty of people who cause their own problems and then complain endlessly. Were I to operate a business I would kill for a way to eliminate such worthless customers. What about the collateral damage of those legitimately wronged?
Looking at your profile you complain about "cancel culture" but seem oblivious to the fact that cancellation is implemented either directly as a million decisions about one's own personal property OR preemptively based on vendors who are acting to protect themselves from those same decisions. What you are arguing for is the method for cancel culture to explode in the public sphere.
Do you really want to worry about writing an honest negative review, being mistaken for someone else, saying something controversial on the internet, revealing yourself as part of a group disliked by some, or subject to a database error and find yourself banned all over town? Do you want to talk to a drone who tells you the computer told him you can't come in and he can't fix it but you can talk to his equally useless manager who will tell you the same thing?
Here's a laugh for you. Lets suppose I took your comment wrong and decided your bit about straight white males was an indication of homophobia. I make no such implication herein but suppose I did and added you to a bigot list that was ultimately picked up not by a single bad list but a web of bad lists as maintained by multiple people who pick up and push their lists to other more pervasive lists like adblock lists.
You find shortly that you can neither buy a loaf of bread nor get a sandwich down the street from your house anymore because we have collectively decided that our "cool private property" is not for you. You find a way to get off one list 3 steps removed from the genesis of your discontent but are re-added later courtesy of a different list. Nobody will tell you why you are on their list nor even if you are they just tell you that you aren't welcome. You spend the next 5 years chasing ghosts never figuring out that a single post on hacker news is why you can't get that job you wanted.
Again you can't be against cancel culture but for all the tools that allow its implementation.
In terms of morality (as opposed to current law), I would argue #1 and #2 should be legally permitted, while #3 is inconsistent and #4 should not be permitted.
Basically, as an individual regarding your private property you have total control to discriminate freely. That's individual freedom. You're allowed to choose your own guests. (Note that if you're renting a room though, that becomes a business, so this no longer applies.)
Regarding #3, as a business owner, it's necessary to create policies to be able to ban individuals based on their relevant reasons that is set as policy, which includes past demonstrated misbehavior (e.g. violence). But not because you "dislike" them. Feelings don't matter, only relevant (non-arbitrary) policies do.
Similarly for #4, again feelings don't matter. No, a business should not be able to discriminate against people who work for or own competitors. (You can ban taking photos however, since that applies to everyone.)
Basically this is all predicated on a slippery-slope argument -- as soon as you allow bans for arbitrary "dislikes" rather than "relevant reasons", you're opening it up to racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. That's the immoral part. People's desire for equal accomodation from a business strongly outweighs a business owner's "dislikes", especially as a business owner is often the exclusive one providing a certain good in a certain area.
And so this case, I would strongly argue that banning employees of a law firm which is suing you from purchasing entertainment tickets is immoral. It's ultimately no different from a Democrat-owned business banning Republicans. It's nothing more than a "dislike".
You’re suing my restaurant because you claim a patron of mine was over served by a bartender and subsequently killed someone while driving drunk.
I do not want your lawyers or their investigators or staff coming in and chatting with my staff or poking around my business without my lawyer being there.
Then tell your staff not to chat and not let anybody poke around. The lawyers may order food but not walk into the kitchen, just like literally every other customer.
Frankly if you're running a public business then I don't care if you don't want lawyers there, the same as I don't care if you don't want people of another race there. If people are coming to eat and they're not being disruptive, then serve them, end of story. It's not your private home, it's a business open to the public.
> I do not want your lawyers or their investigators or staff coming in and chatting with my staff or poking around my business without my lawyer being there.
Which was not the case here. You can not summary ban every employee of a large company that's doing something you don't like.
Kelly Conlon is not involved in the case against MSG, and (as far as I understand) had no knowledge of the case.
Your business place, assuming a public business, is indeed that: a place open to the public by default.
In France (and, as far as I'm aware, most European countries), there is a very clear line: either your business place welcomes the general public, or it does not.
Once you fall in the first category - and, as soon as you're selling something in that business place, you are in that category - then you must have very strong arguments if you refuse to let a prospective customer in or even if you refuse to sell to a particular person the products or services that it is the purpose of your business to sell.
Those arguments usually boil down to either (i) some law preventing you to sell something to that prospective customer or (ii) that prospective customer actively disturbing the public order or presenting a high risk thereof (eg: they're a thief, they're drunk, they can't prove that they will be able to pay, ...). Of course there are provisions for specific settings, but which merely soften the (ii) to allow filtering on public safety grounds for places welcoming more than X simultaneous guests - including eg nightclubs and such.
Anything not in falling into these exceptions is just what it is: discrimination. And actually, this seems very sound to me. The fact you own a business puts you in the public world: you may not refuse to serve someone because you don't like them.
Running a business doesn't magically turn your place of business into public property. I run a home business. Does that mean the general public are free to enter and roam around my home office?
In the USA at least, you can kick out or ban anyone you want from your business for any reason, unless it is one of a very small enumerated list of disallowed reasons including race, religion and so on. If I don't want people wearing green shirts in my store I can kick/keep them out. I'd be an asshole, but I am 100% allowed to do that.
I, as a business owner (eg: a restaurant), am allowed to deny entry to persons I dislike (eg: a previous patron who was violent) from my business.
Actually, no. At least in New York State. While you can ban someone for the "violent" offense you picked, you cannot "deny entry to persons [you] dislike."
The victim in this case, being a lawyer, is taking the clever and lawyerly route with this:
Davis is now upping the legal ante, challenging MSG’s license with the State Liquor Authority.
"The liquor license that MSG got requires them to admit members of the public, unless there are people who would be disruptive who constitute a security threat," said Davis.
That's the thing that gets me. I get the desire to retaliate against people you feel have wronged you somehow, but as an actual strategy it seems like playing games like this with lawyers invites more trouble than it's worth. If they're trying to collect evidence, they will just send in an uninvolved third party to do it, not go themselves. But by attacking them personally, now they're going to use their legal skills to give you a headache.
Any other occupation isn't allowed to use their occupation to retaliate
Sure they do. It happens all the time. Politicians do it. Food service workers. Tradesmen.
One place I worked pissed of a local plumber's union, and guess what — a week later the city condemned the sewer pipe leaving the building. Once we made up with the union, the city magically changed its mind.
If the liquor license really limits who can be denied service, then I don't consider this to be retaliation.
By analogy, if a lawyer is denied entry because they are black and they sue, that isn't retaliation it is just requiring the business to follow the law. If a lawyer is denied entry for some legitimate reason (say drunk and belligerent), and they dig up some other unrelated offense to sue about (while ignoring the hundreds of other establishments with the same minor offense), then that is retaliation.
She’s not illegally “retaliating”. MSG wants to ban her so they must forfeit the liquor license. She is pointing out the rules of a license that MSG is violating. What’s wrong with that? MSG could forfeit it and keep her banned and all is square.
>you cannot "deny entry to persons [you] dislike."
I think that's 100% legal, even in NYS. You can't deny entry based upon membership in a protected class, but other than that, you can't be forced to serve someone!
They shouldn't have taken legal obligations to do otherwise, i.e. they shouldn't have sold the ticket and shouldn't have applied for liquor permit.
"Yes, we took your cash in return for promise of delivering goods and services, but our policy forbids us from delivering" sounds more like Rule of Acquisition.
Given she was there with a Girl Scouts troop she probably hadn't given her name to MSG and the tickets were probably bought as a large group. Also do we know if they refunded the ticket I don't remember seeing that said either way when I read it.
Tough shit. People can resell things they own, like for example tickets, so assuming she and her daughter obtained tickets legally (directly or indirectly, I have no reason to doubt they did, though I don't know for sure), by that act she was already given explicit permission to enter the venue and remain there for the duration of event.
If they don't like it, they can sell named tickets, and BTW since Girl Scouts are known for being vicious hooligans, maybe they should have instituted football-like regime up to and including stadium bans for their mothers.
#4 could (and almost certainly would) be used for broadly awful reasons. For example, “I’m not discriminating against minorities! I just don’t want to serve anyone who’s worked in a chicken processing plant.”
IMO, your right to deny people entry to your private property should end once you take their money for tickets to enter. After all, it's not like she bought her ticket under a fake name.
The difference is the scale of the Madison Square Gardens business. You could argue that they have a sort of monopoly power that holds them to a different standard than the typical business.
No, you should not be allowed as a business to deny entry, or deny service, or deny product to a person/entity you do not "like" or a person who is associated with someone/entity you do not "like".
If you removed a person from your business because of something they did, then denying them subsequent business is an extreme measure and will most likely not hold unless there is language in laws that you can use, like violent activity, criminal behavior, etc.
If you buy a ticket, you can't just unilaterally decide that you don't feel like going after all and get a refund. Why should the seller get to do the equivalent?
I don't think notifying her firm is good enough. She should have to be notified individually, directly, and provably for them to get out of refunding the ticket.
If they have the tech to identify everyone individually they don't want going to their venue, then it's on them to notify everyone individually ahead of time. Otherwise, refund + expenses.
Your premise is a little off. This is not exactly private property, but a public accommodation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_accommodations_in_the_U.... That is why MSG likely has to meet ADA accessibility construction standards, among other things. Different laws apply when you invite the general public into your property.
The law is like code. If you say, "persons I dislike" but you mean people of color, you have Jim Crow, which is deeply immoral. On they other hand, your point #3 is clearly valid. To resolve this, 42 U.S.C. §2000a talks about protected classes (https://www.justice.gov/crt/title-ii-civil-rights-act-public...). People with good and bad intentions have been arguing ever since then about what is a public accommodation and who belongs to protected classes. In this case, even if it's legal, MSG is not being terribly smart to 1) use dystopian technology to enforce bans 2) be petty and expansive about banning people 3) do so against a now-very-angry legal expert.
Honestly I think the biggest free speech issue is their grounds for excluding her. And perhaps a violation of the 4th amendment too. Not because of cataloging her face but by abusing their authority to retaliate against people for exercising due process. What if law firms struggle to hire for fear of being blacklisted for indirectly participating in lawsuits? It will make it that much harder to seek redress in courts.
Lawyers work for their clients, and in the vast majority of cases are not personally invested deeply in the case (except when you do dumb crap like in the article). They request evidence via the court, they do not go gather it themselves. If further on site evidence is needed by non-standard methods a PI will show up at the location, and if they are any good will never be noticed. By banning the lawyers they are either petty, or they feel they are still involved in some kind of potentially illegal activity and need to reduce risk. Not a good look.
This is less of a problem if when public places aren't private property, but we still have the second part of the problem: can one be forced to do business with someone one doesn't want to. It seems like in this case, she was already sold a ticket, so that seems to be a moot point on this particular case.
Another take: personal information is valuable, it belongs to the individual concerned with some fair use exceptions, making electronic files with said personal information in a way that obviously harms the individuals concerned infringes on their most personal intellectual property and is not fair use.
Facts however are not generally protected though which is what most of this is about. That's why map makers include non-existent cities so there's something other than just facts involved in their product.
We don't allow public accomodations to discriminate against protected classes. We have made a decision that some kinds of discrimination is immoral, and rightly so. As it gets easier to make discriminatory decisions on objectionable basis, we may well decide that to expand this rule.
The restrictions in question come from the Civil Rights Act. Which sets a bunch of protected classes, including race, color, religion, sex and national origin.
However federal law does not prevent discriminating on other grounds. Such as political affiliation or profession. For example landlords can choose not to rent to lawyers, and every so often someone gets fired for political views.
State law may disagree. And her liquor license trick is an example of how.
>>However federal law does not prevent discriminating on other grounds. Such as political affiliation or profession. For example landlords can choose not to rent to lawyers, and every so often someone gets fired for political views.
I know more than a few MD's that refuse to see lawyers as patients - can't say I blame them.
It's more complicated than that. You can't deny entry to black people as a public venue. But you can set up a members-only club that does not allow black people to be members, and then sell exclusively to the membership - which is still a business.
But we'll just have to watch cases like https://thewire.in/caste/cisco-case-caste-discrimination-sil... to see whether the courts agree with us that caste discrimination should be illegal in America. (And if the courts disagree, time to lobby the politicians...)
A reminder : still using "race" like it's still the 18th century (up to the 1950s?) and like it's still a valid scientific concept effectively makes the US government a promoter of racism :
The postmodern term is "ethnicity" (which does get mentioned in your article), with the understanding that it's overwhelmingly about culture, and while genetics do matter in very specific cases (like for lactose tolerance), typically they matter very little, and your ethnicity is something that you can change (though it gets ever harder after your teenage years).
P.S.: I really don't know enough about "caste" and its history to comment on that, though the ancestry issue doesn't look good.
(One thing that has been bugging me for a while is how the number of our ancestors grows exponentially with each generation - at least before inbreeding starts to dominate - which seems like any of those ancestry-based discriminations are just arbitrarily stopping at some convenient for them point/in complete coverage, and can basically make up excuses about discriminating against you or not. But I guess that I shouldn't be surprised about it when totalitarian regimes do it : the fear of the arbitrary is a powerful weapon they have, and so it's likely on purpose !)
It should be noted that (3) is not true. You cannot deny entry to black people because you are a racist, for instance. You can deny someone who was previously violent, for the violence. Not because you dislike them.
This is similar to
5. I, as a government, can lock up people who engage in behaviors I dislike (e.g. because they were violent.)
6. I, as a government, can lock up people who are affiliated with groups I dislike (e.g. political groups not in power)
The required brand loyalty from Miller crazy - friends who have worked for them will pour non-miller beverages into glassware so that they can't be photographed holding a competitor's product. This is not in public mind you, but at someone else's apartment and not on company time.
Not sure if Budweiser / AB does the same thing back but its a really backwards way to run a company culture.
Also something similar. A motorcycle (scooter) company in Taiwan only allows their own brand motorcycle into the company parking lot. So if you commute with a non-company scooter, good luck finding parking.
Counterpoint to that: I've been shopping with my girlfriend for a new scooter for her over the past few days. We went to the Yamaha dealer which has limited space for parking in front so all the staff bikes are mixed up with the show bikes (it's Vietnam so 10 staff = 10 staff bikes).
We got to see the Honda equivalent parked right next to the Yamaha we were considering (Honda Scoopy vs Yamaha Mio Classico) and decided it looked nicer. Didn't decide yet but she'll probably get the Honda.
So if people are going to the building to be impressed by your bikes, yeah I can see that it's reasonable to avoid having them parked right next to your competitors bikes where the customers will walk past them. That counts x1000 for the head office where the customer might be shopping for an entire dealership instead of just one bike.
This doesn't mean it's ok to say what bikes your staff can drive or what beer they can drink, of course. But branding at your own company premises is something that you can and probably should control.
Company brand-only parking is typically a thing in the American automotive plants as well, and is also negotiated as part of the union package. Some people that work at the plant and don't want to drive company end up just buying a company beater to get a remotely decent parking spot instead of walk a mile or two through a sea of remote non-brand parking...
AB did this for sure before the merger. Working there during my prime, going-out-to-the-bars age, I was told that I should only buy AB products and make sure the label was turned outward for others to see. Thought it was weird but I only drink whisky so it didn't really affect me.
When I was driving transport truck I applied for a job at Coca-cola, and was told after the interview I wouldn't be getting the job, because their security cameras saw me drinking a Pepsi while driving in the parking lot. Apparently it's against policy and a firable offense to be caught drinking a non-Coca-cola product on-property or in-uniform anywhere.
At least with this there's the actual lawsuit from the lady's firm and to MSG's slight credit there's no way for them to know who is and isn't working on their case (it'd be even worse if they did somehow know who exactly in a large firm was working exactly on their case to be honest).
When you say 'law', you're talking about the 500-year old law that codifies what you can put in beer? (reinheitsgebot) or did you have something else in mind?
This joke is typically boring, but you've raised it to the height of "in poor taste" by wielding it to segue out of the serious subject of a man losing his job.
"A spokesperson for MSG reiterated in a statement that safety is their highest priority and that facial recognition is just one of the methods they use. MSG Entertainment also said it is confident their policy is in compliance with all applicable laws, including the New York State Liquor Authority."
Why do spokespersons frequently speak in non-sequiturs? They simply underline the absence of any good argument. I hope it isn't because many people don't realize this, though I fear it might be so.
I also hope the second sentence will turn out to be as logically incoherent as the first.
Because it works. Human brains are fairly bad at detecting non sequiturs. Even with practice it is still hard, because the brain does not want to activate the expensive rational thought system unless there is a good reason. If you can get it to activate that expensive system, it is often then easy to see through, but that is a tall bar.
> Human brains are fairly bad at detecting non sequiturs.
I think it's more that we automatically try to fix them. If you asked somebody to recall and reproduce those sentences after reading them, they would unconsciously add information to what they recalled until it turned into a reasonable defense.
I suspect another part is just that people only have so much time to read and consider such stories and all they really need to do is make it seem like the situation is more complicated than it seems (which sometimes is actually the case). I tried a quick search for any studies on what people actually think about these company statements but couldn't find anything; another possibility is that people do easily recognize them as BS but that so few people ever see any particular news article that it doesn't really make any difference.
I think printing BS company (and politician, etc.) statements as is, often at the end of an article, is a major issue affecting the reputation of journalism. I don't know the full history but it is related to defamation issues that need to be taken into consideration in some way. I think the situation is something like: printing the company's response makes it much harder for the reporter/publication to be sued for defamation and so the easiest thing to do is to just attach the response as-is without further consideration. They could (and IMO should, and occasionally do) ask questions like "how does this statement relate to the question we asked you" but companies mostly will just ignore such questions (they can print that and I think usually do if they actually ask the question). There can potentially be unexpected complications that arise if they press the company that make the story more difficult to write and/or defend legally. I don't know how much of it is legal considerations if there is a lawsuit vs a kind of unwritten agreement not to push to hard to avoid lawsuits. It partly relates to these quick stories that publications don't want to put much effort into, but even long expensive articles don't seem to have a good record IMO. They do seem to just hope that people will recognize it as BS but even when that is the case printing BS affects their reputation as well.
The Forbes article that voidmain0001 mentioned linked to this routers article:
It seems the lawsuit that prompted the ban is minority shareholders suing the wealthy family who were the majority owners of two business they recently combined.
There's an interesting idea you can look for which has the deeply unfortunate name of System 1 and System 2 thinking. I hate it when people use bare numbers to name things like that, I can never remember which is which. Considering it's just "fast" and "slow" thinking we could have used those terms instead. But the idea is you have fast heuristic thinking, and slow rational analysis. Fast heuristic thinking probably generally assumes that a "because" statement is sensible. The slow thinking can penetrate that, perhaps even easily. But one generally misunderstood thing about slow thinking is that it is legitimately expensive. Even geniuses do not have the cognitive firepower to run through their entire lives subjecting everything to the full power of slow thinking, to say nothing of normal people.
You can try to train your fast system to see a "because" and flag it and/or discard it entirely, though. You do enough of this and you start looking "cynical", but in the hostile epistemological environment we live in now, if you're not "cynical" you're being taken advantage of. Even as a cynic I advise against it as a philosophical position; there are good things in the world, there are reasons for hope and charity and love. Cynicism can be a corrosive philosophical position. But it's simply a necessary intellectual posture nowadays.
Notice that there is no claim here that it is a safety issue.
If MSG fears certain employees may reveal things it does not want known, it should constrain those employees from contact with the public within its venues.
Yea, I would go on to state that MSG is 'fucking dumb'. Now, I don't know how things work in NY, but at least where I'm from the lawyers do not go to your place of business and ask questions. They go to the courts and put in a filing for demands. If anyone shows up to question employees it's going to be private investigators that are seemingly unaffiliated and you won't know to block them in the first place (NY law might be different here).
To me this screams "MSG is doing illegal/contract breaking shit"
Of course lawyers ask questions outside of courtrooms and court filings, though you're right that they would send private investigators rather than lawyers to... investigate.
The Constitution wasn’t designed for this. The framers did an amazing job at writing documents and expressing ideals that have held up astonishingly well through insane technological change.
But if I want my face catalogued next to my social credit score why not go all in and move to China?
It’s not great but the only mechanism in sight that seems equipped to deal with this is restraint semi-enforced by social consensus. God knows Congress isn’t going to do anything: piss off both law enforcement and tech? Yeah I think that’s a hard pass from them.
Take some hope. This case exposes the technology for the naked fascism
it really is. We always knew this is where it would lead, and that
there are few legitimate, ethical uses for face recognition tech.
That it was a lawyer taking her kid to a show is priceless and will
surely contribute to the blanket ban we all hope for.
And even after the civil war was ended, over 150 years ago, there's still significant portions of people in the modern day who don't act as if the matter is settled.
The constitution was a compromise between different ideas pushed by different people. It is not a holy text or necessarily the ideal outcome from the point of view of any of its signatories. Its historical and philosophical importance are immense. But even from day one, it was not supposed to be the be-all and end-all. There are lots of things it was not designed to handle.
Was the First Amendment intended to apply to Speech by means of Photons and Electric Particles flying at sub-light-speed to 10s 100s or 1000s of Remote Viewers?
Was the Fifth Amendment designed to protect magnetic patterns in Etched Silicon?
No, but there are mechanisms in place by which the Constitution can be Updated.
I know this is just a rhetorical point of yours, but maybe we can start to accept that America and the west as whole is not actually significantly different from China with stuff like this.
Thinking about it, why would we be? I can't see a good answer to that without appealing to weird/nationalistic/naive ideas about the moral character of states themselves, or simply the understanble nonlogic of "well this is my country, they wouldnt be like that here." At the end of the day, priorites are priorites, incentives are incentives. Efficiency doesn't know or care about culture, it is self-justifying.
I moved from outside into the West and I’m inclined to agree with you. It feels different here. There’s much more trust, even when Westerners mock their institutions, there is a higher baseline and more implied trust.
The thing is that it’s easy to voice an opinion. And you can be confident that the institutions will endure even if you weaken them, which provides a safety net for populists who have incentives to use corrosive language and attitudes for electoral reasons without fearing a complete breakdown of the state or society.
We’ve seen this countless times. However upset people are about Medicare and public welfare, they still want to get some support when they need.
It is a factor for instability in the long term, but it is an unavoidable cost of having free speech. Ideally, it would be fought against with a good public education system.
I'd like to see a new Constitution with a Bill of Responsibilities, one of them being to know how to live without certain modern necessities for proscribed periods of time.
Jury Duty, but a couple Weeks a Year of Camping in the Wilderness with your Family.
In most Western countries there is an extremely broadly held belief in individual liberty, which can be summed up as "do whatever you want as long as you don't unreasonably burden others". There is significant disagreement on what exactly does or does not "unreasonably burden others", but the core belief is held across the political spectrum for all except the extreme ends of the tankie left and fascist-y right.
Other differences, such as a belief in democracy, free speech, freedom of religion, etc. flow from this.
Oh well that's certainly a relief in this context! I do appreciate the input here, but maybe to help you engage with the actual thought a little better (and for my edification, perhaps) do you have any reasons or theories as to why this is the case?
I doubt this question can be answered in a short comment. The differences stem from thousands of years of diverging cultural influences, history and geography. As for Russia, this video gives a good introduction to the origins of Russian Authoritarianism (with comparisons to power structures in China and Europe over history), that go all the way back to the 5th century A.D. with the Huns and the unique geography/climate of Russia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8ZqBLcIvw0.
So, how does the U.S.A fare in this kind of thinking? There isn't such a vast history to pull from there, how can you justify an analogous nationalistic identity/moral character for it without such a big story?
Also, what is the argument for being able to collapse culture and state together, such that the state can/will manifest this trans-historic character of a group of people? Or rather, if we grant that relation either way, does the argument have anything to say about any of the tumultuous events of politics and culture in Russia or China in the 20th century? Are they just hiccups along the overall trend? Such that the CCP isn't an authoritarian regime from without which harms china now, but an inevitable symptom of some trans-historic Chinese culture?
| There isn't such a vast history to pull from there, how can you justify an analogous nationalistic identity/moral character for it without such a big story?
Well, exactly - that explains a lot of the current political/cultural fragmentation of the U.S. population. Although you can definitely argue that though it is a "short" story in comparison, the founding of the U.S. as a revolution to gain independence from the British Crown to found a state by the people, for the people, with its own constitution and Bill of Rights is a "big" story nonetheless.
As to your other questions - good questions - one could write a whole book (or several) addressing them.
Isn't this such a sad and ultimately negative worldview though? Instead of an Earth of humans, you have an array of static types. Instead of a history where there is change, where people can overcome things and vie for better world, you seem to say there is only an illusion of change, and really its all just scaling an infrastructure set in stone a long time ago. You look at people far away, and first and foremost comprehend them as a kind different than yourself. Just an entire country of millions, thought at once as a particular!
It makes me sad just knowing people hold these beliefs. It's like internalizing the world as a bad fantasy novel.
I don't see how it's so negative...there is still definitely change happening and we are not static. Thousands of years ago when we were hunter gatherers, humans would speak different languages living just 10 miles away, and tribes would battle/murder each other just a few miles away. Even as fractured as the U.S. is, we are still in the long run progressing towards are more united humanity (i.e. millions are not battling in a civil war over "differences" like in the 1860's).
Probably agree on some points here (not sure how the U.S. specifically is leading the way, but whatever), but insofar as I do, it kind of takes the force out of your original point. Differences can be justified by saying "oh they are Chinese, they are just like this," but then you also want to say, "well we can transcend it too". Why can't the Chinese or the Russians? It's wholly unfalsifiable, it gives nothing but justification to nationalistic thinking where its convenient, while still allowing you to drop that as well when that's also convenient. It doesn't say anything at all other than "they are bad because of history/geography, but we can be good despite our history/geography." It is, to be frank, childish nonlogic at best, and potential fuel for fascist tendencies at worst.
And just to recapitualate, this is all just for you to say that the U.S.A and China are distinct enough that the former would never use surveillance on citizens (or whatever) like they do in China. And ultimately proves my point that you can't make that claim without nationalistic thinking!
1) I never said the U.S. is "leading the way". Just using it as and example. China and Russia also had their own civil wars/struggles and are now more united than thousands of years ago. 2) I don't get where you got the statement "they are bad" since I never said that. "They are bad" is a statement that always oversimplifies the situation when applied to a whole country. The problem is the very small percentage of people in position of power in China/Russia that are hoarding the power/money and there is no mechanism (i.e. popular elections) for the populace to remove them from power.
Im sorry, I can't really follow how this point is related to any of your others. Regardless, on its face, I would say this new story is maybe a good answer: that because of real democracy, the United States and others are less likely to use surveillance like Russia and China, because those in power who would benefit from such things fear they will lose the vote. But can you honestly tell me, just say over the past 20 years, that this idea checks out? There is already some facts we know that troubles it at least..
And for another thing, intelligence agencies are by design resistant to electoral turnover. And regardless, such agencies for the most part have broad bipartisan support, because in fact, both parties have ultimately the same incentives with stuff like this.
So I'll accept this new thing as a good argument, but history as it has unfolded has made me weary to put such total trust in even the finest examples of democracy and statehood. Because, again, incentive and efficiency are powerful forces to even the most principled people.
> I know this is just a rhetorical point of yours, but maybe we can start to accept that America and the west as whole is not actually significantly different from China with stuff like this.
This is such black-and-white thinking. Most EU countries are kilometers ahead of the US, and the US is miles ahead of Russia. Putin would love for Russia to race to the bottom and get to China's level, but Russia is way behind China in terms of technical expertise, investment, infrastructure, and actual coordination/coercion between government and industry (vs crony corruption). And then there are the new Chinese colonies in Africa who get all the surveillance and none of the benefits.
My thoughts about surveillance and such in the world at large may well be wrong or naive, but I'm pretty sure I am not the one being black and white here. I think, in order to tell me off like you want to do here, you should say I am too equivocating of things, that I am not black and white enough!
You could be like "you see some particulars and generalize too quickly, countries do live and die by principles, not 'efficiency' or abstract incentive. You're turning everything grey, and forget that there is light and darkness, good guys and bad guys, black and white." That seems to be what you want to say to me, no?
You're derailing this from a substantive discussion about surveillance to one about the meaning of a colloquial metaphor. I'm not going to debate the meaning of "black and white." If you want to make a substantive comment about whether there are national differences in the level of surveillance, I'll reply. But I won't take the semantics bait.
I'm sorry I guess. You responded to only my first statement by just saying that, in fact, Russia bad and USA good. I don't really know what to say to that, its not adding anything, or speaking to my very small and abstract reflections about incentive, justification, and culture.
I'm sure many/most people would be happy to talk to you about how some countries are worse than others, why even choose to respond to me, where such things aren't adding anything?
Everyone always goes for the discrimination angle, but what frightens me is that like other modern automated tech of this decade the facial recognition used here probably has a horrendous false positive rate which most institutions will none the less treat as the final truth. Unrelated this is also why I fear most of this new AI stuff so much despite working in the field; the accuracy rates on these things in production is atrocious.
They didn’t ban her on the basis of face recognition. She just got flagged by security, after which they asked for her ID and banned her on the basis of her real identity.
The false positive rate on quality facial recognition is actually very low. I'm not weighing in whether or not it is proper to always use it, just as someone that's deeply experienced in commercial applications of facial recognition.
> The false positive rate on quality facial recognition is actually very low.
It depends on the purpose. For identity verification purposes, when you already have independent reason to suspect that someone is specifically Person X, then a "very low" false positive rate is likely sufficient.
For filtering, however, "very low" isn't enough. Suppose your facial recognition system has a 0.001% false positive rate (one per 100k), but you have a list of 1000 banned faces and your venue sees 10,000 visitors per night. You're making ten million comparisons, and that "very low" false positive rate will still result in 100 false matches.
That could still be okay, if a match just involves (here) pulling the patron aside for an ID verification. Asking 100 people for ID is much more benign than turning 100 people away at the turnstile. MSG here did appear to follow the match with a secondary verification (per the article), but I shudder to think of all the venues that will hear "very low false positive rate" and not really think through the consequences.
I completely agree with you on this point. AI practitioners have an ethical responsibility to communicate these shortcomings to clients. I know my firm regularly talks to clients how humans should intervene in the AI systems we build. It's a necessary conversation to ensure clients know we aren't building them something flawless.
I loved your .001% example, I'm going to steal that when I talk folks. We often describe how systems fail at scale and talk about how being wrong 1/1,000,000 times can wildly backfire at large numbers.
All that being said, I just don't want people around this forum thinking facial recognition is some fringe, low accuracy modeling exercise like they used to be. The models are actually incredibly impressive these days.
It's not just that. It's the collection of updated face data that's a concern.
They're taking an image, segmenting out the face and they're improving an existing model for that individual. Super scary stuff that's going on. (Other than the fact that they have an existing image)
If she was in IL .. she should persue them with the BIPA act.
Interesting. I think she knows she has no case, but realized her eviction put them in violation of their liquor license, fighting back where it really hurt. Banning lawyers might not be the best idea.
The problem is that her eviction has no case, so might as well weaponize the liquor license to arrive at a similar outcome. They got Capone on tax evasion. Picking a fight with sophisticated legal practitioners seems…poorly thought out?
High level, perhaps private venues shouldn’t be able to ban someone from a venue simply because of who employs them? Perhaps craft the legislation around annual patrons served.
I am not sure why you would say that she has no case. On the one hand, it's a common understanding that businesses can bar anyone from their premises for any reason, and that would be the normal interpretation of this issue, but in this circumstance, the lawyer does have a legitimate response in that they have agreed to waive that authority in exchange for the permission to serve alcohol on premises.
On the other hand, they sold her a ticket to a show and then unilaterally voided that ticket without warning based on something that had only the smallest connection to her, which could be considered retaliation against the law firm that is handling the case.
There isn't any doubt about the facts of the case, the only question is how will a judge and jury allocate fault and responsibility.
That's a really good case for any competent lawyer and I'm pretty sure their legal team is not very happy right now.
> That's a really good case for any competent lawyer and I'm pretty sure their legal team is not very happy right now.
I'm surprised that the policy of banning litigating lawyers ever passed their legal department to begin with. It's just inviting a guaranteed headache without providing any additional legal advantage.
When you say "can bar anyone from their premises for any reason" I don't think you've fully thought that out. Can I ban you from attending based on race? That answer is no, I cannot. Why? Because that is a protected status. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a good thing.
Given that a small number of companies are concentrating ownership of businesses, there really should be legislation that restricts their ability to 'ban' people.
Australia has 2 main supermarket chains, and they also own numerous other stores/brands. If one decided to ban you from every store it makes it very hard to shop for food.
The law firm's previous personal injury lawsuits against MSG were because they served alcohol to someone who later drove drunk. Multiple lawsuits were successful, in one case getting $20 million.
In general they appear to represent drunk driving victims and associate with MADD.
> Conlon is an associate with the New Jersey based law firm, Davis, Saperstein and Solomon, which for years has been involved in personal injury litigation against a restaurant venue now under the umbrella of MSG Entertainment.
> "I don’t practice in New York. I’m not an attorney that works on any cases against MSG," said Conlon.
> But MSG said she was banned nonetheless — along with fellow attorneys in that firm and others.
What does the Bar have to say about being a customer of a business you're suing. Wouldn't this be more of a concern for the law firm than the venue?
But I can see how this has a chilling effect if you can lose access to goods and services because you're taking legal action against the company. Reminds me of the story I heard, though I forget the details (or even if it was true), about someone retaining numerous law firms which made it nearly impossible to find a lawyer who could sue them without it being a conflict-of-interest.
I think the issue is that MSG is too big of an organization to fairly institute a policy like this. It's like [FAANG of choice] refusing to serve someone because their [mother/spouse/hairdresser] posted a bad review of the coffee at [FAANG's] office in [fill in a city].
Maybe said company can have such a policy, but they probably shouldn't.
She's only tangentially related not directly on the team, though it would imo be odder for MSG to know the entirety and status of everyone working for someone suing them so it's simpler to just ban everyone employed at the firm.
Imagine this system, but for chargebacks. "You issued a charge back against us once, so you're no longer allowed in any of our physical locations ever again. You should have talked to us first."
When Tony and Carmine are getting divorced, Tony consults with every lawyer in town, creating a conflict of interest and not allowing Carmine to use them.
Although — I’ve only seen this on, like, other online chitchats so take it with a heap of salt, but — I’m under the impression that the main thing accomplished if someone tried these sorts of antics in real life would be a reasonably pissed off judge with reason to believe that one party wasn’t engaging with the legal system in good faith.
I have personal experience with this. Small town. Handful of law firms. None of them would take a case against a local small business because they all had some kind of relationship with that business.
The case was strong, and I had no trouble hiring a reputable firm one town over to litigate, but it was inconvenient and one can imagine a scenario in which there is no "one town over" with alternatives.
What does the bar have to say about facial recognition for all its members being easily available to anyone with money, apparently? Where does the data come from?
It was here on HN, but I also don't remember the details. I think it was like a big company had a relationship with almost all layers or something like this.
So if someone sues a subsidiary of the group they are banned in the entire group?
That must be really tickling the layers when it's time to ask for damages in civil cases: "well, we're asking to hold the entire group in solidarity for damages, since they conduct business in solidarity, whatever subsidiary we are actually naming in the suite".
The problem here is not facial recognition or AI. The problem is automatic and opaque enforcement of arbitrary rules with no recourse. It's a scary world where you can be approached by private security and forced to comply without recourse because "the system" flagged you. This dehumanizes us. We're creating a world where people are being treated like cattle, merely handled by systems beyond our capacity to fight back.
I don't see them improving safety by much either. With the insane amounts of money in this industry, we would have heard about successes. Yet they are far and few between while data and identity theft is a known problem and all these "solutions" add to the danger.
I am very glad to live in a country where you have to just delete everything after a while, which includes data extracted from said material. I don't feel less safe because of that, although I would even prefer to not have these solutions at all.
This is a bit too Luddite for my taste. Humans were involved at quite literally every step of this process. The human decided that this other group of humans is not allowed on their property. The only thing interesting the computer did is tell security that someone not allowed to be there was there.
Jumping to accusing me of wanting to revert technological progress by violence because I am worried about alienation caused by automatic rule enforcement is a bit much don't you think?
As we get used to "the system flagged you" situations, people get step by step removed from recourse to unfair rulings. If I have to spell it out further for you, maybe you won't see a problem until you are personally affected. I understand, it's a fairly common posture.
The unfairness here came with selling someone a ticket to a venue they are prohibited from accessing. Solve that problem and the rest of the "unfairness" goes away.
… And if you are incapable of responding to the argument without snarky running commentary, kindly refrain from replying.
Not quite. I'm not arguing that a small choice will inevitably lead to disaster. I have seen four decades of civil rights erosion due to some system or another (war on drugs! war on terror!) and now we are automating surveillance and enforcement.
If you don't see the big picture, it's not my place to enlighten you. But oh the irony of butting into a conversation you don't like to complain about participating in it. lol
How did they identify her? Where is MSG getting the data for their facial recognition? This part is confusing to me (I assume some third party vendor, but that's besides the point). Do they have you upload a photo of yourself? Do they have access to driver license photos? If the latter, that's a serious issue that I think we should be talking about: private companies having access to government biometric data. It's already an issue that the gov can track us, but even bigger if they are giving that data to corporations. I think that's the bigger story here.
Probably from a photograph on the lawyer's website. They often post photographs of themselves looking pleasant and well-dressed, along with a summary of their careers.
I get that (others mentioned this already) but I still feel this is creepy. It's definitely not the expectation people have when they show their faces on their websites. I think this is just going to encourage people to not show their face as much because this is seriously not okay.
The legal rights of a corporation should rapidly decrease as it gains market power. My neighborhood bar should be allowed to 86 me for just about anything, but Madison Square Garden Entertainment, Ticketmaster, and Live Nation should not. Same thing with google and Amazon banning people from their platform for a single good faith credit card chargeback.
This is a pretty interesting concept. I think way this is described as “fewer rights” is not precise enough to pass muster. But I agree with the principle that the harm to an individual resulting from a ban is proportional to its scale / reach.
For example, getting banned from all McDonald’s restaurants is qualitatively different from getting banned from one McDonald’s restaurant.
So how does one go about qualifying / quantifying (1) the potential risk or harm caused by an individual violating terms for service and (2) the harm caused to the individual resulting from corrective actions; and then balance the two against each other?
My point was more about a local monopoly. If you operate a monopoly, you should relinquish your right to deny whoever you want without cause. I do see your point about not having the right to be served served alcohol within convenient distance.
It sounds like we might agree, but I would further clarify that it depends on the type of Monopoly and viability of alternatives.
The water company shouldn't be able to turn off your water because they don't like your associations or unrelated Behavior. However, if a licensed plumber doesn't want to serve your house because of the flag you're flying in front of it, that is fair game. They might be the only plumber in your area, but the state isn't preventing someone else from starting a business
For example, if the state is protecting the Monopoly from competition, I don't think they should be able to discriminate.
Same with grocery stores. While food is a necessity to live, the state isn't preventing someone else from selling groceries.
Probably not the electric company because they have a state granted monopoly position. However, if the only electrician in your town doesn't want to see you, I think that is within their rights. They aren't public servers and are a private business.
Many organizations (including the Girl Scouts) have required chaperone-to-kid ratios for trips like this.
Booting one chaperone from a trip could put the entire party out of compliance with the organization's policy and require exclusion of some fraction of the group or possibly cancellation of the trip.
(Note the requirement that at least one chaperone be female and at least two of the chaperones be unrelated, and note that if you have to split the girls you probably need to send a minimum of two chaperones with each half..)
Businesses which sell to the public should provide accommodation for the public. Bad actors should be handled by the legal system. When their sentence expires they should be allowed to re-enter the public spaces they previously disrupted. A private "legal system" administered by global conglomerates is totalitarianism by another form.
I mean, I think it's standard operating procedure not to allow any interaction except through proper channels when there's litigation involved, and they can apply this here.
I don't think barring someone from your property is a good punishment against someone who is trying to sue you, since that kinda implies they "dislike" you already and wouldn't want to engage with you
Up next: Everyone on HN who posted that they disagree with MSG's use of facial recognition is permabanned from all MSG venues, with no notice or recourse.
How do you suppose they got her photo (and associated it with her identity)? Is there someone at MSG (or their facial recognition vendor) whose job it is to look her up on Facebook (Or her employer’s “about” page)?
Common practice for the websites of law firms (and some other fields like private equity) to have the headshots of all employees on their website with job title and description in a nice table.
Face recognition was used to identify a lawyer who works for a company involved in actively suing MSG group. She was booted due to her being a lawyer at that company. Her identify was flagged. She was visually identified and then her id was checked.
IMHO, it’s a bullshit story because the issue is whether a lawyer working for a company suing MSG should be booted from other MSG venues.
Companies/venues had blacklists (deny lists) before face recognition became ubiquitous.
She wasn’t allowed to a show because she is working as a lawyer.
> Conlon is an associate with the New Jersey based law firm, Davis, Saperstein and Solomon, which for years has been involved in personal injury litigation against a restaurant venue now under the umbrella of MSG Entertainment.
"I don’t practice in New York. I’m not an attorney that works on any cases against MSG," said Conlon.
But MSG said she was banned nonetheless — along with fellow attorneys in that firm and others.
No, no it is not. It is very much American. The one thing more American than that situation is Americans saying something bad is un-American. You are what you do, not what you say. US Americans need to get their heads out of the sand and stop being blinded by the con of American exceptionalism. You’re not better than others, you’re not revered, other countries don’t look up to you. You are not a bastion of freedom or justice. You are a country drunk on its own kool-aid, being played by the worse people you have to offer. You need the courage to admit you’re not who you thought. Only then can you enact change to who you want to be.
Quoting George Carlin: “they call it the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it”.
No, they were already getting sued. They decided for apparently purely emotional reasons to punish not just the plaintiffs, not just their lawyers, but also every other lawyer at the same firm.
The reason why we have "protected status" is that people were banning people based on their racist/hate views. Those people used their 5 senses to easily target the people they hated for discrimination. Other variables (such as who you work for) well that's not easily found out...until now. AI is now allowing for new innovating hate and discrimination to drive decisions.
What an absolute cluster. I don't envy the courts. It's going to be interesting if everyone starts weaponizing every aspect of political affiliation, employment, residence location and social status.
In almost all cases, there were people in the protected group who were able to disguise that status. So in those cases just 5 senses weren't perfect. But it was sufficient for at least some cases, which is where the laws came from.
You cannot, for instance, fire someone for being black. These characteristics are protected in the sense that discrimination against them in certain areas is illegal.
> So now companies don't put that as the termination reason, & fire them anyway for 'culture fit'. Or leave the term reason blank, b/c 'At-Will'.
No, for large companies (those at risk of being sued) it works the other way round: they collect very detailed data to objectively justify any firing, otherwise they are at high risk of losing a discrimination lawsuit.
Hence "improvement plans", "needs improvement" ratings, etc, etc.
It is likely true that small and medium companies can get away with abuse though.
> "Protected class" isn't very protected, as it leaves burden of proof to the victim
Surely though, you understand and agree that having this law is better than the alternative, where employers ARE allowed to fire someone simply for being a member of a protected class, and are even welcome to brag about doing so.
Exactly, but there are even more fundamental problems with all these identity laws.
1. They're inherently unjust and anti-equality.
2. In the case of stuff like race and gender, the law doesn't even clearly define what terms like "black" and "white" are supposed to mean. There is no scientific definition because in physical reality race doesn't exist. It's assumed everyone follows race ideology, but even if we assumed that to be true then the premise of such suits is that someone committed a thought crime. Such cases are bound to lead to wrongful convictions as well as actual discrimination going unpunished because it can't be proven. These discrimination suits are the modern day equivalent of medieval witch trials.
3. They create division and conflict. That may be an intentional feature instead of a bug though.
i don't quite agree. the law provides that being part of a protected group can not be used as a reason. that's enough. there is no need to prove a thought-crime. there is only need to prove that there is no justifiable reason for the action that lead to the discrimination, eg no justifiable reason to fire someone or to deny service. finding the real reason for the discrimination is not necessary
So, saying "you can't be part of our group because you're not black" would be illegal in the US and the person could sue for damages?
Wanna see some examples proving the opposite? That is not how it works at all, what you describe is an example of equal legal rights, I already mentioned these laws are anti-equality. Anti constitutional even, not that many in the US seem to care.
Ok, but then the US Air Force would not hire anyone shorter than 64 inches or taller than 77 inches. Your height is a part of your genetics, you can't change it.
Why are people outside of this range not protected? Am I oversimplifying something here?
They are called bona fide occupational qualifications. Even a private business can discriminate against say, an actor who can’t play a particular role due to the race or gender of the character. Same goes with certain jobs that involve lifting or an expected level physical fitness.
Could you say that you need a white male bartender for your pub in rural Texas, because your customers are racist and sexist and anyone else would make them feel uncomfortable? Or would that "choice" be limited by the protected status?
In addition, mere customer satisfaction secondary to the primary job is not enough to establish BFOQ; it's a thin line though as Hooters seems to hide behind BFOQ (thus essentially stating that the primary reason for their serving staff is sex appeal), while flight attendants cannot.
I suppose if you had an airline called "cleavage air" and had all the flight attendants wear low-cut tops, then you might get away with it.
Indeed. The law says that sex is characteristic that may be a BFOQ, and in the case of Hooters it seems to be. BFOQs may apply to sex, religion, and national origin, but not the other protected classes.
Could Hooters then reject a woman based on visual trait connected to a race, arguing that it doesn't give her the required "sex appeal"? Skin colour would be of course to obvious, but lips size or body shape?
The only way Hooters could in principle discriminate on the basis of race is if they come up with some first amendment pretext for it; e.g. the waitress job is actually an artistic performance and for some reason the art demands the performer be a certain race. That works for movie productions, but for a bar hiring waitresses? In practice it wouldn't work because the courts and the public would both write you off as an obvious racist.
That is quite fascinating to me (as a layperson and non-american). Are there any articles or is there any literature that you'd advise in that topic?
I'd be interested in something that gives more context, details and examples than the wikipedia article, but not targeted at lawyers and not excessively long.
How does that work in practice for a company like Hooters - do they spend millions on lawyers to be able to defend their position? What if you'd open a local place working in similar way to Hooters - would you go bankrupt trying to defend yourself?
> How does that work in practice for a company like Hooters - do they spend millions on lawyers to be able to defend their position?
They certainly spend millions on lawyers. They've been sued for not hiring men several times, AFAIK always settle out of court. They defend their position by claiming being a woman is a BFOQ for working at Hooters, but aren't eager to risk losing in court.
They have certainly been sued many times, but I could only find two suits related to not hiring men. The older one resulted in a large settlement and an agreement to hire regardless of sex for non-waitress positions (including bartender and host/hostess). The latter was against a single franchise and had non-disclosed settlement terms (I'm not sure how a class-action suit can have a confidential settlement; wouldn't all members of the class be notified?).
I don't know of any good resources, but application of the laws is mostly common-sense, with a slight bias towards non-discrimination in the gray areas.
It doesn't take a lawyer to tell that Hooters' primary product isn't chicken wings (Chris Rock even made a joke about it).
The reason behind the laws isn't common-sense, in the case that the 1964 Civil Rights Act is basically a list of "things currently happening that we think are bad" rather than an exhaustive list of things it's bad to discriminate on; it's also limited somewhat by the legal framework that the US congress was working within.
Labour laws in the US are also weird for similar reasons. There was a point at which union members were beaten and killed, with the local police being bought-off to not intervene. It escalated to at least one pitched battle between a private army and workers. Things like assault, battery, and murder are enforced at the local ("state" in the US terminology, not in the meaning everywhere else in the world) level not federal level, so rather than arresting the people doing this, laws were passed giving special protections to unions. Then a few decades later people argued that the special protections made unions too powerful and a bunch of extra rules limiting what unions can do were passed.
> Race can never be a BFOQ except in the specific case of artistic works, due to the first amendment.
This is technically wrong, in that the First Amendment limitation on title VII is separate from BFOQs, and race can expressly never be a BFOQ. But the effect of the limitation is similar to allowing race to work like a BFOQ in certain circumstances in artistic contexts.
> except in the specific case of artistic works, due to the first amendment.
The first amendment protected the Boy Scouts' right to express their disapproval of gays by not employing them. Is race different from a first amendment perspective?
Sexual orientation is not one of the five protected classes in legislation (sex, race, age, religion, country of origin). As such, it is not de jure protected through the entire US.
It's been argued in the 7th circuit that "sex" and "sexual orientation" apply to employment, but not elsewhere; Title IX was decided in favor of making orientation a protected class in education in 2020. 22 states protect sexual orientation by law (with 19 of them also including gender), and there's an executive order protecting both for federal jobs and contractors. But if you're in Texas, Florida, Alabama, or 25 other states? It's absolutely legal to be fired for being gay.
> But if you're in Texas, Florida, Alabama, or 25 other states? It's absolutely legal to be fired for being gay.
Recent Supreme Court precedent says that discrimination by sexual orientation is a type of discrimination by sex. If that's what you're referring to here:
> Title IX was decided in favor of making orientation a protected class in education in 2020.
The result wasn't that orientation is a protected class. It was that discrimination by orientation is an example of discrimination by sex, and sex is a protected class. So if it's not legal to fire someone for being female in Alabama, it also isn't legal to fire them for being gay, since that's the same thing.
But none of that would apply to the first amendment, since it's statutory and the first amendment is constitutional. Is there a distinction between race and sexuality relevant to the first amendment?
Look up the definition of the term "bona fide" and tell me if you think that would qualify as a good faith requirement allowing a business to discriminate their workers.
1. The "Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act" specifically bans using "Genetic Information" in certain circumstances, which is generally understood to mean e.g. DNA testing. Discriminating on height does not fall into this.
2. You could still fall into issues with e.g. the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by having a height requirement if e.g. far more men than women fall into that height range, however there are exceptions[A] built into that act when a job has specific requirements, one being you can ask for "male models" to model clothing targeted at men.
> Why are people outside of this range not protected?
Because legislation has been written to target certain characteristics. The experience of short people in American history doesn't quite match that of black, gay, or disabled people, and thus it hasn't been legislated.
> The reason why we have "protected status" is that people were banning people based on their racist/hate views. Those people used their 5 senses to easily target the people they hated for discrimination.
Easy targeting was not the issue, the combination of pervasiveness and the belief that it was unwarranted and/or resulted in an excess of social strife if tolerated was. (Sometimes, it is misportrayed as being about innate characteristics, but this is very obviously not the case with religion, where freedom of religion as a right waa very clearly the outcome of exhaustion with centuries of strife, largely between different factions within Western Christianity.)
Factor into this the consolidation of so many industries, and if you happen to run afoul of one company you've effecively become a pariah. Getting banned from Google is bad enough.
There is certainly a line that needs to be drawn, since I somewhat understand the intent behind the ban. However, this will quickly get out of hand now that we can effectively disciminate on so many new factors scale.
> "MSG instituted a straightforward policy that precludes attorneys pursuing active litigation against the Company from attending events at our venues until that litigation has been resolved. While we understand this policy is disappointing to some, we cannot ignore the fact that litigation creates an inherently adverse environment. All impacted attorneys were notified of the policy, including Davis, Saperstein and Salomon, which was notified twice," a spokesperson for MSG Entertainment said in a statement.
Seems pretty cut and dry if true. The law firm is litigating against the company, and the company notified the law firm of their policy to not allow employees to attend their venues.
I can kind of understand the lawyers actively involved in the case being banned from the arena, but why should a lawyer who is not even licensed in NY, and does not appear to be involved in the case be banned?
Should lawyers be banned from going to hospitals they are litigating against?
That was just a sentiment because lawyers bring this adversarial behavior into society, and I have a general dislike of lawyers because of this behavior I've experienced for no reason. (I was once threatened by a real estate lawyer just because I chose another firm after an initial phone call, for example.) Do they really deserve it? Maybe not, but I'm not a huge fan of the power lawyers wield and their incentives, so them getting a taste of their own medicine seems okay with me. (This is a very generic sentiment though, and not targeted towards particular people.)
Regarding the policy, is it really that absurd? They are being sued, presumably, by the law firm. When I was at a company with ongoing IP litigation, there were extremely strict measures put into place while that went on. The law firm was even notified. So the lawyers purely ignored it. Lawyers are pretty apt to point out when you ignore communication, so why did they do it? They could have communicated prior to the trip, but instead they showed up and gave their surprised Pikachu face.
> Should lawyers be banned from going to hospitals they are litigating against?
Irrelevant hypothetical because that's not what happened here, and there are different rights to medical treatment than there are for seeing an entertainment show.
It's an activist court. They'll block anything which could discriminate against their supporters but as we've seen no level of precedent is going to prevent a decision which those supporters want unless there's an extremely clear direct constitutional prohibition.
After taking a civics course in college and quitting social media none of their decisions have shocked me. I think more people need to learn the purpose and role of the court.
Shocked, no. Disappointed, yes. If you were willing to explore the space intellectually you'd find many legal scholars who could explain how what's happening now represents a significant deviation from the past. The discussion of the court's legitimacy isn't a social media phenomenon.
I can see two viable ways to prevent this from happening without taking sides on whether or not businesses should be allowed to deny service to non-protected classes of people.
1. A laser-targeted law banning facial recognition technology used for the sole purpose of denying service.
2. Not letting corporations get as large as MSG in the first place.
I'm a fan of (2). If there's one thing I would hope people across the political spectrum could agree on it's that the Federal government has seriously fallen down on its anti-trust authority.
I don't think we should keep corporations from getting that large at all. I just think that once they do get that large, they shouldn't be allowed to arbitrarily deny service to people anymore.
> A sign says facial recognition is used as a security measure to ensure safety for guests and employees.
Use of facial recognition is disclosed with a reason for its purpose. They used the same technology for a different purpose without full disclosure. This is grounds for a violation, although civil. IANAL.
However, she is going about this through another route. Liquor license does not allow them to eject people from service. MSG has a civil policy they will not allow anyone (including lawyers) associated in litigation to enter their venues. Obviously both policies contradict at this point.
My opinion is no one should have any policy that allows lawyers of parties to a lawsuit to be hurt in any way.
I think it would be helpful in the comments to separate the issue of using facial recognition for public identification and entry, from the other issue of whether this person should have been allowed in regardless of the policy.
Personally I don't think facial recognition should be allowed for public identification.
On the other hand, I think it's perfectly fine to bar opposing attorneys actively working against you from entering your business. This is not a member of the "general public" and wasn't denied entry based on identity characteristics. She was banned because she (her firm) is SUING THEM. That seems like a pretty good reason right there...
I feel like the facial recognition part of this is a red herring. The two bigger problems I see here are banning people because of what their co-workers are doing, and enforcing bans when people show up instead of when they buy their tickets.
The fucked thing about this is that as it's normalized and justified it allows companies and venues to start blocking people it doesn't like for whatever reason and essentially banishes them from society for life.
Critical of Ticketmaster online and they start to take notice? I guess you wont' be allowed into most venues or concerts for life on this continent. We also won't tell you why you were banned or offer a way out (because that's how Google and Facebook operate and it suits us). It's allowing people to be kicked out of "real world" walled gardens.
So I have been rejected and "banned" from a MSG venue. It's not fun, and it has nothing to do with your behavior.
It was at the Chicago Theather and it was the Chris Rock show back in 2017. I bought the ticket, I don't believe that it had any special restrictions [this was a long time ago], the ticket had no indications about the "phoneless"/phone encasing demand. The event page didn't say anything about this. However they were trying to force this. I refused
Why did I refuse? The Bataclan attack* happened less than 2 years before this and mobile phones did [it was reported at the time] help people communicate for help and escape. This is a big venue, and I certainly don't trust a venue who doesn't trust their ushers who can't get people to stop filming. Think they're going to know how to call the cops/handle an emergergcy? lol.
What happened? Since I was denied, I asked for a refund from the venue. The main security guard corralled me against the wall, waited for the manager, the manager argued with me and refused refund [even despite the ticket saying nothing about this, their overall policy said nothing about this [I checked to see if I could bring my small camera with me]], when the manager left to get an artist rep she felt the need to "ban me" to another security guard, they got a "artist rep" trying to argue against me using "well this is the artist's preference". (Why they brought out the stupid artist rep is beyond me)
Ultimately I lost that 80$ and will shit talk Chris Rock, any venue, and any artist who uses the yondr device.
I guarantee that you clicked through some terms and conditions while buying that ticket, and it almost certainly said that phones weren't allowed. This is quite common at comedy shows because comedians develop their material over time. They don't want clips of jokes failing to land or being taken out of context, as that could hurt their career. Recording also emboldens hecklers, as one friend can record (or even livestream) while another insults the performer.
This has been a long time ago, it's possible, I know the show description at the time of purchase didn't mention it, the ticket didn't mention it and the venue policy didn't mention anything about this. Ticketmaster after the fact didn't state there were any additional T&Cs attached to the ticket.
Back in 2017 it wasn't that common yet. I think Yondr is a great solution for comedians, but can also totally see that it wouldn't have made it into terms and conditions yet. I don't think you can guarantee anything in this case unless you have the actual T&C from that particular show.
I disagree with your statement about the comedians, unless you're talking about a full length recording that is being sold on. But for those people, you go after them in the courts for piracy after the fact.
Most of the bits captured are/will be out of context and useless. My personal desire to "record" is short "i'm here" clips or pictures. (Music productions, clips, photo for the show) TM claimed "there was nothing extra" on the ticket. (I contacted them but did not try to pull a refund as that I know that TM is going to pull the "well this is the venues' issue")
> Most of the bits captured are/will be out of context and useless.
Actual history shows the opposite. The entire reason for Yondr is precisely because people were posting bits that comedians were trying out, and then people were jumping on "so-and-so told an offensive joke!" on Twitter and it becomes a whole thing. Comedians are terrified of getting "cancelled" because they tried wording their joke a different way to see what the audience reaction would be.
If people were just recording "I'm here" clips then Yondr would never have existed.
I’ve gone to several comedy shows (5 or so?) that use the Yondr bags, and honestly I think they’re a pretty good solution. I think it’s fair for artists and comedians to want to prevent filming, and the phone jail thing is quite clever, actually. The bags are not indestructible, it seems like a sharp pair of scissors or a knife would get you in. And I think the magnet lock is actually bypassable otherwise. It’s just inconvenient enough that everyone pretty much just complies, while retaining physical possession of their phone. I kinda like the experience as an audience member, I think the phone thing does keep the audience more engaged with the show. I’m open to arguments against, but as it stands I find the phone jail charming
Yeesh. This whole thing sounds like some gross commercialization of a problem blown out of proportion, that doesn’t really work, hurts honest customers, and only gets enforced due to some sunk cost fallacy going on in the minds of the venues/entertainers that were duped into using this “product” by the IP attorneys that are throwing bad ideas out there to justify the size of their salaries. I have no doubt the same sort of thing is going on with the linked article, only it’s a different branch of the legal team involved this time.
While I am fine with bans on phones for performances, I too would absolutely bristle and feel strongly inclined to complain if that was not made clear at the time I bought a ticket.
If they actually kicked people out, not just say "please put your phone away" people would learn it's not okay. The only reason people do it is because they don't think they'll get in trouble.
That would have invalidated my other tickets held by Ticketmaster. I think I held a Metallica ticket at the time. (Metallica let me into solder field with a Lecia Lumix LX10)
Funny about Metallica. They went from being one of the lead crusaders that brought Napster down, to now releasing their new music with no restrictions, and allowing filming at their concerts, because they have realized that on balance they are gaining more from the publicity than they lose on music sales.
What was the phone requirement that you refused? Did they want to confiscate your phone, lock it in a bag you physically couldn’t open, seal it in an envelope you got to keep but could open in an emergency, just demand you keep it in your pocket…?
If the pouches had a tamper evident tool-less ripcord to open it in the event of an emergency, I think that would resolve the concerns about a Bataclan scenario.
I'd never thought of that. I would have accepted that situation if it had a rip cord and not had been happy about the requirement. However, I'm very confident that it'll never happen as that people will pull the rip cord to record. (Heck I would probably obey the rules and pull the ripcord right before handing back the case to remove the phone)
Reading about those... They basically lock away your phone and they don't give you the key.
Not quite as bad as chaining people in their apartment buildings to keep COVID-19 quarantines, but it certainly would be reason enough for me to avoid a venue.
They don't quite lock it away. They give you a special pouch that locks, you put your phone in that pouch, lock it, and then they unlock it for you at the end of the show. Your phone doesn't leave you at any point.
Not trying to argue for or against that policy. But comparing it even remotely to the COVID situation you are describing (that is currently happening in a certain country) is about as self-aggrandizing and out of touch as it can get.
There are a lot of claims here. Their offical statements are:
1. They don't want their show recorded.
2. They don't want their show "leaking" on the internet ("loss of ticket sells")
3. People using their phones "ruin the experience"
Realistically it's due to:
1. They say libalious things. (Aka Hanable Burris talking about Cosby before formal conversations were had) Also, they say things that upset groups of people who try to "boycott." Aka Louie and the Parkland shooting joke./"Cancelled"
Nearly all of the shows I've been to have "no recording requests"/rules etc.
Most of the time who gets caught are the ones that bring a full video camera. (Poor Rammstein requests no filming but people have their phones out the whole time.. comes with a big show)
This is an extra enforcement deal I'm referring to.
Look up "phone free" and you'll find the references. What it is: It's a strong fabric case that locks you out of your phone with a very strong magnet.(defaces the object you have) This prevents you from answering the phone, making calls, using the camera etc. Have a medical/police/medical-staff being called back emergency? Good luck buddy, no one cares about this.
The company who is doing this is Yondr. They've been doing this for years. They've been doing this with musicians, comedians, courtrooms, and even at schools. I'm amazed that they have been getting away with this for so long.
Yondr has had a lot of astroturfing over the years so it's harder to find the people who have had a bad experience over the years. You'll see non-normally participating people pop up in every comment section that mentions the phone ban: "well i like that everyone isn't on their phone" etc. Also, you'll see near promo news pieces on this. Additionally there has been no public comment with this that I know of, which is super auspicious from the US or Europe. (Just did the research Placebo and Bono have enforced this in Paris.. a bit brave considering the bataclan)
EDIT: Dang, yes I said the a word (ends with turfing), this is not a statement thats happening here.
If a venue insists on treating me like guilty-until-proven-innocent cattle, I will not go. I can't be alone in this sentiment.
A friend of mine uses their phone to run an insulin pump. Are there suitable exceptions? How about doctors which may have obligations to their patient's calls?
Not OP but there are a few performers who like to either confescate phones or place them in locked baggies to stop the people who hold their phone in the air filming a video nobody will ever watch.
In theory I like the idea but in practice I agree with OP.
> to stop the people who hold their phone in the air filming a video nobody will ever watch.
This is the statement that I want to go up to you in person physically grab you, shake you and tell you I love you for making that statement. It's frustrating to be gaslit by artist claiming that a youtube reproduction of their concert/show is going to cause a justifiable loss of future revenue. Looking back at the Rammstein stiched concerts only makes me want to go more.
I'm unclear on how this is a regulation or deregulation thing. There could be a regulation that specifically allows for or denies smartphones at such events. It's hypothetical at this point, so why is deregulation to blame in this case now?
It’s only a big deal because regulators allowed companies like MSGE and Live Nation to buy up all the independent venues. No one would care if a single fascist club owner was terrorizing customers because the free market would punish him.
You can make the claim that ADA/disability rights were denied by the venue. (See the bluetooth gluclose monitors and people are extremely fragile or blind with the use of aids)
With regulation this a slam dunk.
With deregulation- they're getting away with "per venue's discretion" - But I have heard of medical staff being rejected because they were oncall or parents who had a baby sitter.
Yes and if enough people actually thought about it and cared then they wouldnt participate and the market would change. But instead just like with regulation they don't care. It's just one is forced and one is a choice.
An artistic show tend to have weirdly inelastic demand. If someone is a committed fan, they will typically pay any amount of money to "worship their idol" (not in a negative way, ritualized communal, artist performances are some of the earliest human traditions we have).
To see a society in which very few limits were placed on who could see a concert, look up Metallica playing when the USSR fell, absolutely massive.
A venue can dictate how you dress and behave, but can't dictate that you not carry in a cellphone?
Not clearly telling someone with anxiety that their (very common) safety blanket isn't allowed in the venue before they buy the ticket it a problem, but it's a problem with how we treat Terms-of-Service and EULAs that are too long and legalistic as binding. It's good that people can't have their cellphones at comedy shows.
Banning phones at large events is dangerous, and should be illegal for the same reason that jamming is. If there's an emergency, neither you nor anyone around you will be able to call 911.
A magnet can be attached to your keys so it looks like a prox pass. No security guard is going to argue about the contents of your keyring.
I've had success with keeping (small) pocket knives on me. Those metal detectors are almost always badly tuned since false alarms are disruptive. I used to consider getting some kind of fancy thermoplastic pocket knife but frankly any cheap small knife works.
I was assertive and not aggressive. I tried to do friendly chit chat with the security guy trying to corner me against the wall so "I wouldn't escape into their venue". (People dealing with the public have very short fuses when it comes to non-polite language on ejecting you/banning you/etc.. I have no plans to giving them the ability to invoke that policy despite their frequent gas lighting "well this is what the artist demands")
> unclear
This about a venue's (MSG, which also runs the one that the Rockeets played at) overzealous and seedy decisions to deny entry.
On the other hand it does kind of make sense that they would refuse service to people actively suing their company. I would do that too. I mean it's kind of common sense
We all know how this works. It’s perfectly legal until someone in congress is impacted, then legislation will suddenly appear about this “new horrible invasion of privacy”.
I don't like the consequences of facial recognition tech and what it's going to do to our society and its potential to enhance social discrimination of all kinds, but I have a hard time faulting the venue for using it to enforce an (arguably reasonable, or at least legally viable) admittance policy that had been communicated beforehand to the law firm. This doesn't seem to be a case of discrimination.
Question: if she purchased the ticket under her own name and she held a valid ticket upon entry to the venue, would it be fraud if one doesn’t get access to the event? Even more so if she doesn’t get a full refund?
One would presume that there would be measures in place during checkout that would inhibit transactions that go against their policies to not go through.
I can't help it, I see lots of recent corporate developments as a whole new set of "middle-age"-attitudes that permeate in society. This is one of them. Another is Elon's personal & professional mixed events. There is a whole new bunch of things happening in this direction.
I know what you mean by this joke. But good. Their hostile position of "we will retailate anyone against us" should not be taken lightly. The more people they ban under this the more they're going to lose business and fail.
This is a service I think some parents would be eager to sign up for, although since the woman kicked out was chaperoning a school field trip it seems like poor judgment on the part of MSG.
The weirdest thing about this to me isn't that they kicked her out because of the litigation, but that they were able to see who she was based off of the facial recognition alone
Like where do they get this data from in the first place? From a data broker? Is it possible to request to have facial data removed from the data broker?
Did she consent to them using facial recognition technology on her at the venue? (If this isn't already a law, that is to say requiring consent... it should be)
Dystopian SaaS idea: Integrate facial recognition and Yelp reviews. If someone shows up who gave you a negative review, send a text to staff and/or deny sale at POS.
I read the article and I have read a lot of comments here.
I couldn't find a single reference to where the data set came from that trained the model they are using to do facial recognition.
Someone did theorize that it could be taken from a hypothetical law firm website but IIRC a single photo of someone is not good enough to reliably train a model that is not overfit.
Another chapter in the corporate hellscape of the US. Now your job search includes research on corporate factions and their relations, any outting you attend is preceded by research of corporate ownership and faction relations or security measures in place in order to know if you can attend or attempt to bypass said measures.
Many open source software license have an automatic revocation clause in the event of litigation too. Considering the viral nature of software libraries, that could make life very difficult for people too.
can someone explain a bit the reasonning behind banning opposing lawyers from the defendant's venue?
I feel like it's to reduce "on the ground" discoveries in civil cases, but I don't understand why, as far as I know those are neither forbidden nor unethical, there is a later opportunity to debate whether those discoveries gets introduced as evidence in the case.
There isn't any information they could discover. The lawsuit is not against MSG the venue, but against a restaurant somewhere else that happens to be owned by the same umbrella corporation.
Her law firm is actively using the venue owners. This isnt just some random person showing up to an event. Her picture is probably on the firm's website.
The biggest US law firm Baker McKenzie (just googled this) has almost 5000 lawyer. Would they be safe from this policy due to the bureaucratic nightmare involved in adding that many faces to the system??
It would also be very interesting if the law firms that were litigating MSG started putting 'different' faces on their employee websites... a little bit of misinformation could cause lots of issues.
This seems pretty cut and dry to me. If someone had a lawsuit against me, one of my businesses, or the like I wouldn't allow them or their employees into my establishments.
If there is a need for them to be there, law enforcement will be accompanying them.
Yes this was exactly my thought. Every day we hear about someone kicked off google without recourse, often because of an automated decision incorrectly made. How long until people are banned from public venues for the same reason?
For a long time now, governments have failed to modernize laws and regulations, and companies have stepped in with their own vigilante systems. We don't need more regulation, but we need updated standards for how technology like facial recognition can be aligned with previous norms and laws that came into existence when mass surveillance and communication tech didnt exist
Yea I think the bigger issue here is just that Dolan is an oligarch heir piece of shit and we need to rethink how inheritance works. The facial recognition stuff is an issue, but if dolan had to actually work for any of the stuff he's got I think he'd behave very differently.
they are banning them because they have already caused trouble in similar situation. This is very different, she is being banned even though there is no indication that she would be security threat.
Anecdotal but having visited a few countries that have national IDs, they use them with just about anything worth having. Tickets, SIM cards, Service Agreements, you name it.
I live in Uruguay and you need to use your ID very often when doing commercial stuff.
A lawyer was banned from seeing a popular show for reasons entirely unrelated to physical safety, with an FR twist. She then hit back at their liquor license. Who's got popcorn??
The hit back at the liquor license (which apparently requires admitting the general public, with only very specific exceptions) sounded pretty clever to me.
Yes, people in a vulnerable position routinely get hurt and just about every citizen is vulnerable to multiple someones.
It's unfortunate that certain professions have extremely high walls around them: police, doctors, lawyers, even certain elected officials and select other professions are very hard to displace, while their position grants them very easy tools to displace, manipulate, or harm others.
The woman's law firm is in active litigation with MSG Entertainment. She knows she's not allowed on the premises while the lawsuits are unresolved. They saw her and kicked her out.
But this is a controversy because Girl Scout Mom got spotted by facial recognition I guess. Not the fact that she was trespassing.
Last month MSG revoked the corporate suite leased by a law firm that was _actively suing them_. And they made the same big stink about how unfair it was that they can't go to Knicks games anymore.
So I get that this is true, but I don't understand why people are being so "Bob's your uncle" about it. I get that it's a policy but why do so many act like it doesn't deserve criticism?
TL;DR A personal injury lawyer ("in a wreck, need a check?") was banned from an attending a show. She attended anyway and was asked to leave. Computers were involved.
Seems like it’s an unpopular opinion, but it seems fairly reasonable to me to restrict someone who is currently, actively suing you from using your place of business.
It’s neither punitive nor petty. It’s simply practical from a legal perspective.
I don't take issue to that. I think using facial recognition paired with a database of naughty / nice individuals is going to pose a plethora of societal issues down the road. It is evocative of China's social credit system somewhat.
Yet the audience of hacker news typically leans on hating any sense of ethics in AI (check my recent comment history). This is a problem. We need to take ethics in AI seriously.
So security have received an alert on a person. They start rushing for that person. There would be a significant proportion of the population who would find that uncomfortable if not scary, who is to say how they will react. The person runs away, or does something that the guards think is threatening. The guard pulls a gun and shoots the person... All because they happened to be employed by a company that the venue has decided they don't like.
>MSG instituted a straightforward policy that precludes attorneys pursuing active litigation against the Company from attending events at our venues until that litigation has been resolved.
While it's reasonable to disagree with this policy, it's not really related to social dystopia, so I think it's dramatic to lament this in the vein of "today it's this, tomorrow it will be getting banned due to Tweeting about your politics", or whatever. I mean, yes, that may happen, but the only thing concerning about this case is the tech itself, and not necessarily the rationale under which it was deployed.
> While it’s reasonable to disagree with this policy, it’s not really related to social dystopia […] While it’s reasonable to disagree with this policy, it’s not really related to social politics, so I think it’s dramatic to lament this in the vein of “today it’s this, tomorrow it will be getting banned due to Tweeting about your politics”, or whatever. I mean, yes, that may happen, but the only thing concerning about this case is the tech itself
Tolerance for use of the technology without restrictions is, arguably, a way in which this relates to social dystopia.
Technology doesn’t do anything on its own; people using it (and other people allowing other people to use it) in certain ways is always social.
It becomes a social dystopia when it's not just "you're banned from places you're suing" but "you're banned from places in half the country because they're all actually just owned by the same company"
Jumping from "attorneys pursuing active litigation" to anyone working with such persons, and from "litigation against the Company" to "any ongoing litigation against subsidiaries despite date of purchase or litigation" makes it far from clear. Also selling the ticket despite such a "straightforward policy" seems like it may bring up a tricky contract issue.
Covid is still around. Always wear your mask in public.
Don't show ID unless it's a cop demanding it (when it's legally required). Private parties can't demand ID. Don't give ID for routine transactions. Practice saying no to routine demands for your papers.
It doesn't improve unless a lot of us start ending the transactions.
What? Can you cite any laws legally barring people for requiring ID for a business transaction or to access private property? I've honestly never heard of such a thing. Obviously if a private person says "I want to see your ID for access or before completing this transaction" you may legally refuse, and they cannot arrest you or anything. But they can then in turn refuse to complete the transaction.
You've no right to access private property even with ID, as TFA illustrates. ID or no ID, the private property owner can eject you if they wish (unless their ejection is based solely on your membership in a protected class).
I'm not sure where your question comes from. Of course any private property owner can reject you for any reason, including failure to ID. But that's nothing to do with ID.
It comes from your assertion that "Private parties can't demand ID." That was your claim. I'm saying that as far as I know private parties absolutely CAN demand ID. Including for "routine transactions". And if you don't cooperate then you don't get to do the transaction.
You seem to have just completely reversed yourself with this post so now in turn I'm not clear on what your first one was for. If you were somehow conflating "demand" with criminal penalties or force then that's a weird reading, and also this entire discussion is purely about a business transaction. They didn't arrest her, they "jsut" didn't honor her ticket and booted her, which is what people are (reasonably IMO) concerned/upset about. But refusing to show ID wouldn't have helped with that quite the contrary, even places with zero such tech may require identity verification for a transaction and ID is the only widely existing low friction way to do that.
Radio City Music Hall is a private venue, they can ban or exclude anyone they want, as long as it's not due to membership in a protected class. You don't have a right to attend a Rockettes show, and if she doesn't like this policy she can start her own Christmas Spectacular show.
> Radio City Music Hall is a private venue, they can ban or exclude anyone they want, as long as it's not due to membership in a protected class.
There are a ton of laws preventing this behavior by venues. Basically if you sell tickets to the public, you HAVE to let the ticket holders in, barring bad behavior at the gate or contraband. The idea that something is private means you can do whatever you want is very naive.
> if she doesn't like this policy she can start her own Christmas Spectacular show.
She can also just sue and demand hearings about licenses that further prevent this kind of behavior (i.e. public venue, hospitality, zoning, liquor, food and beverage, etc...). From a social/business standpoint, punishing lawyers for working for an opposing firm is very small minded.
Also facial recognition telling gate agents who a member of the public works for is scummy.
MSG Certainly does not abide by that.("you have to let ticket holders in")
I was banned entry [Chicago Theater] (not formally but at the door which was weird as that I was not trying to progress in) for refusing to encase my phone in the yonder pouch. Once denied, I requested a full refund of my ticket. I don't recall having the notice when I bought the ticket and the the ticket didn't state the phone casing. (This was chris rock)
2. How willing would attorneys be willing to persue this?
3. How many attorneys can you actually contact about this? (This deals with the entertainment industry.. they're very well funded and very aggressive.
----
Then it came down is.. is it worth reaching out to the IL Attorney General about this? I didn't because I was exhausted by then and they probably wouldn't take it up due to the complexity of the transaction.
This situation simply is: A third party holder of tickets (TM) issueing a ticket to a show venue (Chris Rock+MSG|Chicago Theater), rejecting entry to an individual (me) with a ticket, but preventing me from being able to honor the ticket (due to rules from the Chris Rock group to the venue). And the whole case involves a group v 1 conversation involving all parties except for TM.
While in principle I'm inclined to agree, I'm not sure I want to live in a world where you might get yanked from a business after paying for entry because your employer is deemed to be adversarial. This has a nasty tinge of a cyberpunk dystopia. It fells at best illiberal, in the classical sense it like a kind of techno-mercantilism.
What really bothers me here is that the lady wasn't even involved in a lawsuit against Radio City Music Hall, it just happens to be the case that they're connected through some billion dollar conglomerate to the restaurant that she's involved in litigation with.
Pissing off a mom and pop store and getting banned from that one location is one thing, but treading on the toe of an enormous corporation and being met with this just doesn't sit right with me.
Yeah the possible chilling effect here is terrifying tbh, especially with all the mergers happening. Using the courts to get redress is a core pillar of our world (whether it should be or not is another topic). Imagine if Live Nation had a policy that anybody who works for any firm who is involved in any litigation against the company (or it’s many subsidiaries) can’t attend any of their shows or go to any of their venues. Firms would absolutely hesitate before they took on any related case bc of the impact on their employees, functionally increasing the ability of LN to do more bad.
You are forgetting that they have the right to not sell tickets to whomever they choose, but once that ticket is sold, they are on very shaky ground to ban someone unless they misrepresented who they were when buying the ticket.
Tickets are contracts!
How can they prove this isn’t some bogus way to account for oversold seats? What if an airline did the same on oversold flights?
> they are on very shaky ground to ban someone unless they misrepresented who they were when buying the ticket.
Then I suppose it will come down to whether the ticket terms included a clause that the purchaser/attendee was not employed by a firm involved in a lawsuit against MSGE.
Well with advances in surveillance tech maybe we should rethink that general principle, as we have re: the protected class carve out you mention. You may be ok with this but how about excluding certain members due to low social credit scores? Or because they vote a certain way? Or because they said something mean on twitter about the owner? etc.
similar to the legality of unpleasant speech .. a private venue does have the right to exclude because it is.. privately owned.
Instead of taking to the streets (or social media) in righteous anger, I suggest considering your economic support right now, of companies that build and operate societal surveillance machinery; that build and operate companies that rely on indentured servitude; companies that build and operate private shopping areas with pleasing music and eye-catching ads while paving the living earth and hiring private snoopers. worthy of scrutiny and operating widely today in your town, no?
Data collection / sharing regulations should absolutely be passed in America asap. Laws re: facial recognition are being passed in part because it creeps us out but that's just the tip of the iceberg. EU is taking the lead here because these are American companies, but I no longer look at things like "right to be forgotten" or GDPR or whatever and scoff at those wacky Euros.
I mean, taking the article at face value (which, albeit, can be a bit of a leap sometimes), they've had both a court order to stop this practice and it's out of compliance with other regulations to ban these individuals.
It's a corporation, which blurs the notion of what it means to be "private." To assert its rights as a private entity, the venue could restructure itself as a Sole Proprietorship or Partnership.
> It’s a corporation, which blurs the notion of what it means to be “private.”
Legally, under established precedent, it does not, though a legal doctrine that as creations of the state through law corporations are bound by the same due process and equal protection rules that would affect all other state organs would be interesting, as would the corollary that foreign corporations, as creations of foreign states, are arms of their governments, and that their agents, including employees and domestic subsidiaries and their employees, are agents of foreign governments subject to all the rules and restrictions applicable thereto would be interesting.
There are aspects of corporate law, such as limitation of liability, that correspond to no natural rights of private individuals. In fact, that's probably the granddaddy of all entitlements.
> Radio City Music Hall is a private venue, they can ban or exclude anyone they want
I don’t think anyone is arguing that this is outside of their legal rights.
Things can be undesirable without being illegal, and just as MSG can legally punish this lawyer for distant connection to a lawsuit against them without violating the law, other people can note the behavior, criticize it, and even punish MSG for it in their business relations without violating the law.
Being compelled by the state to do something you don't want to do (e.g. provide a service to someone) is what they are objecting to in principle I think, and they see THAT as a potential slippery slope more so than the opposite issue (being unable to pay for services due to societal freeze out).
I don't think that's what he's saying so much as the law reflects the principle I outline and they likely admire: state should in general not compel individuals (or businesses) to do things they don't want to do.
The idea that the law is just a bunch of words and your job is to advocate for them to change if it improves your life in any way is not a great guiding principle.
>state should in general not compel individuals (or businesses) to do things they don't want to do.
This is a very easy thing to say as a member of majority groups, but American (and South African and European, and...) history has shown that this attitude leads to some of the most grotesque outcomes in history.
And where does it end? Should subsidies and variable tax rates be illegal (hope you're not a member of a church or a supporter of the arts!)? Those are control mechanisms the government uses to influence behaviors.
Should federal employment be illegal? I don't think most Soldiers would risk their lives if not for the paycheck/benefits.
But treating the law as ironclad and immutable to the detriment of practical outcomes is just as bad. Therein lies the tension of civilization that must be kept in balance.
"Being compelled by the state to do something you don't want to do (e.g. provide a service to someone) is what they are objecting to"
That's not what happened though. They sold admission to a person and then rejected it because that person works for a firm that has an open case against another company that they're conglomerated with.
It smells like retaliation to me, but I guess it will come down to what the courts decide.
> Working against one's own interest because one believes in a higher principle is a good thing. It's what we call "being principled".
It can be a good thing while we regularly and objectively evaluate a principle's worth. We humans have a history of allowing principles to obtain rigidity and the diminished outcomes that follow. We also tend to allow principle creep w/o sufficient examination.
I assume because GP is at a point where they can use and value a principle but have not yet realized that (to remain beneficial) principles need rigorous reevaluation and updating.
Amen. Parallel industries will spring up to serve those disenfranchised from establishment dystopian nonsense, and the ongoing ideological self-segregation will accelerate.
I wouldn't be so sure of this. There are countless examples of businesses applying gross discrimination practices for generations, and only stopping when forced to by the government.
Jim Crow laws were passed and enforced by the government. There are countless examples of businesses having no choice but to discriminate because government told them to.
The government itself determined that segregation was A-OK as long as things were "separate but equal."
Just to clarify, you're claiming that ALL businesses that discriminated were legally compelled to? If you're just talking about some businesses at some point in time, that does nothing to refute my point; or "narrative" as you put it.
Parallel industries are hard to spring up when, as mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, entrenched oligopolies like MSGE and Live Nation buy up all of the independent venues. Unchecked corporate interests are the biggest enemies to free market competition and capitalism.
