Hacker News Reader

Comment by noodlesUK | Hacker News Reader

This sort of ticketing thing is a trivially solvable problem. It is solved at every airport in the entire world millions of times per day. You provide the name of each concertgoer when you buy a ticket, and they show up with their ticket and ID. You often need to show your ID at these kinds of venues to prove you're old enough to drink beer anyway.

View on HN

Yup.

I have to believe the reason the likes of ticket master isn't fixing this is because they are selling/auctioning/reserving some percentage of tickets to scalpers or "3rd party sellers".

Requiring ID is such an obvious solution that I have to believe these convoluted approaches are only there so the secondary market can exist and so ticket master can wash their hands when prices get out of control on that market.

I have to presume that the driving impetus of all of this is that they're trying to avoid the actual requirement of checking the ID. Like, they want to improve the flow of traffic through admissions.

But I mean, obviously, any kind of system like this strikes me as the same sort of thing as DRM. That you can somehow protect the message from the person you're sharing the message to. How can you avoid reselling if you don't verify the original purchaser? It just seemes ridiculous on its face.

Yup exactly. Some events are pretty bad at opening the doors early. The Brooklyn Nets seem to open 30 minutes before the game, so they need to get 20,000 people through 20 metal detectors in 30 minutes. Every second extra they add to the process is a second you don't have to buy a $25 drink, and that's how they make their money.

We check IDs for flights because airline yield management demands that there be no resale, or business travelers would be traveling on leisure fares.

>We check IDs for flights because airline yield management demands that there be no resale, or business travelers would be traveling on leisure fares.

Sorry, what? Surely business travelers pay more just by virtue of traveling by business class? Or, if travel through business portals was consistently significantly more expensive than just buying the ticket directly on the airline's website, businesses would just start buying tickets directly from the airline's website?

Is there something about how ticket fares are calculated and paid that I don't understand?

Business travelers != travelers in business class.

Airlines use a fair number of techniques to price discriminate between leisure and business passengers.

Last minute / next day fares have traditionally been far more expensive than 3 week advance, and that was intended to impact business travel more than leisure. If there was a 3rd party marketplace for airline tickets, last minute tickets would not be nearly as expensive and the airlines would make far less money.

Consider an example where we have a business traveler "Bob" and a leisure traveler "Larry". Bob needs to get to LAX tomorrow to put out a fire at a client site. Larry has a trip booked to LAX tomorrow, but can't go because he's sick. Larry has paid $500 for the trip 3 weeks ago.

Today: Larry cancels his trip, and maybe, if he's lucky, gets an airline credit for the original price of the trip that expires in a year and which may be hard to use for his next trip. When he cancels, a seat opens up on the plane, and the airline sells it to Bob for $1200.

If resale was permitted: Larry auctions off his ticket at an airline ticket reseller. He gets $700 from Bob. So if resale was permitted, Bob's business saves $500, and Larry makes $200, and the airline looses $1200-$1700. You can see why they hate resale.

Okay, but how many business flights are actually last-minute like that? Whenever I've flown for work reasons the tickets were bought at least a week in advance, and usually 3+ weeks in advance.

Likewise, there are plenty of non-business flights booked last-minute like that, too - like, as a personal example, needing to book a same-night flight to help a family member drive cross-country with her kids and personal belongings so she could get out of a dangerous personal situation.

All this being to say: if price differentiation between in-advance v. last-minute bookings is actually intended to make business travel cost more than leisure travel, I'm thoroughly skeptical of that intent being fulfilled in practice. Seems more likely that it's simply a matter of things costing more when they're more scarce (as seats on an airplane would become as it gets closer and closer to the departure time), and that just so happens to impact business travelers more than leisure travelers.

I would guess most of your exposure to business travel is within tech or consulting, which rarely require last-minute booking. I would imagine most last-minute bookings for business travel come from people in sales. I’ve seen many sales people find out a prospective client is open to meet and immediately hop on a flight just to potentially make a sale. The opportunity cost is worth it even for small businesses. My exposure to this was for wholesale and retail distribution of consumer electronics but I’d imagine that this would apply to any business with a sales team.

About half of the work trips I've been on, the tickets were booked at most a couple days in advance. The most expensive ticket I've ever bought was an economy United cross country flight to LAX for $1500 (booked about 14 hours in advance) and I've done a lot of vacations to Europe. We booked it last minute because we didn't know when the project would be ready to deliver and once it was, we had to deliver ASAP. I was on the ground in LA for about 12 hours before flying home. Awful trip. Largest ratio of dollars spent to enjoyment received I've ever experienced.

Or physical world engineering: my brother had to hop on a plane last minute to go fix in place a machine having issues plenty of times.

I almost always book tickets for business travel 1-3 day before the trip. I am completely price insensitive (I do not care if my employer pays $100 or $400 for the ticket), my schedule is hard to predict ahead of time (if there are no important meetings on Monday, I will fly on Monday. If something important pops up I may fly on Sunday or on Tuesday). Downside is smaller seat selection (I mitigate by always checking if aisle seat available before booking) and sometimes convenient flights sell out.

My employer does some kind of credit system so we get cash credits for future trips which we can use for nicer hotels next time. Something like that. I don't fly often/ever. I should clarify the credit is the difference of the expected price vs what we paid. So if flight is normally 300 and we pay 200 we get 100 towards future travel. And then there are upper limits to what we can expense and the credits offset that.

That sounds pretty easy to game. But I think in these cases, they take what they can get and can’t really game it.

I think Google does it now. One problem is see is that people may optimize for price tickets and not business goals to get bigger credit. Business need is 2 day trip but people may extend it by 2 days to get cheaper air tickets but on balance it will be more for the company due to additional hotel cost.

Yeah, I don't think that's right either. They don't check your ID at the gate, it's just TSA that checks your id (if you have one).

Depends on the departure and arrival city. It is common for ID to be checked at the gate for international flights because airlines are held responsible for transporting passengers that don't have the correct paperwork / visitor permits for the destination country.

Yes, and the airlines don't (generally) let you change the name on a ticket.

And they require a boarding pass. Which can’t be changed without the airline’s permission.

Back in the old days, sales like this were common. No ID checks, non-passengers allowed through security, and the classified ads in newspapers would say “round-trip coach ticket May 8-12 JFK to SFO, male name, call 212-555-1234”. So you met them, got your paper ticket, got a boarding pass at the counter or the gate, and flew.

> or business travelers would be traveling on leisure fares.

Don't they already do that anyway? Every time I've gotten on a plane for work purposes, there was no differentiation between "business traveler" v. "leisure traveler" as far as the ticket purchasing process was concerned. Hell, in the most recent case it was even with my own credit card (for which I submitted an expense report to be reimbursed) - so for all the airline knew, I was just taking a week-long vacation to Colorado Springs (in that case) instead of being there for work.

The rates are typically different if you stay a Saturday night. Business travelers go home on Friday night. (SFO-NYC on Friday night was always a tough flight to book. I usually stayed the extra night so I could fly 1st or Business for less money.)

If you could buy someone else's ticket on the secondary market, then you could do a split ticket thing where you both stay Saturday night but neither of you actually do.

Everyone should change their name to Pat Smith and end this scam once and for all.

> The rates are typically different if you stay a Saturday night.

I recently flew from the US to Europe and returning on Thursday or Friday was twice the price of flying home on Saturday or Sunday - the weekend return options actually showed up as free during booking.

So even if you don't want to do the ID thing, there are alternatives that you see all over the place (like venmo) Have a rotating QR code seeded with a unique to the user id. Then with ticket master, require a login to buy tickets. Register the tickets to the ID and then do the lookup with a combination of the ticket id, rotating qr code, and the user id.

That requires the admitter device to send the challenge back to HQ, but that shouldn't really be much of a challenge. Tickets then become linked to the user's account (perhaps you allow transfer).

This is effectively what Disney does with their ticketing system, along with at the gate them taking a picture of you so they can confirm "Yes, so and so looks like the photo".

But yeah, all of this is ridiculous on its face as the cheaper and easier solution is ticket plus ID. If you are worried about flow have signs up before check in that say "be sure to have your ID ready before you get to the counter".

The ticketmaster solutions are just bad/half assed.

That is to say, if ticketmater had just done TOPS like the article points out, you'd not need the headache they've created with needing a live internet connection to load your ticket.

You don't understand how people at their companies evaluate stuff like this.

Any solution that increases capital or operating expenditures for them or the venues (half of whom they own, if I remember correctly?) is a non-starter if it doesn't generate some increase in revenue.

They will not do anything they don't have to do if it means any impact to their bottom line whatsoever.

We see it as "pennies per transaction."

They see it as "we sell 500M tickets per year so five cents per transaction is $25M/year in lost net."

Well that's where I'd argue they are negatively impacting their bottom line.

> These rotating barcodes on the other hand are far from perfect. I experienced this first-hand last year when I attended another very popular concert where they used a similar rotating-QR-code-ticket system. Numerous people including myself and my friends were floundering at the entry gate citing a bevy of broken barcode problems. ...

> The venue was so crowded that cell-towers and WiFi were overloaded. Internet access was spottier than a Dalmatian with chickenpox.

That is impact to their bottom line. They have admittees waiting at the gate blocking other people from getting in cutting into their concession sales.

If they'd used a bog standard TOPS system (like the op suggests) that would not be an issue at all. But instead because they have the dumb system where you reach out to the ticket master servers to get your code, they've created their own nightmare.

> I experienced this first-hand last year when I attended another very popular concert where they used a similar rotating-QR-code-ticket system. Numerous people including myself and my friends were floundering at the entry gate citing a bevy of broken barcode problems.

That's a different system. The article makes it clear that the Ticketmaster system works offline if you have opened it on the mobile app. Which they don't want to install.

You don't even have to use the app. You can just visit the ticketmaster website and add it to apple wallet straight from there. Can do it months in advance, too.

The website comes up in Safari, and is scannable from there. Don’t need to add to wallet. I used box office wifi to get text and follow url.

I never asked for this BTW, would rather have a paper ticket.

The advantage to using wallet is that you don’t need working WiFi at the event. Everything you need to get in is stored locally.

I bought it at the box office and did need wifi to complete the download. I didn’t need wifi or the wallet at the gate.

Webpages can work offline. Not sure if Apple has allowed this yet.

Disney is collecting pictures of everyone faces. That's pretty creepy.

They only collected my fingerprint last time I went.

Are there no cameras in the fingerprint collection area?

I don't recall. There's probably cameras everywhere. Disney is hardcore.

> How can you avoid reselling if you don't verify the original purchaser?

A ticket scalper cannot know the names of the people that will later purchase his tickets. So connecting each ticket to a name prevents scalpers.

> Like, they want to improve the flow of traffic through admissions.

But they in turn greatly degraded the flow of traffic by forcing the use of a proprietary always-online app which fails to load when your cellular connection is less-than-ideal. Verifying a photo ID would probably be faster.

True, but when you point out practical realities like this to monopolistic institutions, they don't have to care.

They will instead ask "well why isn't the connection good at the concert? What can we do to fix that?" (ie. "we don't have to change when we can make you change")

It IS true that if you don't have to verify the ID of the ticket holder then admissions will go much faster. So long as they can make that plausible sales pitch, they can use it as justification for whatever byzantine DRM system they can dream up.

Yeah I agree, they are not incentivized to fix scaling/bots because they get a fee every time a ticket is sold. It is in their best interest for the ticket to be sold as many times as possible.

But also, the hell with this. I'm still sour enough about the TSA without the concept of, "I'll buy tickets for me and three of my friends then see who wants to go," becoming impossible or gated by ticket transfer fees.

Even allowing that but requiring your valid ID must be taken into the venue by yourself (or by your friends eg if you get sick and can't go) would be a big improvement, meaning ticket scalps would have to actually go or have someone on their team go along with every ticket they resell.

Airlines are preventing a secondary market. Unfavorable for your use case, but also prevents scalping airline tickets (while allowing airlines to attempt to maximize revenue). There are always tradeoffs and compromise.

To hack around this, I've used Southwest Airlines; I can buy tickets for folks and if they can't travel, we cancel the ticket(s) and keep the travel funds banked for another time. I hope this is potentially helpful information.

https://simpleflying.com/why-airlines-dont-allow-name-change...

except Southwest is easily the most expensive carrier these days and other carriers have also adopted flexibility

hopefully their new changes such as allowing their fares to be indexed will make them close to being competitive at some point. but today you really only get near-competitiveness (it's still bad) if you're going to check both pieces of luggage and have no way of getting free luggage on any other carrier.

even buying and throwing away tickets, depending on your probability of travel, might pay for itself in one trip.

People who compare Southwest to Frontier and Spirit are not serious people. Southwest is a premium offering, if folks want to ride cattle car a la carte, I encourage them to, just don't ruin the established brand of SWA. I would rather fly dead on Southwest than alive on another domestic carrier.

First I've heard of southwest being a premium option. Even Wikipedia lists it as a budget airline.

Value is subjective. I'm going to pay for business or first when the whole plane gets there at the same time? Nah, I'm paying for a great experience if something goes wrong, bags included, and reliable air travel between two points. It's low key white glove service in a world of race to the bottom customer service and trying to remove every touchpoint possible between the business and the customer to save pennies.

https://community.southwest.com/t5/Blog/Southwest-Airlines-R...

https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/travel/is-southwest-airli...

Flying on Southwest is generally a more pleasant experience than flying economy on United, American, or any of the other major carriers IMO. It won't beat flying business class or whatever though, but I'm not that rich.

The seats are more comfortable. Every plane has pretty good in-flight WiFi (paid) and free movies/TV you can watch on your own device. Drinks and snacks included. Two checked bags free. About the only thing I miss from the big carriers is charging/power outlets at the seats, but I hear that's coming.

I booked a flight a couple of weeks ago. Southwest was still cheaper than American and Delta for the flight I was looking for, even before thinking about two free checked bags. Adding in the fact their seats are bigger and free checked bags, it is definitely a better value to me.

Flying requires an ID. Attending a concert should not. Any solution that is solved by "simple, just require an ID" is not a solution.

> Flying requires an ID. Attending a concert should not.

Why though? Not disagreeing per say because I'd have thought so too, but upon reflection...

I assume the main reason airlines require an ID is safety and security. We maintain a denied parties list and use identity verification to make it as difficult as possible to fly a plane into a crowded venue. Border control is another issue, but there's plenty of intra-country or intra-state flights where this isn't an issue.

Ticketmaster sells unverified access to crowded venues.

Is your argument that people should be unable to attend concerts/etc without presenting ID? I for one am not a fan of that idea

I'm not a fan of it either. Just sayin' that concerts and events are where the densest crowds are. Are we protecting people from doing things to events more than the events themselves? I'd hope this is an argument for more granular control. I'd love to fly short-hops without ID, but maybe TSwift concerts should require something? (Edit: Do they? Events/venues do start to have their own security at some point. Flights also have different controls for national vs international.)

I'm also probably overly discounting border control. Traceability in particular. I'm not a fan of this either.

You need to show one to get a drinking wristband anyways (and avoid the hand Xs), or into any 16+, 18+, or 21+ show.

This is not universal.

I assume the main reason airlines require ID (for domestic flights) is to prevent ticket resale, and that "security" is just a convenient scapegoat. And I'm not alone[1].

[1] https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram/archives/2003/0815.html...

Because we ought to do everything in our power to stop the aggressive onslaught of the surveillance state. We already know TSA is security theatre at best, and the time they’ve wasted already justifies more lives lost to terrorism instead.

Practically, I don’t want Ticketmaster having access to the information on my ID, they already leaked lot of my other PII.

that's really just an opinion. and I'd argue that if people really care about a fair and sustainable concert going, given how ridiculous the live event situation is, you'd support pretty common and standard requirements like ID to be shown. as others said: ID is already required to validate age in many events/venues

Recent changes are anything but fair and sustainable. Front section tickets have gone from $120 to auction at $400+ at our local venue.

Can no longer pay cash, have a paper ticket, be anonymous. Those are much more important to me than preventing scalping.

Scalpers out front have provided a valuable service to me a dozen times over the years, when I didn’t plan well.

Any solution (I didn’t ask for) that turns concerts in an international flight experience means they are dead to me.

Age was traditionally checked separately and manually. Not put into a database to be bought and sold and breached.

How are you getting into shows without presenting ID for age? Every (well, every legal...) venue I've been to in NYC cards to see if you are 21.

I have never had to show ID to get into a concert other than tiny shows at bars. Every larger venue around here (SF) I’ve been to checks IDs to get a wrist band which lets you buy drinks, but you can just skip that if you aren’t drinking.

I've been to many [big, small] well-known, legit shows in the US as a kid who was not yet an adult.

I did not have an ID, and none was required to get in.

All-ages shows are definitely things that exist.

Depends a lot on the country you live in. In most European countries "carrying an ID" is legally required if the police stops you anyway (they do need a reason to see it though), so "show an ID at the entrance" is no big deal.

It's to my understanding mainly the US where ID requirements are often side eyed because many people don't have them and there's no national standard (and due to a variety of political reasons there probably won't ever be any.)

What the hell kind of draconian country forces you to always have an id on you? What if I go running with only my watch on (I’ve regularly done this with no malicious intent)

In my home country (Hungary) it is mandatory if you leave your home more than 500 meters and as far as I know, most European countries have similar rules.

Lots of nations require carrying some form of ID: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_identity_card...

In the US, permanent residents are required to carry their green card at all times.

Here's a description of the law for the Netherlands, where I live: https://www.government.nl/topics/identification-documents/co...

There's difference between mandatory possession of ID, and requirement to carry it all the time. This list doesn't distinguish between that.

Papieren Bitte!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_identity_card...

Italy solved this. Five years ago, a new law enforced ID-checking when you enter any big events (like concerts with an audience larger than 5000 people).

Tickets have your name on it, and you can only change the name or resell them through the official seller (so, third party resellers are out of the game). Also, every reselling transaction is registered and can be inspected by the Italian Rightsholder Agency (SIAE).

I’d rather not solve it than let the state have more information about my transactions

Because this, and more very strange rules it is very hard for ticketing systems to get into the Italian market. Some examples:

- not allowed to change to time or name of the event after the 1st ticket is sold

- only allowed section names in halls from a know list

- free tickets on events... can only do this under strange conditions

- smart card application, for encryption, must run on a physical server in Italy. You should not be able to log into the ticketing box office if that smart card application is not running.

You know many details about Italian ticketing systems, are you working in the industry?

People often buy tickets without knowing exactly which of their friends are going to attend with them. This is not true of airplane tickets.

Would be awesome if it were true for airplane tickets

One ID for the entire order would be fine. You can buy 4 tickets, and go into the concert with your 3 friends. It often works this way even with no ID involved, I buy two tickets, add them both to my wallet, scan them both when my GF and I go to the show.

You COULD still scalp tickets if the person who bought them from you is going to walk in with you. But the scalper would have to eat the cost of one ticket to do it, and it's probably onerous enough to severly reduce the impact of scalping.

That's how trains work (here).

Every ticket must have one name and surname on it, no matter how many passengers it covers. That person must be traveling on the ticket.

You're usually asked for some kind of photo anyway because of discounts, which a very significant percentage of train riders are entitled to.

I think this is because tickets must be both printable and verifiable offline in case the train gets into a spot with no connectivity when the inspector is inspecting tickets.

Thats interesting to learn.

Here, train tickets need to list every passenger along with their age and gender. This also enables you to cancel for just one person on the ticket without affecting the rest.

The ticketing system basically assumes no network connectivity. Ticket inspectors usually only ask you for your name and match it to their records. And only ask for and id in rare situations (you absolutely need to have yout id with you irrespective of infrequently you actually need to show it).

What if you need to arrive separately? Especially for a big event with tens of thousands of people, can be easier to meet up inside the venue on everyone’s timeline.

Then you should have thought of that when you bought the tickets I guess. Any change to the system to fight scalping is going to inconvenience regular users too.

As a frequent concert goer, I’d happily have to arrive with my group if it meant no Ticketmaster.

So that makes it a shitty system that is really solving nothing. If I hypothetically have a group of 14-15 year olds that I buy Taylor Swift tickets for, does that mean I have to accompany them up through the line? Just dumb.

There are really two options. Tickets are non-transferable, which means you need the name of the person and to check ID, and there's no scalping, like airlines. Or tickets are transferable, and you don't need names or IDS or whatever else but scalping occurs.

If you think scalping isn't enough of a problem to balance out the inconvenience of having to plan the ticket purchases better, well, uh, that's just like, your opinion, man. We'll agree to disagree. But it does mitigate a problem, scalpers inflating prices.

Then assign names to the tickets after purchase. Should be allowed up to 24 hours before the event or something.

That beats the entire purpose of having names on tickets, which is to stop scalers.

No, because at least 1 name has to be assigned on purchase. So the scalper is still out 1 ticket.

Yes this exists, it's called lead booker tickets

That requires a single source of truth for which names go with which tickets. Which is going to be a problem if tickets need to be transferred in contexts where users don't have internet access (but they do have local connectivity between devices) or in contexts where the venue doesn't have internet access. Or in cases where the single source of truth might be vulnerable to attack or doesn't have the resources to handle the load at certain times.

I don't have the solution explicitly, but it seems like it ought to be possible to do this such that PII need not be collected. Tickets could be cryptographic proofs that a chain of custody exists and meets certain criteria. The proofs could be constructed at transfer time and verified at admission, no servers in the loop anywhere. Yeah, we'll come up against the CAP theorem eventually, but we might find that the imposed constraints are workable.

> Which is going to be a problem if tickets need to be transferred in contexts where users don't have internet access (but they do have local connectivity between devices) or in contexts where the venue doesn't have internet access.

You know as well as I do that TicketMaster won't allow any of that, because it means they miss out on selling another ticket.

I was operating under the assumption that the goal was to replace TicketMaster with an open protocol.

I agree, mostly. What do you do for people without an ID (and without a parent)? Think of the number of people at a Taylor Swift concert who are under 18 -- a lot. Also, checking the name between ticket and ID will slow down entrance by 2-5 times, I guess.

I was recently at a Festival that requires ticket + ID (https://www.resurrectionfest.es). The key to success was to put a little more personal at the gates, maybe 15 people instead of 10. But it is also true that we have the ID document issued in our early teens it not before. Each ticket verification takes 3 more seconds extra to verify the ID matches, no big deal.

Said festival does their own ticket re-sale to avoid scalping but mainly to avoid shady sites that are known to allow the selling of counterfeits. You can only cede your ticket, not sell it. It is not perfect (e.g. if you don't find a buyer for the same price, you can't sell it at a lost to recoup some money. You get your ticket back) but at least is not as bad as the one from Ticketmaster.

No, it's not. At my work here we'll all go online to try and get tickets to a big gig. One of us might get in, so that person will get ~8 tickets or whatever the maximum is. And then we split them between us, transfering over cash etc. If we have a few left over we'll sell them to friends for the ticket value.

But none of us have any intention of lining up with the others to get in. We want to go with our partners, our own friends etc.

I want Bob, Terry or Bazzy to by able to buy tickets for me (or me for Bob, Terry or Bazza) but I do not want to have to meet up with Bob, Terry and Bazza and stand in line with them all to get in.

So yea, it's not trivial. I wish it was, I farkin' hate scalpers.

how is this not the same as 8 people trying to find airline tickets for everyone? you can buy tickets for different passengers. some airlines/travel agencies even allow for name change for a fee.

This is trivial and solutions exist in the wild already. If you buy tix for the Paris Olympics, you can transfer them to your friends or you can assign their names to the tickets directly.

The interesting mechanism there is that you can buy a lot of seats at once, but you don’t get to choose where they are exactly, only the section. So in every case you’re going to have people buying big lots of tickets and distributing them to friends and family after the fact.

Hell, you just scan your ID at TSA nowadays. They don't need your ticket.

Or just scan your face with the new Digital ID rolling out. It's actually quite nice.

I flew about 3 days ago and they only asked for my minor children’s boarding passes.

The issue is most likely about throughput. You want to let fans enter the venue as quick as possible. Most venues have lots of gates, but still the latency at each gate has to be a handful of seconds per ticket. Having to validate both ticket and ID would easily double or triple that time.

Today's digital entry experience is far from frictionless. Might as well add a scan of the PDF417 barcode on the back of the latest state ID cards.

I just went to a MLB game yesterday, and the digital process was:

    - Open ticket app
    - scan ticket 1
    - scan ticket 2

I imagine this could have been:

    - Open ticket app
    - scan PDF417
    - scan ticket 1
    - scan ticket 2

Hopefully in the near future (https://nfc-forum.org/news/2024-07-nfc-forum-defines-next-ge...) you would just need to tap you phone once, and get your ID passed to the scanner, along all the tickets for that venue & time.

No more opening app, and showing different tickets and IDs.

That would clear that argument.

For one, this is a problem world wide, but OK, you can try to solve it for the US.

But for another, not everyone has a state ID card. In particular the 7.1% of the population that does not have U.S. citizenship will have varying amounts of US documentation, depending on how long they're in the US for and whether they're there legally.

And you really want to be able to sell tickets to tourists.

I keep reading about this argument but Olympics and World Cup matches are arguably as large events (if not larger) and they place name on ticket and check ID at entrance.

people complain at ticketmaster yet seem to bend over backwards to justify the state of affairs

You can rely on TM to do whatever makes the most money, and they probably know better than us. Also those you list are typically higher security events.

Yes, some events are different, like the Super Bowl for instance, where everyone is screened, and a simple concert, where you just need a ticket that scans.

Not sure how they do it for Olympics and World Cup, they probably compensate with more gates/scanners than a typical venue. I am not advocating either way, which is either keep a ticket anonymous, or tie a ticket to an ID. I guess Ticketmaster would love to tie tickets to ID, so they would know the customers better.

If/when https://nfc-forum.org/news/2024-07-nfc-forum-defines-next-ge... gets implemented by Apple/Google then we could one phone tap, get the ID, the ticket and verify that they match.

But I have no idea when Apple or Google would implement those ?

Some venues do this already and the scalpers buy an additional ticket to burn on themselves so they can get their customer in the gate. It just goes into the cost of doing business. I agree this is probably one of the best ways to stop scalpers but it's not foolproof.

I’ve heard the argument that forcing people to have an ID is anti folks with disabilities and anti-poor since it requires someone to go to an issuing agency to obtain and pay for one, which could be putting someone out who has a mobility disability or doesn’t have a lot of money.

I’m not making the argument but it’s an argument I’ve heard.

If the government needs people to have IDs, then maybe the government should provide those IDs for free...

I happen to agree, but it isn’t only the government that requires IDs if private companies are asking for them as well.

Airlines are starting to use rotating barcodes as well. Heck some are even switching to purely facial recognition.

I’m not sure that would fly in Europe. And I personally don’t want to hand over my id to use a ticket

Exactly. The privacy characteristics of government ID cards are worse than any other solution. When sharing such an ID, a person is providing several global, stable identifiers (e.g. ID number, full legal name). For adtech and data brokers, this is the ultimate fingerprint for tracking and matching.

In a perfect world, the digitization of these IDs would come with modern digital privacy and security. Scanning your ID number would only provide a recipient-specific ID that couldn't be matched with other vendors. Age eligibility and driver's licensing status would be presented as separate signed attestations that share no other data.

We aren't even heading in that direction yet.

I wouldn’t bring my ID to a concert. I don’t have my wallet with me and even if I would they wouldn’t like me to have a backpack. I‘m coming as light and minimal as possible and also would hate to lose my ID jumping around at a concert.

...yet you have a phone (for the moving barcode and whatnot) which is heavier and bulkier than a card?

True. I feel it, it's locked without my face and I can track it.

Have a picture of your ID on your phone, like every other person has. Or bring a photocopy of your ID that you can throw away after entering.

I don't.

That's not valid. And almost no one would except it. The real digital version is still in the making.

I knew this comment would come. But you're wrong. A photo of your ID is accepted almost everywhere, and especially at a ticketed event where the only purpose is to match your face to the name on the ticket. They're not the police, they just want to check that you're the person who should have the ticket.

Well around here if they ask for an ID, passport or driving license they don't accept copies. You are wrong on the "almost everywhere". Might be true for most places around you.

+1 to this. also doesn't Olympics and World Cup class events also face similar issue as concerts, and they allow for fair'ish purchase and resale by private people, but only through their platform?

This improves the security over airline tickets.

There was a recent story of someone taking pictures of other people's boarding passes, and using that to board the plane.

With this ticketmaster scheme, unless the person has access to the secret keys, the pass would only be valid for a few seconds, likely defeating this attack against boarding passes.

https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/texas-news/texas-man-board...

How often has this been a problem though? How about not keeping your boarding pass, or ticket, or credit card for that matter, visible for the world? Just put it in your wallet, I don't know.

This is security FUD. Stop solving problems that do not exist to the point where it makes the news when they do happen, once a century.

This DRM scheme concretely creates millions of small annoyances to millions of people and wasting our time as a society.

It also happens that pranksters can cancel your travel if your boarding passes make it on to Twitter or other social media. It's not a non-problem like you make it out to be.

Sure, it won't happen to you or me, because we know it is a risk to expose these documents, but that is not true of most people.

Maybe the DRM is not worth it. I actually think it's obnoxious for concert tickets (I recently had to deal with this system, and I was not thrilled about installing an app from a company that I think is using unfair business practices).

> It also happens that pranksters can cancel your travel if your boarding passes make it on to Twitter or other social media.

The security theater of checking ID does nothing to stop this. What's your point?

My point is that rotating expiring barcodes actually can provide some security value.

I’d call that a feature, not a bug, since you can’t get a boarding pass until 24 hours before the first leg of a trip. Expensive education, but education nonetheless.

I only use paper boarding passes if they insist on giving them to me when I check my bags or if I’m flying internationally and am worried about connectivity in one of the transfer airports. They go straight into my travel wallet (full-length, large enough for letter or A4 paper folded, with enough space for two passports, several credit cards, a pen, and plenty of cash or other documents). The company that made mine is unfortunately out of business, but https://www.leatherology.com/zip-around-travel-wallet is similar.

This is a horrible horrible idea.

It'd then be impossible to buy a few tickets to an event with the intention of finding people to come after the fact.

This has its own problems. It makes it difficult to swap tickets.

A music festival I went to recently charged 30 euro to change the name on a ticket.

A lot of concert goers are under 18 and dint have valid state id.

Yeah, except NO.

A lot of people think live event ticketing is the same problem as airplane tickets, but they really aren't. As an example, there are rules about requiring identification for commercial flight. There are rules against requiring identification for live events.

Where has rules prohibiting it? Maybe will move. :D

Ticketmaster says: NIH

Reply on news.ycombinator.com