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Comment by kspacewalk2 | Hacker News Reader

I'm unclear about the rationale for banning facial recognition here (other than sour grapes about the technology preventing them personally from attending a concert). Are they arguing against the concept of looking for a particular human face on a video feed? Then it's completely illogical to ban automated ways of doing so and allow the old-fashioned eyeballs-on-screens method. In other words, the very concept of trying to identify someone in a crowd at an event ought to be illegal.

Or is it merely the effectiveness, brought about by facial recognition algorithms, that they object to? In other words, go ahead and have humans do it very ineffectively, that's somehow not against my rights, it's only when it actually works that it becomes a Violation Of My Human Rights. Not a great argument either.

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From the original story, the person was barred after she purchased a ticket, travelled to New York, and entered the venue. She was with her child and a group of children from the child's school, along with their parents. She was confused, embarrassed, and humiliated for being singled out and kicked out of the venue in front of the group.

She said it wouldn't have been so bad if they had just denied her a ticket. It would have saved her all the time, expense, and embarrassment. However, that is the problem inherent in using facial recognition in this way.

>However, that is the problem inherent in using facial recognition in this way.

Would it have all been a-okay if an employee "manually" spotted her face on a CCTV feed and matched to a physical binder with lawyers' photos? No? Then this has nothing whatsoever to do with facial recognition itself.

The sheer scale facial recognition allows makes it different yes. You could ban millions of individuals with automatic facial recognition which you simply can't do manually.

Banning millions is objectionable while banning dozens is okay, purely due to numbers involved? I am trying to find this argument coherent in any way and failing. Maybe someone can help me out.

If you only have the capability to ban 10 people, you are going to be very judicious in who you ban. If you can ban an unlimited number of people, you will ban people up until it has a financial impact as long as business feels the ban is a net financial positive (such as making all lawyers second guess taking any case against any of your businesses, or your affiliated businesses once these databases get shared. Imagine being banned from your local grocery store based on representing a person's legal interest in a completely unrelated lawsuit, corporations could bring a lot of pain if this was to be extended).

> If you only have the capability to ban 10 people, you are going to be very judicious in who you ban.

But how do you arrive at this limit? Why 10? Why not 100? Why not 0?

10 is the number that a person can reasonably accurately memorize based on photos.

I'm having the same exact issue. I don't understand the argument that many here seem to implicitly be making, that "businesses should be allowed to ban as many people as they can without using automated technology". First of all, the question is 'why?' Why should a business be allowed to ban a person so long as they're not using technology to do so? The next question is, this would still allow a big business like MSG to ban significantly more people than a smaller business, just by virtue of being able to hire more security staff.

I don’t know why you think that the law must allow every technique, so long as a basic one is always functionally available. The right to own a small gun does not promote the right to own a howitzer.

(Put another way: it’s perfectly ordinary for the courts to rule on methods themselves.)

In your gun analogy, there's some rationale about the end goal of owning the weapon. A handgun can plausibly be owned for personal self defence, a howitzer cannot. What is the analogous argument with facial recognition? Only that it works better than the non-automated method (more accurate, but especially more cost effective).

It is either okay to pick undesirable customers out of a crowd after (or perhaps in the process) of granting them entry, and kicking them out. Or it's not okay. Whether I use a room full of employees, a bigger room full of underpaid "interns", or a computer algorithm in a small box to do the matching is a detail of implementation.

The argument would be either (1) that automated facial recognition goes above and beyond the reasonable requirements of the facility, representing an unnecessary intrusion into a person’s private life, (2) that the same does unacceptable harm in the public sphere, or (3) that its particular application is capricious and clearly represents an attempt to stifle the right to seek legal recourse. Any of these would be sufficient, and may or may not be convincing to a judge.

I still fail to see the uniqueness, as it were, of automated facial recognition. In 1 and 3, what changes if a human being either looks at your face on a screen or looks into your face attentively at the turnstile, and then matches it using a big old binder with photos? Just the effectiveness of the method?

If you're arguing 3, surely the argument has nothing to do with the technology used to identify you and kick you out to stifle your methodology of obtaining evidence outside the court-approved methods of discovery, it is the act of kicking you out that is in itself an issue.

If you're arguing 1, I'd say your private life is not being intruded upon in any fashion that's new. You chose to go to a public place, so it is unreasonable to expect that no one might try to identify you based on your facial characteristics.

Not sure what to make of 2 without further elaboration. I can sort of steel-man a coherent argument to this effect when it comes to government surveillance, but I don't think it'll apply to a private entertainment venue.

Weird how you act as if it was always possible, yet it has not begun to occur until recently, with the application of facial recognition. Must be some sort of weird coincidence, right? What reason do you propose?

>Weird how you act as if it was always possible, yet it has not begun to occur until recently, with the application of facial recognition.

While I can't claim to know for certain about the goings on in casino security rooms, I've seen films from pre-facial-recognition era featuring attentive personnel browsing through dozens of CCTV cams, with binders full of photos of undesirables within arms reach.

We aren't talking about Casino rooms though? We are talking about MSG and you are proposing that it's been a trivial thing for MSG to do since, I guess photographs have existed? So, it's on you, not me to establish that. I think it's a pretty ridiculous proposition that you've offered. I think the fact that it hasn't been a problem yet, until facial recognition was used, demonstrates that your pushback is baseless.

We're talking about venues with a massive number of customers and a blacklist, so I fail to see why a casino is special for the purposes of this discussion. If you go back and re-read the article a bit more attentively, I think you'll find examples from the early 20th century onward of this having been a problem. Without agreeing or disagreeing with the idea that such venues (whether casinos or concert halls, the distinction being irrelevant at least to me) ought to be summarily disallowed to ban customers - nothing changed with facial recognition other than their ability to do this a bit better. At least I can still grow a beard or put on one of those funky anti-recognition glasses from Hong Kong, though I think I won't try that at a casino.

>We're talking about venues with a massive number of customers and a blacklist, so I fail to see why a casino is special for the purposes of this discussion.

A casino has totally different security needs than MSG, and is subject to significantly different types of laws. And if your point was true, then it's something that MSG would have done. They didn't. Full stop.

>If you go back and re-read the article a bit more attentively, I think you'll find examples from the early 20th century onward of this having been a problem

Your rudeness aside, I did read the article. Those examples aren't comparable because they did not happen on the scale we are discussing here (paralegals from the firm that aren't even on the case? that wouldn't be identifiable were it not for a firm's website, and linkedIn?). Sorry but you are demonstrating a lack of credible judgment and reasoning by the means of your arguments, which are specious and lacking in reasonable judgment. Your counterexamples are purposefully obtuse as to remove the meaningful distinctions between the things we are comparing. I have no reason to believe this has occurred for any reason aside from your own purpose.

I haven't really seen you argue anything new (We're specifically targeting MSG, other concert venues from decades ago won't do? Okay. We're again talking not about the substance but the scale? Great, back to square one). But I will note the supreme irony of accusing me of rudeness, having introduced "ridiculous propositions" and "baseless pushbacks" into a discussion that, outside of your involvement in it, is fairly courteous and adult among the other half dozen participants.

I'm rebutting your assertion that it was practically possible to do before facial recognition was being used. It wasn't. That's clear because MSG has wanted to do this, but couldn't, until facial recognition was available. Everything else you are saying completely detracts from the reality of this situation. I'll point out a further irony, that once it is your own ego that is being challenged, suddenly you can make an astute observation and a reasonable deduction thereof. But when it was your hypothetical that you are pushing, which defies obvious reality, you were unable to make sense of anything.

>I'm rebutting your assertion that it was practically possible to do before facial recognition was being used.

This is unambiguously false. Examples in article from early 1900s, casinos, etc. Just going in circles here.

MSG isn’t a casino. They have completely different business models and security needs. Casinos already have video surveillance on every single table as well as people monitoring them, on top of the on-floor security staff, which exist in much greater numbers than at MSG. This is a completely unreasonable comparison. There are no circles here, just your head in the sand ignoring these key fundamental differences that explain exactly why you are wrong. They are facially obvious and it's no coincidence that MSG didn't begin this conduct until facial recognition enabled them to.

> I'm unclear about the rationale for banning facial recognition here

I don't think facial recognition needs to be banned. The two things that need to be banned are denying people access to events after you already took their money for admission to them, and denying people access to events for what their co-workers did.

I don't know if I'm even comfortable, in the consolidated corporate world we live in today, with the idea of large corporations issuing bans as retaliation for pursuing legal rights. Or for really anything besides bad behavior in there.

Under the narrow "right to refuse service to anyone for every reason (except based on a protected class)" reading, there's nothing to stop, say, Live Nation, to refuse entry to any concert for life if they decided they didn't like you, for instance if they found out you bought or resold a ticket through other than their own scalping service. Or if you sent a mean tweet about Ticketmaster fees. LiveNation controls a giant proportion of venues so they would have the power to do that and if you don't like it, they don't need your money.

It's not even about feeling bad for those who end up banned. It's about knowing that when this power, and the available data for them, becomes 10x easier and better in a few years and people realize it, it will have "a chilling effect" as they say, on how comfortable people are about participating in any speech or activity that corporations may not like. Like "Well, I support Starbucks employees to unionize, but I'm not going to admit it openly because I don't want to be banned from Starbucks for life."

Starbucks is a silly example, but there are so many real near-monopolies or duopolies that I'm very nervous about giving them carte blanche to use what will no doubt be dramatically improving tech to be able to literally query a DB, select all, "Ban" - or what about "Warn" - next time you enter a venue you're pulled aside and handed a brochure stating that "while you've been admitted this time, your access privileges to our venues will be revoked the next time you engage in any further behavior that damages our reputation or interferes with our ability to conduct business."

>denying people access to events after you already took their money for admission to them

What if you discover fraud or criminality after the ticket is sold but before entry? Leave this lawyer tempest in a teapot aside for the moment, I'm talking unambiguous crime.

>denying people access to events for what their co-workers did

Say I'm known to be employed by the Lawyers for The Right to Throw Octopi at Hockey Players Coalition, but haven't yet thrown my first octopus. Why can you not act proactively to prevent nuisance? Employment at a particular organization is not protected status, like race or sexual orientation would be. Also, what constitutes an event? If there's a trade show or a product unveiling I don't want certain competitors to attend, why should I have to grant them access? Other than you being in rather narrowly specified groups, if I don't want your money, I should be allowed to refuse it.

> What if you discover fraud or criminality after the ticket is sold but before entry? Leave this lawyer tempest in a teapot aside for the moment, I'm talking unambiguous crime.

Do you mean crime related to the ticket purchase or event, e.g., stealing a credit card that you then use to buy the tickets with, or do you mean if you just happened to have committed an unrelated crime in the past?

Related to being in attendance at the event. The local KKK branch intending to smuggle tiki torches and presumably their charming incantations to the annual Diversity and Inclusion gala. (Presumably that would be criminal due to the contents of their slogans, though in America I'm not sure anything said or chanted qualifies as hate crime, like it would in my country).

I mean, they purchased tickets, so let 'em in and let 'em have at it, no?

Edit: Okay, I'll give a less ridiculous example, one that involves nuisance but not criminality.

I come from Ukraine; Alex Ovechkin is a Putin fanboy who refuses to condemn the invasion and genocide of my erstwhile compatriots. If I form a group of people who attend hockey games to heckle and accuse Ovechkin of being a genocide supporter, can MSG kick out a new member of my organization after learning of their joining? They won't sell me a ticket, they know I cause trouble. But he just joined, bought a ticket, then their security team got the updated the Facebook group member list.

If someone does something bad after buying the ticket, then banning them might indeed be okay (depending on the details, of course). My point is that once you hand over legitimately purchased tickets to people, you shouldn't be able to deny them entry because of anything that happened prior to the purchase.

>once you hand over legitimately purchased tickets to people, you shouldn't be able to deny them entry because of anything that happened prior to the purchase.

Even if something happened prior to the purchase and I learn about it after the purchase? That seems oddly arbitrary.

Flip the scenario around: you buy tickets to a sporting event. A few days later, shortly before the game, you learn that one of the players is a Putin fanboy and decide you don't want to support him. Can you make MSG take back your ticket and give you a refund?

Maybe if I can successfully raise a stink on Twitter. Generally, no.

Having thought of how this scenario works backwards, I discovered that I assumed the kicked out lawyers were issued a refund, but I have no evidence of it. If not, they ought to demand it.

> Having thought of how this scenario works backwards, I discovered that I assumed the kicked out lawyers were issued a refund, but I have no evidence of it. If not, they ought to demand it.

The point of my example is that even if the victims were issued a refund, what MSG did is still wrong. Buyers don't get to unilaterally unwind ticket sales. Why should MSG get to do so?

Because they're the ones providing the service. As long as they don't keep the money, and as long as they're not breaking the anti-discrimination laws, I fail to see the problem.

So if you book a flight and hotel room to go see an event on the other side of the planet, when you get there, MSG can turn you away and tell you "here's your $100 ticket price back, but you're out the $3000 you spent to get here to see this"?

Whatever reason they have to refund your ticket (say the band didn't show up), they'll always just refund your ticket, not any other expenses. If you want those refunded, you get travel insurance or something. Why should it be any different here?

If I'm walking and you hit me with your car, it's you and your car insurance that has to pay my medical bills, not me and my health insurance. Why not stick to this model for everything else in society? If it's your fault I can't go to an event, you should have to pay for all of the expenses, not me.

> If I form a group of people who attend hockey games to heckle and accuse Ovechkin of being a genocide supporter, can MSG kick out a new member of my organization after learning of their joining?

In my opinion of how it should reasonably work - MSG should be in their right to kick them out, but only after that person who joined your group gets caught disrupting the game by heckling and accusing Ovechkin. Just like any other person who gets caught doing the same.

Only associating with you should never be a problem on its own (unless we are talking of group memberships that are criminal on their own, e.g., organized crime gangs).

My Ovechkin heckling club isn't an organized crime gang, but it is an organized heckling gang of sorts. Do you propose to draw the line at criminality? Before that gavel hits the wooden saucer-like thingy though, criminality is always alleged, so we're on iffy ground here.

Bringing it back to unpopular-person doing objectionable-thing that's not criminal, against popular-people, say something which will generate a lot of Twitter hullabaloo... Why should I not be able to prevent it? A far-right group heckles a drag queen reading event for children at a library, calling them "groomers" and generating shit maelstroms online and offline (I'd even say for good reason). I know this will happen, but still I must allow them entry to do the deed and (further?) traumatize 8 year olds before booting them out? Fuck that, I see a Facebook photo of a douchebag in that yellow rooster t-shirt or however these far-right losers choose to visually identify themselves these days, then I find out he's bought a ticket, then I deny him entry.

> My Ovechkin heckling club isn't an organized crime gang, but it is an organized heckling gang of sorts. Do you propose to draw the line at criminality?

I propose to draw the line at organized crime affiliation when it comes to pre-emptively denying someone who hasn't done anything wrong at a big public event like that yet, yes. Worst case, you let them in, they get kicked out after they start heckling, they are banned from attending future events of that nature by the venue. Simple as that. Someone getting a chance to heckle at a massive stadium event for a minute before they get banned is not some massive risk with grave consequences.

> A far-right group heckles a drag queen reading event for children at a library, calling them "groomers" and generating shit maelstroms online and offline (I'd even say for good reason). I know this will happen, but still I must allow them entry to do the deed and (further?) traumatize 8 year olds before booting them out?

To address your specific scenario, no, you don't need to let them in. You are hosting your own small event at a library that doesn't require purchasing tickets, you can boot whoever you want however you want. Esp since the event is for children, I would have no qualms about any adult (who isn't a parent of one of the children attending the event or one of the organizers) just being blanket-denied entry. I.e., using an allow-list instead of a deny-list.

>To address your specific scenario, no, you don't need to let them in. You are hosting your own small event at a library that doesn't require purchasing tickets, you can boot whoever you want however you want. Esp since the event is for children, I would have no qualms about any adult (who isn't a parent of one of the children attending the event or one of the organizers) just being blanket-denied entry. I.e., using an allow-list instead of a deny-list.

And if it's a Drag Reading Hour Gala at the MSG, tickets required for entry and sold online? Or, I don't know, it's an LGBT-themed music festival, with tickets sold openly online. Must I allow homophobes to disrupt a set before kicking them out, or can I kick them out purely on the basis of being members of the LGBT Concert Disrupters group on Facebook?

They can't buy the tickets directly from MSG, so they never gave money to MSG. So that can't be the reason either. Would it be fair to prohibit entry to the attys that did sue MSG? Even though attys just represent the interests of their clients?

It really seems like the intent of that is to make it so that people who have been harmed by M.S.G. won't be able to find an attorney next time. Which is a very scumbag gangster type of behavior, so I'm completely happy to have it be smacked down violently by the law.

I totally agree. Especially as a NYC-based attorney, that loves the Rangers, concerts at MSG, and is suing a close business partner of MSG.

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