6 ms·

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

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.

advisedwang 4y ago
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.
theironhammer 4y ago
hnlmorg 4y ago
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.
- tedunangst 4y ago
  I'm not sure why everyone is assuming she was denied a refund.
  - wanderer2323 4y ago
    They won't be able to refund her missing out on spending time with her kid.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    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.
    - briffle 4y ago
      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.
    - engineer_22 4y ago
      > 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.
      - rlpb 4y ago
        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.
      - nulbyte 4y ago
        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.
- baandang 4y ago
  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.
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    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).
- alwa 4y ago
  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.
- teepo 4y ago
  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.
  - monksy 4y ago
    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)
  - hnlmorg 4y ago
    I’m aware of that, hence why I said it was a harder problem to solve.
chucksmash 4y ago
> 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.
thih9 4y ago
> 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.
- xyzzyz 4y ago
  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.
  - strix_varius 4y ago
    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.
    - bonzini 4y ago
      Not because it's impractical to check IDs, but because facial recognition is less explicit and thus more easily "normalized".
  - azernik 4y ago
    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.
    - xyzzyz 4y ago
      That’s exactly how they work when you actually board the plane.
lovich 4y ago
>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
pnt12 4y ago
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.
nextlevelwizard 4y ago
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.

advisedwang 4y ago

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.

theironhammer 4y ago

hnlmorg 4y ago

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.

tedunangst 4y ago
I'm not sure why everyone is assuming she was denied a refund.
- wanderer2323 4y ago
  They won't be able to refund her missing out on spending time with her kid.
- pixl97 4y ago
  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.
  - briffle 4y ago
    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.
  - engineer_22 4y ago
    > 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.
    - rlpb 4y ago
      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.
    - nulbyte 4y ago
      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.
baandang 4y ago
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.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  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).
alwa 4y ago
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.
teepo 4y ago
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.
- monksy 4y ago
  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)
- hnlmorg 4y ago
  I’m aware of that, hence why I said it was a harder problem to solve.

chucksmash 4y ago

> 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.

thih9 4y ago

> 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.

xyzzyz 4y ago
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.
- strix_varius 4y ago
  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.
  - bonzini 4y ago
    Not because it's impractical to check IDs, but because facial recognition is less explicit and thus more easily "normalized".
- azernik 4y ago
  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.
  - xyzzyz 4y ago
    That’s exactly how they work when you actually board the plane.

lovich 4y ago

>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

pnt12 4y ago

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.

nextlevelwizard 4y ago

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.