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.
