I’m thrilled to see facial recognition applied against people in a position to speak out loudly against it. A lot of people seem OK with it when it’s policing the bad parts of town. This is their reminder that 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 everybody who wasn't allowed in to the security staff and use low-tech facial recognition to enforce the same policy - assuming it was scalable, would it be OK then? I remember reading that IBM got into trouble when it first computerized its personnel files because some exec noticed that the computer could scan through all the personnel files and fire people who were close to retirement to save on paying out their pensions. It would have been prohibitively expensive to pay a person to do that, but with the computer, it was a quick SQL query (or whatever query language IBM used back then). The problem wasn't that the personnel files were computerized, it was that they were being used in a very evil way.
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: ...`.
There have been references to the ban lists going from one venue to another.
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!
For something like starting a fight, you can go by actual court records, which are public and have processes in place to correct them if they're wrong (and we have rules about e.g. when convictions should be expunged). Just sharing lists of names is too abusable.
I have several concrete problems with these lists.
1. Secrecy. I should have a right to know if I’m on the black list.
2. Due process. There is no process to being put on the black list. Partially because you don’t know it’s happening, there’s no way to contest it.
3. Permanency. The punishment should fit the crime. If you do something at 18 that shouldn’t be a lifetime punishment. However being on a secret list of names and faces distributed between companies is a lifetime punishment.
> If the list is too inaccurate, it stops doing its job and becomes a net-no-help to the venue using it.
This is an extremely optimistic take. In reality, what is the threshold of false positives where the list stops being useful? One percent? Five percent? Hell, even if the list is 10% wrong you’re still denying people who should be denied 90% of the time. And there will always be a stigma against people who are on such lists. “You must’ve done something to get on that list.”
A community of people aren't built around absolutism. They are built around give and take.
You can't have your best day, every day.
This isn't about having your best day. I've had many bad days, yet somehow never assaulted anyone.
> I don't want to board an airplane with someone who has a history of assaulting people.
> Do you want a loose cannon who has assaulted people in the past on a tin can with you at 50,000 feet?
If this someone paid whatever price a competent court of law imposed on them, then I have no problem boarding a plane with them. People make mistakes, even grievous ones, and even ones that you or I wouldn't make on our worst of days. The law encodes the penalties for those. Beyond that, what you're advocating for is extrajudicial punishment.
That's a key problem here. People don't agree on what's acceptable and what the proper criteria for forgiveness is.
If somebody did one of your more unambiguous transgressions, like assault (proven to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt, i hope?), but reformed themselves, how do you know and who decided that? Maybe they did it because of a drug habit, mental illness, some other extreme condition that they've now worked past. Maybe they really don't want to do it again, and would not.
These are the types of problems that can arise when you split the world between good and bad people. Not everyone who does something you disapprove of is irredeemable.
I really dislike this way of thought. It could be me that one day went my world went to shits. And then I’m also burned forever.
> There have been references to the ban lists going from one venue to another.
The linked article mentions bars, where does the school bit come from?
Please keep in mind that some people on the sex offender registry are only there because they were peeing in public, or because they were sexting while underage.
Another reason to keep wearing masks…
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.
Because bad policies can do only damage.
And tech can do both good and bad.
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.
> "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.
(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.
Does the law firm have 100,000 employees? According to their website, they have about 29 attorneys in the firm. Bringing up companies the size of cities compared to that is completely ridiculous and irrelevant. And companies like Meta, Google, Apple, etc. will absolutely enact draconian policies when IP and other litigations are going on. The secrecy and policies those companies put in place likely go well beyond simply not letting a lawyer part of a law firm that is suing one of your businesses into your building.
Why does it matter where she's licensed? It's irrelevant.
Lawyers play these little games all the time. I'm not necessarily for the policy or the use of facial recognition to enact it, but they were told ahead of time. They should know better. If they wanted to argue the points ahead of time and get approval, they could and should have.
How is that relevant? A stupid and harmful policy is stupid and harmful, regardless of who was notified and how. If I send an email to Google to notify my displeasure, it is not reasonable to expect all Google employees to be aware of it and avoid my business.
Despite the fact that personally punishing individual employees for a beef your holding company has with some of their colleagues is stupid. There is no other way of putting it.
> Lawyers expect others to abide by such notifications, do they not?
There is so much wrong here. Lawyers are not omniscient. They also expect companies to abide by their own terms of use, and routinely ignore unfounded or groundless “notifications”.
> Bringing up companies the size of cities compared to that is completely ridiculous and irrelevant.
So, where’s the limit? What company size makes this reasonable?
> And companies like Meta, Google, Apple, etc. will absolutely enact draconian policies when IP and other litigations are going on.
So, it is draconian after all. Show an example of individuals being booted off Google’s or Apple’s platforms only because of their employer.
> Why does it matter where she's licensed? It's irrelevant.
But then, none of the points you’ve made are, either.
I started out reading the article wondering 'OMG, what is it that this mom could've possible done that she's banned?' and then when it says "lawyer at adversarial law firm" I immediately switched to "oh yea, makes total sense".
None of the counterarguments here stand up to scrutiny.
"Isn't involved in litigation" and "not a Security threat" - she is totally a security threat: today she's a mother of a girl scout and is not working on the case, and tomorrow she's a loyal employee helping out with the case.
"Part of girl scouts trip" - Does she have a firewall in her brain between personal and professional?
'Conlon said she thought 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.” - You know what the best thing about America is? Our endless appeal system.
This entire article is a non-story (someone denied access to a business), and yet, it's somehow making the rounds. The paranoid cynic part of my brain is interpreting this entire situation as "A law firm that sent in an employee for some snooping, and then got caught, and now is making some noise in the papers." The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
Remember everyone arguing that Twitter pre-Musk is a private company, so they could ban anyone they wanted? This is the same thing, only in a physical location.
The venue knows not, but that venue is a tiny cog in an empire owned by the parent group.
The parent group compiled the ban list by trawling the large law firms website for images .. and the parent group knows which offices and groups of personnel are involved in a specific case.
With large and potential trans national groups doing this it has a parallel with, for example, one country banning an entire countries citizens from entry or doing business .. on the basis that a small group of citizens took action that was undesired.
Very large companies have very large numbers of employees and many different activities on the go.
Should, for example, several thousand people be banned from watching streaming television because 15 people in the company they are associated with are involved in a class action against a media group?
Do they? I don't work in law but at every company I've worked we adjust who is working on what based on needs at the time. Why wouldn't a law office temporarily shift more people to a case if they needed some extra manpower?
Someone else posted that the law firm has 29 members, not "very large numbers of employees".
And again, why are the lawyers so surprised when they knew ahead of time? If they had asked, it could have even been pre-approved, and thus a non-story. If anything, I'd almost consider this to have been an intentional act by the law firm because they knew ahead of time and took their Girl Scout troop anyway, knowing it could look bad for MSG.
What if the company was Google? What if it was a healthcare provider with a patented/proprietary treatment?
As a matter of fact, didn't we recently have articles in hn where people were commenting they are reluctant to charge back to Google because they don't want to risk losing their gmail and the rest of it?
> I'd almost consider this to have been an intentional act by the law firm
Good for them. The legal system is the only way corporations can be effectively held accountable. You can hate lawyers as much as you want but this is directed at us via proxy. Lawyers litigate for clients.
"Sorry we can't take your case. We use Google products extensively."
The law firm is a personal injury firm, which in my experience and understanding can be (not always) very shady. Why is it required that MSG let lawyers suing them come into their venues while being sued? One could argue that the policy should be targeted towards certain venues and lawyers, but that is a lot of overhead that is solved by a simple, blanket policy.
I honestly don’t see the outrage here. Sure, there are a lot of what ifs that make this seem worse, but those hypotheticals are not what seemed to happen here.
And it’s the law firm showcasing punitive action. They’re now suing MSG for the denial for something that basically seems like a stretch of a loophole. I almost would guarantee the law firm did this on purpose, and that’s why I can’t stand lawyers. They don’t play by the rules everyone else has to, and they get to make the rules.
This is not a black and white issue, and there are valid points that can be made pro or con of either side. Even the likely possibility (I agree with you on that) that this was all planned does not change this. This fuzziness of the line that would obviously delineate right vs wrong is the issue.
That is why I added that "proxy" bit in there. One could argue for the position of law firms or the position of corporations, and I am urging you to now consider it from the pov of lonesome you, the possibly innocent bystander, caught between these two powerful social forces. You may still reach the same conclusion but it is a distinct analysis and you should do it if you haven't already.
This is kind of an ironic case because I've noticed that lawyers make themselves immune to non-compete clauses via state laws in most states. In California famously, regular employees are generally immune to N.C. In my state lawyers are not impacted by NC by law, but regular devs are subject to them, even sandwich makers have been blocked from changing jobs. There's been a big battle from devs to get rid of them, it hasn't yet passed the state legislature. My own leg rep said she didn't think there was a problem - of course she's a lawyer. The lawyer and business class wants to keep them.
Besides, if the law firm really wanted someone in there for hand-wavy reasons, why would they not just hire someone for it? Blacklisting is petty, counter-productive, trivial to abuse, and solves nothing.
If it were protection .. to prevent a lawyer from witnessing something at a public venue that might be used as evidence agains them ... then there is no protection possible.
A sensible law firm would not use one of their employees with a public image available, they'd use a contracted private investigator to gather evidence.
This smacks of punitive behaviour to not only punish the law firm (for doing their job) in a petty manner, but to also intimidate any other law firm thinking of taking them on.
Eg: Hypothetically if Disney were to ban all members of any company that challenged Disney on ride safety .. how would that appear?
Or just, like, not doing this at all. This is James Dolan, the owner of Madison Square Garden, being petty as usual and banning people from the venue who annoy him. e.g. Spike Lee for saying bad things about him, Woody Allen for the wrong reasons (he refused film ads for Dolan), &c
I am under no obligation to contort myself to assume good faith on his part in the face of a pattern of behavior that indicates otherwise.
I'm not sure I see what's unfair here. They were notified. If they wanted to negotiate around it, they could have done ahead of time. They're lawyers. They should know to read material they're sent.
As any good lawyer would say, "It depends."
Can you think of any policy anywhere that never results in unfair outcomes?
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.
assuming it was scalable, would it be OK then?
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.
In the future ounishowill be swift and eternal
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.
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)
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-cel...
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-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
Regarding commercial use of photos taken of people in public, the law varies by state. Some states have stronger protections.
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.
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.
- 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.
But guns sure help.
The most devastating tool for fighting crime is not increasing the penalties or making jail more miserable. No, the most effective way to stop crime is by drastically increasing the chances of getting caught and correctly sentenced.
> Asian and African American people were up to 100 times more likely to be misidentified than white men, depending on the particular algorithm and type of search. Native Americans had the highest false-positive rate of all ethnicities, according to the study, which found that systems varied widely in their accuracy.
One. Hundred. Times. The camera may say it recorded John Smith breaking into a house, but it’s incredibly likely that it was actually Ron Jones. Who’s the jury going to believe, though: John Smith who was at home with his girlfriend at the time, or the hugely expensive video system that the city just bought?
Facial recognition doesn’t work. It’s bullshit tech, and we should stop using it until we make it deliver on its promises AND decide how to deal with its ramifications.
[1] https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2020/racial-discriminatio...
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/best-algorithms-struggle-recogni...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/12/19/federal...
The racial bias issue is still important for now, but it's fast becoming irrelevant. We should be asking ourselves where our priorities lie even if bias weren't a concern.
Furthermore, an accurate system is not the same as a morally just system. A ubiquitous system which recognizes people with 100% accuracy could be used for evil if it ever fell into the wrong hands. Such powerful systems should never be created in the first place, the juice isn't worth the squeeze.
A video completely indistinguishable from the video presented by the prosecution. Not sure where we go from there.
No we look at the primary suspect's digital footprints and analyze metadata, look for other nearby video feeds, etc. We try to see if additional evidence is corroborating.
<< A lot of people seem OK with it when it’s policing the bad parts of town. This is their reminder that it can be used against them, too.
What is fascinating is that AI recognition did not reach individual homes yet ( say.. won't let you add family members to 'approved' members to open doors, but maybe I should not be giving ideas ). I did hear about it being a toy for the rich though.
CCTV and facial recognition are both used around the world accross cultures and political systems and not 1 citizen voted for (or against) them. Not in totalitarian regimes nor in countries that pretend to be democratic.
That ship has sailed. You no longer have a reasonable expectation of privacy in an airport. Courts have ruled that safety concerns override privacy considerations inside them. Alright, well, if this is the system we’re stuck with, then we might as well make it efficient. Now we have TSA PreCheck where you can give up all pretense of personal privacy in exchange for a relatively pleasant airport experience. And the facial recognition kiosks I’ve seen don’t seem inherently more invasive than having a human security guard doing their functional equivalent, and we’ve had that for many years.
I’m not thrilled about the situation, but feel powerless to change it. It seems like the majority of my countrymen think this a good tradeoff, so I can’t say I’m fully on the right side of the argument anyway. So if stuck with a system I can’t change, and most people don’t want to change, if this makes the practical experience of dealing with that system faster and less unpleasant, then fine. So be it.
That system was created to avoid what you mention earlier, privileged people in society being inconvenienced and feeling motivated to speak out against these systems. Instead of subjecting the movers and shakers to the full brunt of the TSA, such people are allowed to opt out of the tyranny for a small (to them) fee.
It's not free, because if it were free then everybody would apply for the lineskip privilege and it would cease to be a lineskip privilege because now everybody is in that line. So, like amusement parks selling lineskip passes, they price it high enough to discourage most people from buying it.
I don't mind a security guard checking my ID. I do mind some random contractor building a facial recognition system that does it automatically and saves my picture and my identification information for all time without my consent or control.
I also don't see how we can ever get rid of it. There is a large psychological component on the topic of safety and flying. That we cannot get rid of it again is a problem though. Doubt we can have low security planes for those that don't want to be screened.
If the venue manager had kicked her out because he personally recognized her, would that be better?