17 ms·

> it can be used against them, too Is it facial recognition that's the problem here, or the policy itself? In theory, they could hand out pictures of everybod

• kstrauser 4y ago
  You're right: it's the policy that's bad. However, facial recognition is what makes enforcing that policy possible, and society and the law haven't changed quickly enough to deal with the repercussions. For instance, say 18 year old "Joe" gets caught stealing soda from a fast food place. The manager kicks him out and bans him from the store. Fast forward a decade, when Joe walks back into the store with his wife and kid to buy a quick meal. Without facial recognition: Joe's grown up and matured. The manager was either replaced years ago, or doesn't remember the incident, or vaguely remembers but doesn't care about it anymore. Joe and his family pay, eat, and leave. With facial recognition: the system notices that someone on its "do not allow" list has entered the store and summons police to deal with the trespasser. When human judgment is involved, we rarely deal with absolutes. A lifetime ban isn't really for life. It's until both parties grow up and the situation cools down. A ban on a competitor's employees isn't absolute. Maybe you won't serve the owner, but if his dishwasher comes to your place on a date, you're not gonna hassle the kid. We're really, really bad at designing automated systems that handle nuance. It's way easier to write code like `if photo_hash in banned_people: ...`.
  • bmitc 4y ago
    Why is the policy bad? They are preventing employees from a law firm in active litigation with them from attending their venues while the litigation takes place. It's not some draconian thing.
    • monsieurbanana 4y ago
      I'm certain you didn't read the article. The link between the woman and the litige case is very tenuous. She doesn't work on the case, and the venue has nothing to do with the case either, besides that a huge corporation owns both the venue and the restaurant under litigation.
      • bmitc 4y ago
        I did read it. MSG notified the law firm of their policy while the litigation is ongoing, twice. > "MSG instituted a straightforward policy that precludes attorneys pursuing active litigation against the Company from attending events at our venues until that litigation has been resolved. While we understand this policy is disappointing to some, we cannot ignore the fact that litigation creates an inherently adverse environment. 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.
        • monsieurbanana 4y ago
          That does sound pretty draconian to me, you haven't adressed my point.
          • bmitc 4y ago
            What is your point?
        • techwizrd 4y ago
          Also from the article: (a) Conlon does not practice law in New York where Radio City Music Hall is located. (b) Conlon is not an attorney pursuing active litigation against the MSG Entertainment. She works for a NJ-based law firm who representing another party in litigation against an unrelated restaurant which now happens to now be owned by MSG Entertainment. She's not part of that ongoing litigation. (c) > A recent judge's order in one of those cases made it clear that ticketholders like her "may not be denied entry to any shows." (d) > "The liquor license that MSG got requires them to admit members of the public, unless there are people who would be disruptive who constitute a security threat," said Davis. "Taking a mother, separating a mother from her daughter and Girl Scouts she was watching over — and to do it under the pretext of protecting any disclosure of litigation information — is absolutely absurd. Refusing her entry doesn't even make sense according to their stated policy, and it is absolutely _draconian_. She doesn't work on the case—she just happens to work for the same company. If this firm was representing a client suing Meta or Google or Apple, would it be okay for Meta/Google/Apple to ban all attorneys from using all of their services? This type of behavior just discourages firms from taking on clients suing large companies.
  • rg111 4y ago
    It's always the policy that should be modified, and not the tech that should be stopped. Because bad policies can do only damage. And tech can do both good and bad.
    • kstrauser 4y ago
      I’d amend that: it’s always the policy that should be modified in the longer run. Sometimes it’s wholly appropriate to pump the brakes on the tech that would allow mass application of the bad policy.
      • int_19h 4y ago
        It rarely if ever actually works out for the simple reason that, if one jurisdiction pumps the brakes, there's a dozen others willing to floor the other pedal on the same thing.
  • underwater 4y ago
    Scale is also an issue. So many things are either owned by a megacorp or run via a centralised platform. Getting banned by a store pales in comparison to being banned by Uber, Google, Visa, etc.
    • LarryMullins 4y ago
      Just as most websites today use captchas run by one or two companies, we may see a scenario unfold where most brick and mortar businesses use a facial recognition blacklisting system run by one or two companies. Get labelled as trouble by the system and you'll be banned by every store in town.
      • kstrauser 4y ago
        That’s a great point. For that matter, imagine that being maintained by Verisign or the like. Get a ding on your social credit report, and voila, you can’t walk into a grocery store anymore.
        • kstrauser 4y ago
          :facepalm: I mean Experian. It’s too late to edit it now, but if a future person reads this, I was thinking of credit bureaus managing these lists.
      • thwarted 4y ago
        This was already a problem with the email spam blacklists, DNSBL.
      • mrguyorama 4y ago
        This is not allowed in my state thank god
      • phpisthebest 4y ago
        See Las Vegas Casio's who have been doing that for awhile
  • monksy 4y ago
    This is happening already with PatronScan which is being pushed agressively into schools, and bars: https://scribe.nixnet.services/id-at-the-door-meet-the-security-company-building-an-international-database-of-banned-bar-patrons-7c6d4b236fc3 https://scribe.nixnet.services/id-at-the-door-meet-the-secur... There have been references to the ban lists going from one venue to another.
    • Nifty3929 4y ago
      Can you imagine getting into an argument with a bartender and being asked to leave - and then you can't go into any other bars either? Yikes! Reminds me of the hidden low-level-banking-employee blacklist that some would end up on for not forcing enough customers into expensive products they didn't need. Or the opiate painkiller registry that doctors use to centrally track folks who come to them for painkillers, and which by the way counts any painkillers you might have gotten from the vet for your dog. Fewer central registries please!
      • lmm 4y ago
        Blacklisting is something we already recognise as wrong; banning who you want from your own establishment is fine, but passing around a list of people and banning them on someone else's say-so isn't. Perhaps the laws against it should be enforced, or strengthened.
        • Nifty3929 4y ago
          I don't know of any laws against this at all, at least in the United States.
          • bigwavedave 4y ago
            The parent may be referring to employment laws; google claims 29 states have made blacklisting illegal in an employment context.
            • 4y ago
  • Gigachad 4y ago
    I see it as things returning to how they were. In a small town, the person running the fast food joint often did work there for decades and everyone recognized everyone. Theft was hard to get away with because you don't just blend in to the masses like a modern city. Now tech is allowing us to hold people accountable again.
    • kstrauser 4y ago
      I think that’s a romanticized memory. While holding people accountable is good, so is eventual forgiveness. If you steal a candy bar from Old Man Smith at the town’s only gas station, and he’s the kind to hold grudges, you’re boned. Never mind teens trying to buy condoms when every cashier in town knows them. There’s a happy medium in there somewhere. You don’t want to let repeat offenders off scot free, but there needs to be a cooling off period, too.
  • acomjean 4y ago
    What’s weird to me is MSG had to get pictures of all this law firms attorney’s and enter them into their facial recognition database. It seems wasteful and really petty. They probably pulled from they law firms website. Another reason to keep wearing masks…
    • dredmorbius 4y ago
      RealID and drivers license databases are increasingly available to very-tenuously-based "security" measures.
  • KronisLV 4y ago
    > A lifetime ban isn't really for life. It's until both parties grow up and the situation cools down. This is especially worrying when no humans are involved. If your Google account gets banned by some automated bot for whatever reason, you might find any attempts to create new accounts be considered "ban evasion". Regardless of the fact that you have very few options for things like ad networks or publishing Android applications, even before you consider losing access to your e-mails or any servers you might have.
• TheFattestNinja 4y ago
  Both. Id argue that in addition to the policy being bad, she probably didnt agree to her image feeding into the dataset backing the facial recognition, which raised some spicy privacy questions: how did this private company get the image? Under what terms of use?
  • archontes 4y ago
    Consent isn't required if you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy. I can take your photo in public, and there's nothing you can do about it. I can even distribute that photo, and you can't, and if you do, I can sue you for copyright infringement. I own your likeness, in a finite way. https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/but-it-s-a-photo-of-me-celebrities-face-22804/ https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/but-it-s-a-photo-of-me-cel...
    • hgsgm 4y ago
    • saveferris 4y ago
      Not so fast....In Illinois anyway. You cannot do any of that without consent if you use that data for any commercial purpose. https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/ilcs3.asp?ActID=3004&ChapterID=57 https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/ilcs3.asp?ActID=3004&C... I think anyway, IANAL but I believe this law prohibits the collection of, in this case, images/facial recognition, etc. So, you can take my picture in public and keep it on your phone, you cannot upload it to say Instagram without my permission, all kinds of recent lawsuits about it. I think the intent of the law is to prevent my picture from winding up in say Instagram without my permission but for sure it cannot be used in the way it was used in the article - to scan it and prohibit me from entering an establishment. Apparently, no matter what state I go to.... https://www.reuters.com/technology/one-us-state-stands-out-restricting-corporate-use-biometrics-illinois-2021-09-16/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/one-us-state-stands-out-r... It's a complex law and a complex topic in general so I am not 100% sure what is and isn't covered.... edit; spelling
      • 4y ago
• quanticle 4y ago
  assuming it was scalable, would it be OK then? The problem with automated facial recognition technology is that it makes what used to be infeasible suddenly routine and cheap. In the past, would the security folks at Madison Square Garden have even thought about implementing this kind of policy? No, of course not; it would have been obvious from the very beginning that such a policy would have required far too many resources to feasibly implement. At best, they'd have been able to hand out pictures of a few folks, known to be bad actors, and told their security personnel, "Hey, watch out for these people and don't let them in." It's highly unlikely that a random obscure attorney working at the same firm, but not specifically tied to the litigation at hand, would have made it onto that list. However, today, with facial recognition, it's possible for Madison Square Garden to have blacklists consisting of thousands, or even tens of thousands of people and check against them just as quickly and as easily as if they were a list of a dozen people. That's a qualitative change, and I think it's valid to treat it as a separate kind of thing than a bunch of security guards, each with a stack of photographs.
  • wombatpm 4y ago
    This is while it’s in the hands of corporations. Wait until the local HOA sets up cameras to real-time scan for people on the sex offender registry. In the future ounishowill be swift and eternal
    • MaysonL 4y ago
      Imagine muggers with this tech. Imagine gangs with cameras guarding approaches to their turf – watching for rival gangs, cops, and people who have been placed on the all-gang database of marks and narcs.
      • shadowgovt 4y ago
        The Transparent Society is an under-read book.
    • Spooky23 4y ago
      It’s already happening. You can’t leave most municipalities without and LPR scan and interstate corridors are covered by face recognition capable cameras. The Feds can track your progress from Maine to Miami in near real time.
• nonrandomstring 4y ago
  > Is it facial recognition that's the problem here Yes I think so. Some technologies are inherently no good, lacking any obvious positive use cases, but enabling obvious abuse. It is a mistake to shift the blame to "policy" or malevolent actors and claim the technology is merely a neutral enabler. No. The technology itself contains a gamut of evils.
  • partdavid 4y ago
    If you had to identify the eventgoer in advance for a non-transferable ticket, then she would have been banned for the same reason and no facial recognition would have been involved. Would that be okay, in some way this is not?
    • nonrandomstring 4y ago
      Are you asking me personally? Or to respond with a general philosophical principle? In either case no. On the first count, no, because I don't believe in "non-transferable" tickets for arts and entertainments. The holder has every right to give or sell their purchased property to family or friends and "non-transferable" instruments violate that first-sale right. On the second point, no, because the singular specific "okay" case (even the tear-jerking one that saves poor fluffy dying from kitten cancer) has no bearing on the profound but nebulous harms inflicted on society by an essentially rotten technology (on a purely Utilitarian principle)
• berniedurfee 4y ago
  I’d argue the technology takes what was, at one time, a relatively benign and reasonable policy and weaponizes it. There’s a level of enforcement where a reasonable policy or law becomes unreasonable. Cameras on every street corner enforcing every infraction, no matter how minor, is an extreme. There’s a threshold before that extreme where the policy combined with the enforcement becomes unreasonable. I think the combination of policy and enforcement outlined in the article is well over the line.
• Retric 4y ago
  The idea that it would be prohibitively expensive to manually look at each employee’s age on paperwork compared to the cost savings of denying pensions is extremely dubious.
• panic 4y ago
  It's hard to imagine what role this type of mass facial recognition technology would have in a healthy society.
  • shadowgovt 4y ago
    - pay-by-face - identifying people legally banned from premises who are not self-identifying -returning lost children with their parents by identifying last-known location of parent The list goes on. The technology itself is not evil.
• dusted 4y ago
  I agree, the tech is actually wonderful. The problem is not that it provides new opportunities, the problem is determining which of these opportunities are acceptable to pursue, and under which circumstance. I don't like the "this is bad because it allows current laws/practices to be efficiently enforced" attitude that a lot of people seem to hold. Oh no, in my opinion, by all means, make it 100% efficient, cheap and easy to enforce _EVERY_ policy under the sun. We need to get on with cleaning up and amending policies until it's not a complete shit show. Any policy should be written as if it will be effectively and quickly applied to 100% of the cases, and if that makes it look shitty, then it is and must be fixed.
• balex 4y ago
  In other news, guns don't kill people, people do. But guns sure help.