> The growing popularity of facial recognition at stadiums and music venues like Madison Square Garden has drawn criticism from privacy advocates who say the te

> The growing popularity of facial recognition at stadiums and music venues like Madison Square Garden has drawn criticism from privacy advocates who say the technology doesn’t work as well for women or non-white people. I am so sick of this complaint. Although the easiest to reach for, it is also by far the weakest argument against facial recognition, and it becomes weaker every day as the technology improves. And that’s not the problem that MSG made headlines for anyways. MSG banned a bunch of people involved in lawsuits against them, and those people were upset that they were turned away. The fact that facial recognition facilitated it is not relevant at an individual level. What is interesting is the scale of the control that such a system enables, that it questions our intuitions about this kind of thing. No one questions that an individual establishment can ban an individual person for all but a small set of reasons. But what should make us pause is the fact that this same technology can be used to ban people from every store in the country simultaneously and permanently, whether or not they deserved it, and with no legal recourse.