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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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!
> 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?
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.
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.
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)
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!
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.
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.
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.
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 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)
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.
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.
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
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.
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 d...
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.
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!
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 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.
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.
>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.
>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?
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 !)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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!
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.
#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.”
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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..)
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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…?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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”.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 390 ms ] threadFor 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
Can we just make personal data collection and sharing illegal? We got by before this was even possible.
Otherwise known as regulations. If it's just a standard that's not enforceable, companies will not comply.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34057496
Sure they can do this without anyone getting sued, but they can still face consequences for doing it (like people not going to see the Rockettes).
People like the OP seem to forget that legality is not the ultimate moral code.
I’m just saying people who lean on “the law is this, they are in the right” ignore a major part of society and commerce to their own detriment.
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.
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.
Is the problem only with mandates?
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.
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.
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.
It’s a gross system.
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?
Best of all possible outcomes.
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."
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.
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)
1. How much time would this take
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Ticket master also has anti-chargeback clauses as well.
Listen, if you’re going to be a pedantic law critic, at least be iron clad.
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.
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.
To me this screams "MSG is doing illegal/contract breaking shit"
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 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:
https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/madison-square-g...
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.
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.
The key part of the second sentence: they are confident. Tricky to argue just how confident they are.
Weird that they still sold her a ticket, though.
This seems like a very American thing to do all of this. The lawsuit, the facial recognition, the counter lawsuit. So very American.
https://www.wired.com/story/soccer-world-cup-biometric-surve...
https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/26/15435620/champions-league...
I live in Uruguay and you need to use your ID very often when doing commercial stuff.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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?
After having been warned and then being prevented from going in, her response is to sue them again.
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!
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?
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.
So you're OK with countries using guns to conduct warfare, but you're NOT okay with countries using nuclear weapons? How does that make any sense?
Hopefully you can see the difference.
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)
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!
https://www.marketing91.com/brand-architecture/
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.
1,000,000 deaths are a statistic
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.
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.
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.
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.
MSG claims to have notified the company twice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
They couldn’t, it seems impractical for an event of that scale.
Plus, it’s easier to bypass a door check or even convince the person doing the check to let you in.
They do not perform the ID checking, which because of varying forms of ID is a non trivial problem that they push back to the security lines.
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
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.
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.
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 d...
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.
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!
https://thenewswheel.com/history-of-the-car-phone/
I actually don't see that as the key element at all - Doing something that is already legal, faster, doesn't make it illegal does it?
The 1974 SAFARI scandal seems to be quite relevant here too :
https://www-lemonde-fr.translate.goog/blog/bugbrother/2010/1...
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.
It’ll be interesting to see if MSG is forced to report the source they used as part of the legal proceedings.
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.
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?
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.
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).
Low-tech and easy to enforce.
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.
Of course banning people based on where they work is bad for business.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34075624
But I think we are on the same page anyway
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?
How? Dalits aren't from Dalitland.
It'll come down to a judge, but it doesn't seem like a stretch to put a caste group under that umbrella.
[0] https://www.justice.gov/crt/federal-protections-against-nati...
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...)
https://www.americananthro.org/ConnectWithAAA/Content.aspx?I...
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 !)
Basically because it wasn't on the radar of American legislators when they wrote up the lists of protected classes.
See https://www.eeoc.gov/statutes/title-vii-civil-rights-act-196....
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.
I know more than a few MD's that refuse to see lawyers as patients - can't say I blame them.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Which laws forbid this?
If you were not letting other, strangers, in for money. (Unsure if "for money" matters) then you are not, or should not, be so allowed.
If you are in trade than (in civilised jurisdictions) you cannot refuse to trade with a person because of prejudice and/or bigotry.
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)
This is a slippery slope.
Facial recognition matched with digital currencies is a real serious problem.
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.
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 run a home business. Does that mean the general public are free to enter and roam around my home office?
So you're in the second case. What's complicated about this?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Example of a different firm where you can even filter by school: https://www.wlrk.com/attorneys/?asf_l=View%20All
I'd bet she self-identified as being an employee and posted to social media about it.
Another angle is their insurer
Another angle is their payment processor
You can likely get them back into community expectations
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.
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.
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.
Typical Girl Scout policy here:
https://www.gsnorcal.org/content/dam/girlscouts-gsnorcal/doc...
(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..)
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.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_2015_Paris_attacks
> unclear
This about a venue's (MSG, which also runs the one that the Rockeets played at) overzealous and seedy decisions to deny entry.
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.
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.
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.
GP - what?
In theory I like the idea but in practice I agree with OP.
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.
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.
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?
(Specifically, no video recording allowed, but most enforcement is too stupid so they have a blanket restriction.)
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"
2. They are pissy about bad recordings going up on the internet and being caught behaving badly. (https://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/dave-chappelle-fan...)
3. It's there to protect notorious joke stealers from being caught in the act.
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.
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.
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.
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")
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.
> it seems like a sharp pair of scissors or a knife would get you in
You have neither of those during the time of an emergency. They've already taken those things away at the door with the metal detector.
They do "have an area where you can unlock it" however it's a restricted area.. and not much of a use during an emergency.
> It’s just inconvenient enough that everyone pretty much just complies
I feel like that's why it's gotten so far as it has.
Not only is it a numbers game (too many people to police), it is also very annoying for other patrons when people are constantly told to stop.
So banning the phones is a great solution that solves a number of problems.
> Think they're going to know how to call the cops/handle an emergergcy? lol.
Of course they do.
I really don’t think you rationale for refusing to hand over your phone holds up.
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.
Why didn't you chargeback for services not received?
The more we privatize, the more we allow to converge in the private hands of the wealthy few, the less recourse the "public" has.
And the government never makes mistakes.
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 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.
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.
So the chance of false positives is minimal.
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.
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?
I mean, I'm thankful to live in a place where we are too boring to even think of these kinds of shenanigans. We have our own but they are not as bad.
For discussion, let's take MSG's statement in good faith, and assume the attorney was notified twice.
Are there legitimate reasons to do this other than a "pretext for doing collective punishment on adversaries who would dare sue MSG" as suggested?
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
(In that case it would be purely the holding employees with no connection to the specific actions responsible for what their employer does.)
Similar to the video rental privacy act.