She was denied entry to Rockettes show, then facial recognition debate ignited | Hacker News Reader

She was denied entry to Rockettes show, then facial recognition debate ignited

npr.org

29 pointscratermoon4 comments

In my mind there are two things going on, and perhaps an emergent property of both:

1. Banning people for any reason or no reason at all from a private business. Not a privacy issue, but a rights issue (the right of a business to refuse whomever they want, the right of a patron to be served without prejudice). We have laws about these things. Maybe they should be revisited since with a distributed list the scale of the problem is different. I can see arguments for and against.

2. A powerful new technology that has until now mainly been used against those with the fewest legal options. There are perhaps some questions about the way this person was identified and banned, and perhaps this would be illegal in states with better biometric protections such as Illinois. However I see technological whack-a-mole as a pretty weak argument against the more central issue. It doesn’t have to be a face, it could be cell phone location data or even satellite imagery moving forward.

Where it gets interesting is in the combination of the two. This new technology will enable blacklisting on a scale never seen before. And the inverse, tracking ideal customer behavior anywhere they go. A social credit score, privatized and packaged neatly into products sold by companies you’ll have never heard of. And just like with Equifax and Experian, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.

If her picture had been handed out to all the security officers, would that violate her privacy? The argument "it's super easy to add new faces" would also follow if they just handed out bits of paper to the staff.

If the software is being used in criminal cases then, that's bad. If it's being used the same way a picture in the local 7/11 is used to say "don't sell to this person." then it's not so bad.

If it's being used to track someone as they walk around town, then I think it falls into privacy.

In this story. The lawyer was warned. It's reasonable to assume if you're suing me, I don't want you in my house.

> if you're suing me, I don't want you in my house.

The "me" in the article is not a person, but a corporation. The person suing is not the lawyer, but whoever engaged the law firm. And an entertainment venue is not somebody's house.

How about ... If you work for a company that is engaged by a company that is suing us in a business dispute, we will harass you by excluding you from an unguessable amount of venues and events. We're warning you of this but we won't give you a list of those venues and events, you'll just find out when you get excluded as you go about your private life. And we don't have to get a green light from a magistrate to do this, and we might continue doing it after the dispute is over if we don't like your attitude.

Let’s say you owned several dozen music venues all over the country. Let’s say another company sued you. Would you find photos of all the lawyers who work at the law firm representing your legal rival, and distribute those photos to all of your security staff at all your dozens of venues?

I think the scale allowed by automation is important in this case.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com