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Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

I'm not sure why everyone is assuming she was denied a refund.

They won't be able to refund her missing out on spending time with her kid.

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.

> we're refusing you access to a place you had a ticket for, on a reason you could not have possibly predicted"

MSG claims to have notified the company twice.

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.

Yea how stupid.

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)

I’m aware of that, hence why I said it was a harder problem to solve.

>Who cares what technology they use?

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

> They could also check ids at the door and cross-reference their naughty list.

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.

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.

Not because it's impractical to check IDs, but because facial recognition is less explicit and thus more easily "normalized".

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.

That’s exactly how they work when you actually board the plane.

The thing they scan is your boarding pass.

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.

> Who cares what technology they use?

As you say, they could accomplish the same thing by checking IDs at the door. Given the choice, I'd personally prefer an explicit ID check that I know is happening and is inconvenient for everybody rather than one that leaves me oblivious to the fact I'm being tracked and researched.

The technology isn't really important, but its what makes this possible. Without it, no one would do the alternative of employing dozens of people to look at faces and search them in record books of people they want to ban.

I'm also critical of the legal argument - too often in HN someone will about stuff that isn't illegal. My question is: so what? This is a forum for discussions, not a tribunal. We are not judging, we can argue that something is shitty, or that laws should be changed.

You can always refuse random ID checks. Of course the business still has the right to refuse service to you, but by law you don't have to ID yourself to random businesses.

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