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Comment by llsf | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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 ?

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.

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