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Comment by fphhotchips | Hacker News Reader

The best way of expressing this was posted in the comments when this issue was raised a couple days ago: the scale enabled by technology means that decisions that would have had to be reasonable before can now be made unreasonable by applying them at scale - and in most cases without the nuance applied when done by humans.

In essence, it's fair enough to ban the legal team suing you, and in the past you would have to restrict it like that, because who's going to check against 1000 photos on the wall, right? But when it's automated, it's probably just easier to ban the whole firm. Is it fair to ban some paralegal who works in probate law from seeing their favourite artist or attending a show with their kids because someone in a different state in a different division is suing a different division of the giant conglomerate that owns the venue? I think that crosses a line for most people.

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Ok, I appreciate this response and I hadn’t read the comments you reference from a past post. This nuance is valuable and I can understand the logic. There should be some connection to the thing offending the land owner, and the way to embed this into the decision making is to take technology out of it so that decisions have to be internally governed by some thought to efficiency.

Thank you

> Is it fair to ban some paralegal who works in probate law from seeing their favourite artist or attending a show with their kids because someone in a different state in a different division is suing a different division of the giant conglomerate that owns the venue?

depends on many things, from pettiness all the way to financial harm. i’ve seen places ban whole families.

I wonder what the world would look like if Google, Microsoft, and Apple had term wars everytime one of their legal teams sued another over patents.

I bet companies would stop suing each other really fast

I think this is spot on, and to add to it, tech allows scaling in other concerning ways besides just this example IMO. A different comment mentioned you can't restrict bans to behavior on property, because then a venue can't refuse entry to someone they saw behaving disorderly across the street. The problem with introducing tech to this decision is the temporal and spatial scale it can expand to though. It becomes theoretically feasible to ban someone from one venue because they were garden variety disorderly drunk 6 months ago at a venue across town.

Certainly this is more of a grey area than the guilt by association scaling you mention, but I think there is a point at which it becomes scary. People grow over time, people behave differently in different environments with different peers, etc. People also just make impulsive mistakes from time to time, especially when under stress. To what extent should that information be usable at scale for years of a person's life?

I'm for sure not legally qualified to know how or where to draw the line. But it's a problem we haven't grappled with much yet, because in the past there was no realistic infrastructure for it as you say. A ban list had to stay at reasonable length and further only had a more restricted set of info available to it.

Now ban criteria can include not only a longer list of "offenses" which may be much more minor, but also can cover offenses that occured at more possible places over a longer duration. Hopefully business interests will prevent much of this from being realized, but there needs to be a regulatory discussion to get in front of this too.

Furthermore, under the "businesses can do what they like" principle, there would be nothing stopping a business offering to ban anyone as a paid-for service.

On the technical side of this issue, I am curious how MSG as to how acquired the reference images, and I wonder if they would try to pass it off as fair use.

In fact, I am slightly skeptical that the identification was done via face recognition, as opposed to through the ticket sales chain, with face recognition being claimed as a cover. If using ticket sales information this way would present legal problems for MSG, I hope this possibility is investigated. (Nevertheless, face recognition clearly could be used this way, so that issue would still be on the table regardless of what MSG did here.)

I'm under the impression that the ticket wasn't bought by her, but rather by another member of the group she was traveling with. The facial recognition match was supposedly then confirmed by the venue asking her for her ID.

Thanks for your correction.

Hmmm, it's like implicit safety checks, intersting concept.

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