Security Company Building an International Database of Banned Bar Patrons
onezero.medium.com
onezero.medium.com
“Appeal” to a private company to seek what’s effectively forced arbitration only ends one way en masse.
This sounds horrible. I hope there’s some legit privacy regulations passed to ban passive practices like this. Scanning an ID locally to check for duplicates that night sounds reasonable. Auto uploading it without notifying patrons to a central DB is not.
On another note, how are 18 - 20 year olds going to get into bars? I guess the wristband/no drinks will be the norm for them.
I show my ID to bouncers, in my hand, to avoid the common practice these days of putting it into a scanner and logging my data. If that’s not good enough for them, I go somewhere else.
How long will it be before company behind it are lobbying cities to make it a license requirement for every bar to use their system?
According to the article, it's zero minutes, because it specifically says they are already doing that lobbying.
This won't be just for bars, it'll be for restaurants that serve beer, liquor stores, gas stations, and supermarkets. Any place selling alcohol, cigarettes, spray paint, knives, guns, etc., anything that requires id.
They did, that's why they limited the power of the federal government to interstate commerce and defence. It was later generations that decided interstate commerce means activities that take place in a single state[0] and that we should use legal trickery to get around the protections they created.
Potentially? What if a customer leaves and then comes back after a shift change?
I'm sure this happens, but I doubt it's really a major problem.
This is the "social credit system" for western nations forming. I only know how this works in the US, so I'm concentrating on it.
Firms like this that succeed will be bought out and rolled in to the existing credit firms as new dimensions. (They already track much more than your credit use - google "experian data services", and substitute the other two in as well.)
It is private, so in the US there is little regulation to worry about. And the third-party doctrine means no warrants are required for LEO access.
Can you smell the freedom yet?
Alternatively, just pay a low low price of $1 a month for our "Bar Behavior Report" monitoring service!
Programs like this will make it much easier to round up LGBTQ people like myself, enabled by shortsighted management of these spaces implementing mass data collection.
Instead of discriminating against people, they could pre-select patrons and move the rest to the end of the bar bouncer's line.
Honestly, if this system ended up causing a bunch of bars to go out of business, I'd be laughing. Maybe people should find a better way to spend their time than getting drunk.
Did you ever notice that nice restaurants attract nice customers, and that scummy looking places attract scum. we are perfectly adept at governing ourselves already.
It's a solution looking for a problem.
Until insurance premiums require the service if you want to be able to afford to operate a bar.
https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/banking/blacklisted-by-chexs...
As well, if a bank denies you a checking account due to a Chex report, the bank is under obligation of letting you know why (again, thanks to the FCRA).
Now, this doesn't mean that it's _fair_ (it isn't), but the law does offer you some measure of transparency.
Oh, and combined with lobbying cities to force adoption?
Realistically, how do we prevent every blockhead with an unsecured database from hoovering up personal information? Can we start instituting major fines and the requirement to carry liability insurance or something?
The information stored though is certainly sufficient to find your street address and a great deal of other information in almost all cases since a full legal name + DoB + zip code match is nearly always a unique identifier.
Storing the id photo is fun and no doubt useful for further tracking of the patron using things such as the cameras on the table kiosks. Also the photo has value for sale to other interested parties.
Your address is not a secret. If you own a home, it is necessarily a matter of public record. If you ever want to have anything delivered to you, you necessarily have to share it. If having your address in a database is a problem for you, you're going to have to learn subsistence farming and move completely off the grid, because you're not really going to be able to function in modern society.
I doubt I would want to associate with anyone who would care. I'm confident that I could find people who wouldn't even think to check such a database even in gasp Alabama or on a military base. Just because someone doesn't live in one of the five approved liberal cities doesn't mean they're automatically a bigoted jerk.
And just because somebody does live in a liberal city doesn't mean they don't have legitimate reasons to desire privacy.
For me the point at which this becomes a problem is where other bars that were not a party to the incident ban people based on unverified information. That is the actual problem and what I would propose restricting
You know this. I know that you know what data brokers are, that companies obsessively log everything by default, and that cyber-security is frequently abysmal. You're not dumb, you're just pretending to be. That's a nasty habit.
[1] partial because not every bar is going to implement this
I don't have to. Commercial speech isn't by definition free.
The bar owner is certainly permitted to tell their friends about something that happened, or write a book about what an asshole customer you are. That doesn't mean every for-profit database of information, no matter how personal or how obtained, is legal.
As, of course, you most certainly already know. There aren't any consumer credit reporting agencies, for example, making legal claims that the FCRA is a first amendment violation.
Gay bars, biker bars, strip clubs, bars hosting political rallies, bars hosting events mocking religion. Bars where convicted felons are present, bars where alleged gang members are present, bars where prostitutes are present, bars known for drug use, bars known for cheap liquor and heavy drinking. Going to see a concert you're not that familiar with and it turns out to be racist/sexist/atheist/pro-abortion/anti-abortion...
Accidentally ending up in the same bar as your coworkers during a union organizing drive, intentionally going to the bar with your coworkers during a union drive... Five bars in one night, one bar after 3am...
It's not much consolation that you "find them insufferable" when they tie you to a fence or drag you behind a truck because of who you are.
This isn't that complicated. Many of us consider it a right to keep parts our our life private including who we choose to socialize with. You have every right to not agree with that point of view, but you should quit the charade of pretending not to understand it.
I agree it's a problem that people do things like that. I don't think that worrying about a name in a database has anything to do with preventing it.
I'm really struggling to find any credibility in this scenario:
Mr. Bigot thinks Jeff is gay. Mr. Bigot then goes to search on pastebin to see if there's any evidence of Jeff going to gay bars before beating him up.
In my experience people like Mr. Bigot are not real big on fact checking.
He goes around the neighborhood telling everyone Mr. Smith used to hang out at gay bars, or that Mr. Smith habitually bar hops on weekends, or that Mrs. Smith emasculates her husband by going to the bar with her friends while he stays home with Smith Jr. Mr. Smith loses some business opportunities, or gets in hot water with his religious relatives, or just notices people laughing at him behind his back at the block party. If Mr. Violent Bigot is his next door neighbor, maybe this is how he learns Mr. Smith is gay, or hangs out at bars frequented by other races, or whatever.
Also, stalkers could easily use this to track their victims and people who they associate with.
How about this. Mr. Bigot employs Jeff, or is his client.
Ukrainian Bob hacks a database and finds out Jeff goes to gay bars. Bob contacts Jeff and says pay me or I tell Mr. Bigot.
Or maybe Jeff is a schoolteacher, and the bar is a BDSM themed bar. And Bob the hacker is a student.
Or maybe Jeff still goes to a bar in his old neighborhood, which is an ethic neighborhood. And maybe a black box unaccountable AI algorithm used by an insurance company flags him as higher risk because of that data point in his larger profile they've queried from a data broker.
Or whatever scenario you can think of. As long as certain things in society are legal and OK but taboo in some contexts, people are going to want privacy around them. Once you keep records like this that privacy is threatened, given that the probability of lists such as this leaking is basically 100% in the current environment.
Many of us want that privacy safeguarded. You are clearly not arguing in good faith by pretending not to understand why someone might have this opinion.
If there is anything the digital age has demonstrated beyond a doubt, it is that attempting to control information is futile. Go ask the music and movie industries how successful they have been in controlling the flow of the digital information representing their IP.
Jeff's employer wants to fire him because of his sexuality? Jeff's employer is wrong and we should not allow that. Jeff should have cause to sue his employer and win.
A schoolteacher is into BDSM and someone thinks this is a problem for some reason? They are wrong and we should prevent them from taking any action against the schoolteacher.
An AI increases someone's insurance premium because of occasional visits to one bar? This AI sucks and its data model is probably severely broken. A better insurance company with a smarter data model should offer a better deal to that customer.
For anything that is legal but "taboo" without clear evidence that it actually results in a real problem, we need to aggressively prevent people from interfering with other people's lives because of ill-defined feelings they might have about things that in reality don't matter at all. THAT is what is going to solve this problem. Trying to unpour the jug of water that is digital information is destined to fail and a waste of time.
Telling people with unusual but harmless lifestyles that they need to hide and hope that nobody finds out instead taking steps to protect them is wrong.
Indeed. I do in fact fully support your impassioned argument that we should eradicate the legacy of centuries of bigotry and ignorance and bias that underpin nearly all human interactions.
In the meantime, while you're working on that, I'd like some fucking data privacy laws.
It's the Chinese social credit system but worse because it's privatized.
Instead how about we just make a law that bars can only ban people for incidents that occurred in that bar. That seems reasonable to me and would hold them to a similar standard as the justice system (no hearsay).
Here's a great article in The Atlantic about how American restaurants got so noisy: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/11/how-r...
Isn't this already the case if you visit a gay bathhouse anywhere in the south?
Mroe generally, the answer is "everything you can think of". People are trying to pull the world in a direction you don't like, so pull it in a different direction. Poison their data. Explain why they're awful to everyone you can. Talk to your local ABC authority before these jerks get there and explain why this is terrible. Try to solve the whatever actualy "problem" there is here in a less intrusive way. Whatever else you can think of that is legal.
You don't have to ask for permission to fight back.
For my part, I will not go to establishments that scan my ID. I'll show it to you for legal compliance reasons, but you don't get to record it. If your house rules say otherwise, that's fine, I'll spend my money in some other house.
Even if you are a social butterfly, use your head. That place has decided that they need ID scanners. Just imagine the things that have happened that made that necessary.
I'm imagining visits from pushy ID-scanner salesmen, stopping by the bar to drum up some business while on their way to meet with legislators.
Time to put some EU risk takers and ambulance chasing lawyers in Sacramento together for freedom. Would make a great startup.
GDPR. You need to take GDPR, translate it to your local language without removing any clauses, maybe add some liability for processors too, and get that implemented as a law.
Most of these seem pretty unscientific / dangerous.
Everyone wants to be the key-master.
I'd think the tracking company would need to have some degree of proof as to the "bad behavior" they're sharing with it's member bars to hold up in court.
1. A false statement
2. Made to a third party
3. About a specific person
4. That causes damages (eg, to their reputation)
If they repeat something false, it absolutely is defamation. Damages could be hard to prove or show - perhaps a business meeting at a bar would qualify. Likely way to use this is through sending the company a demand letter basically saying "remove these false statements from your database or I will sue you for defamation."
It seems rotten, but I'm sure that's the kind of loophole they'd use as defense. :)
The more likely legal defense is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields online service providers for liability for hosting online content from third parties.
https://www.onlinecasinoking.com/insights/casino-id-facial-r...
It does seem we could use some modern privacy laws to prevent this type of thing occurring...
Most don't care about your personal life.
But some care incredibly deeply about it. There are Christian employers in Canada and the United States, who will fire you, if they discover that you, say, had pre-marital sex at some point in your life. Others will fire you for undergoing a medical procedure.
Do you think bosses like that give two shits about an employee splitting hairs as to what exactly constitutes living in sin?
Consumer boycotts are very often ineffective and shouldn't be relied on. This may distress libertarians, but regulation is the only real answer.
Merit is overrated anyway, so all people have left to do with their lives is sorting and filtering people to pretend they can enjoy a better evening.
I mean I might want to go to a bar that's full of KKK members, because they serve nice beer. I have 2 choices go there for the beer, and perhaps inadvertently support the KKK, or the bars stance on that. Or I could not drink there. That's my choice, I'm not sure I could go to the anti KKK league rally and complain that I want to drink at that bar.
One pub I used to goto was well know as the only pub in town that did not have bouncers at the weekend.
I worked at a bar that only had a guy outside on Thursday, Friday and Saturday after 9. The rest of the time it was slow enough that the bartender could just check IDs before the customer was served.
Any relevant research on that topic?
Edit because I was too vague: I am saying multiple online retailers collaborating on a list together that bars customers from purchasing/ returning from all of the participating members. I am aware that companies individually fight return fraud using their own private lists and fraud detection software from external companies.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/08/12/ret...
Since you asked, my personal opinion is "I don't care."
2) I still don't care.
Just my opinion.
They've been doing that for years already: https://www.thestreet.com/story/13078117/1/returnaholics-bew...
>> “The system may prevent a consumer from returning for a period of time at a particular retailer, but if that consumer reduces his or her return activity, the system then allows the consumer to make returns at that retailer."
So, the individual retailers are blacklisting, much like individual bars blacklist today. But this original article is talking about collecting those lists on a national scale, into one database.
I live on the East Coast, I've traveled around the country a fair bit, and I go to bars. I've only seen an ID scanner literally once in my life.
I can see where this would be helpful, but i can see most small bars not really caring as long as no one starts a fight.
Few parties dealing with people in any capacity wouldn't want to pay something for access to this really great database.