San Francisco's Least Welcome Start-Up Explains Itself | Hacker News Reader

San Francisco's Least Welcome Start-Up Explains Itself

allthingsd.com

21 pointsdwynings24 comments

blinks I've already been told I have a defective sense of privacy, but I am genuinely confused about why people would object to this.

It scans your face in a public place in order to do facial recognition. What happens if I want to go to a public place WITHOUT having my face scanned for facial recognition and inclusion in some startup's dataset? Do I not get a say? Is that not my right? Where do we draw the line?

I don't know, by the same logic you could say you have a right to not let other people look at you in public (you don't). I understand the desire for a right to privacy (despite no such explicit right being anywhere in the constitution), but when you are in public, you be definition give up some privacy.

The thing is, I think most people who object to this so much would probably never even visit those bars where people care what the "scene" is like anyway

This. I'm having serious difficulty imagining that anyone would object this much if the bar simply hired someone to sit in the corner, count the men and women, and post the numbers on a twitter feed.

Because it's a very short hop from what's described here to full-on tracking, and some marketing company knowing where you are, what you're doing and who you're with at all times.

It's a similar situation to Google's street view - sure, it's in theory in the public domain, but when you start aggregating this sort of thing and making it searchable, it's different.

a bar is not a public place, it's a private place that the public are invited into.

Aren't bars more formally referred to as "public houses"?

sure, but public in "public house" (or just "pub") means open to the public, it doesn't mean that the public have some sort of right to access, whereas a public street means it's accessible by everyone.

Relating to the usage of the word public, humorously in England we have "public school" which is the American "private school", in America if you go to public school you're considered normal and in England if you go to public school you're considered rich.

If there were some way to assure people it only did what they say it does, and couldn't be modified in the future, I wouldn't really have a problem with it (bars are public places; at the very least, getting person-counts would be good).

Maybe they could skip the gender and individual profiling and do low-resolution IR, which would be a pretty decent way to identify human-shaped blobs. If you monitor entrances, you could assume no one dematerializes inside, so starting from zero, just count people who enter and leave to get a count.

It's a logical idea for successful scene-type bars to use. The guy sounds a little clueless about SF culture, but other than that I expect it to be a reasonably successful project.

He needs to be more aware of what bars he signs up, and probably more upfront with the owners. Pissing off a bunch of owners is not a good start.

If they added an "attractiveness" algorithm (with an artificial boost, of course), I bet it would be even more of a feature for the right bars.

I dunno. It's got potential for misuse, which will almost certainly happen, with them or their competitors, but it also seems like enough of an advantage to certain venues that it seems inevitable in some form.

The funny thing is jwz's DNA Lounge broadcasts from their venue at all times - and this is a feature.

I have to admit that my wife and I once used that to figure out whether we want to figure out whether we want to go or not.

People react to things differently when given a reason. Imagine you are out walking around, and someone comes up to you and shoes you as hard as they can. You trip and fall and get mad. The pusher explains, "I hate all white people!" You are probably not going to feel too good about being pushed.

But imagine the pusher had a different reason: "Those bricks were going to fall right on top of you! I saved your life." Chances are, you're going to be pretty happy about being pushed. It's all about the reason.

Going back to the DNA Lounge; people don't mind being recorded and broadcast because they 1) sign up in advance (it's the DNA Lounge's "thing"), and 2) they do it for their own entertainment. They can call a friend and say, "hey, check me out on the webcam", which is fun.

When the cameras are there to increase the bar's profit margins by collecting personal information, though, people are less likely to be happy. They're giving something up but getting nothing in exchange. Most people don't like that. If the deal was, "we record your face, you get the cheapest beer in town", then people would be less upset. But when you use people as currency and don't give them anything in exchange, the value proposition center of their brain tends not to be happy.

The whole point is that the customers are getting something in return. They open their mobile device and look up which venues have people at the moment, so they know where to go. In fact, it sounds like that's the only thing this app does.

The only problem is what rdl said--that some customers might think the cameras are actually doing some kind of facial recognition and storing the results (which you wouldn't get from the regular security cameras already at those places) as opposed to just counting how many customers each place has. But then again, customers who aren't going to trust the maker of this app might as well assume that the government is also secretly connecting all street cameras to facial recognition software with huge hard drives to spy on us. Which could be true, but if those people are already willing to go out in public with their faces oncovered, they shouldn't be further afraid of going to these bars.

I'm very skeptical it can offer any meaningful information to a halfway decent bar general manager. Someone who's in the place every night anyway.

> I have to admit that my wife and I once used that to figure out whether we want to figure out whether we want to go or not.

Did you get the memo for the pre-meeting meeting planning session?

Argh. Deserved that.

I like the phrase "a nearby camera-like sensor for facial detection." It's "like" a camera in the sense that it actually is a camera, right?

I think they phrase it like that due to the fact calling it a "camera" implies that it's saving what it captures. Assuming that they're being truthful, this is not the case with their device.

This looks bad just because they publish the results. If they kept the results for the venue owners, nobody would know, as they do not know or care what the video surveillance installed in all those venues can show. A possible picture while you enter the venue is nothing compared to a video of all you did inside.

Beyond the privacy implications, I wonder if the technology actually works. I'd be amazed if it's accuracy was even higher than 50% but I guess this kind of tech has probably been perfected by the gaming industry.

It does go down a scary path. So beyond gender and age, what's to stop tracking by race, etc?

I don't object to the privacy aspect, since this will never take off. I object to the utter unimaginative/douchy aspect of this. Who with half-a-brain hasn't thought of this and immediately rejected it as a stupid kind of frat boy inspired 'where the chicks at' idea?

this should have launched in the UK.

When I was younger and actually cared about going to bars and clubs, I quickly learned that you're kept entirely in the dark until you get inside. I waited in line and paid too many cover charges to get inside and find out the place was deserted.

So, yeah, I see definite value here.

Like having a party in an open prison.

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