I thought it was interesting that the law firm complained to the NY liquor licensing board that their employee was banned from entry to MSG. I thought that was pretty clever. The liquor license says that have to serve all members of the public unless there’s safety concern. The licensing board agreed:
> In November, after a complaint about the ban from a law firm, the New York State Liquor Authority sent the Garden a letter advising it that such a policy could violate liquor laws.
I conjecture the connection to the liquor license is not accidental.
The various articles and discussions about this issue have carefully avoided mentioning what precisely the "personal injury" lawsuits have been about that started the whole issue.
Clever as it may be it doesn't address the actual problem. They might win the battle but lose the war.
You can still ban people to venues that don't have a liquor license. You can probably also find some creative ways around it. Like: Move the bar before the checkpoint, move the face check after the bar but before the main entrance, etc.
Honestly, I think they could just move the facial recognition check. It's something that happens in a computer using video feeds. There would be no physical difference in the setup, the security would just come for you after you get your beer. That's what makes this so insidious in my opinion.
Great point, any way to know if MSG makes more in beer sales than they do in ticket sales? And it must really threaten Dolan if lawyers can show the venue is overselling to already drunk and rowdy attendees.
I'm glad this is happening this early in the tech's advances so that we have time to legislate over it.
With megacorps owning bigger and bigger chunks of everything, these sorts of bans will start having deep effects on peoples lives.
Imagine being banned from all grocery chains within 200 miles because the parent corp that owns all grocery stores in the area decided that it doesn't like you.
The US is going to start looking like China if big companies can ban you for doing anything they don't like.
I'm usually in favor of companies deciding what they want to do and how they want to price things - but anything related to general discrimination or suppressing free speech seems like a VERY slippery slope that companies shouldn't be allowed to do.
There's already a lot of companies sueing people for leaving bad reviews. This seems completely dystopian. Imagine if you say anything bad about Apple and you can't message iPhone users anymore. If you say anything bad about Google, you can't use any website with Analytics. If you say anything bad about Comcast, you have to sell your house and move to get Internet, etc.
Internet enabled cars were never a good idea. I dread the day I have to give up my mid-00s Honda and replace it with something new, since everything seems loaded with phone-home spyware and killswitches now.
I have a VW from 2019. I think it's the last generation to only have Bluetooth connectivity. Still, every time I talk to an official VW employee they ask me to install their app and update the car firmware, so they can spy on me. I politely refuse.
I'm sure we'll figure out the regulation sooner or later, but for now it looks like things will get worse before they get better.
Yeah, it’s becoming more and more obvious that keeping a vehicle SOMEWHERE that doesn’t connect to the internet is going to be important in the future - even if it’s just a bike or motorcycle or M32A2.
I say let them. It will make people weary of big companies and value community based solutions instead which are much harder to just buy out or corrupt. You're seeing this play out with Twitter vs Mastodon right now for example.
how is this company “generally discriminating” or “suppressing free speech”? i feel like your comment is about the right to deny service more than the use of face recognition.
You mean it's not a First Amendment issue. Free speech is a broader principle about how a society should conduct itself, not merely a set of restrictions for governments.
> The company is denying service BECAUSE the customer is involved in a lawsuit.
Why should that be unreasonable? Seems a little cheeky to sue someone and expect them to keep on entertaining you.
> If you don't think that's suppression of free speech
Whose speech is being suppressed? The Rockettes are free to sing, the lawyer is free to complain about missing the show, and the venue is free to explain their point of view. Everybody involved appears to be speaking freely.
The lawyer who's organisation is involved in a case, is being denied service.
Specifically, the lawyer being denied service is a personal injury lawyer, who works for the law firm who is representing people suing the company.
So they work in an entirely different branch of the law firm, but are being denied service because their firm is representing someone who is suing the company.
I mean do you prefer the world where you are punished for the actions of 3rd parties who are semantically or logically connected to you?
Irrespective of the fundamental issues of this case, this seems a bit of an overreach.
If I were taking this at all seriously, I suppose I would have to agree with you. The whole thing just seems frivolous, and both parties entirely unsympathetic; a terrible case for setting any precedent we should care about.
A publicly traded corporation is not "someone." They don't have points of view or the ability to speak. In many ways, they are far more similar to government institutions than to private citizens, and should be treated as such whenever free speech is concerned.
The customer banned from MSG is not involved in the lawsuit, but even if they were, we shouldn't allow corporations to retaliate against people by banning them from public venues.
> Why should that be unreasonable? Seems a little cheeky to sue someone and expect them to keep on entertaining you.
One things that’s being missed is the compartmentalization of the individual in their professional capacity and as a private citizen. The person was attending the venue as the latter.
The only time this partition is disregarded is in vindication.
MSG offers entertainment to the public. They sell tickets which are fungible.
How do you expect an attorney to be able to perform her professional responsibilities if she can be punished for doing so?
What happens when her firm is involved in litigation with Cushman & Wakefield and she can’t meet clients with offices in Rockefeller Center due to a ban?
Primarily Democratic backed company that doesn't like Republicans and don't want to provide them service? Boom excluded - "We reserve the right to refuse you service!". And honestly with as much data that has been collected they could legally do it on a data point that's not tied to your politics(ie misdemeanors, felonies, court cases, etc). It's absolutely going to be discriminatory, and they can hide it in the algorithms. And, not to pick on Democrats this is possible for any group, or individual to clearly point at any other group/individual. This is just the start, but it might be the actual end of individual expression without repercussions.
Not OP, but likely because Democrats have been doing this to Republicans online for the last 20 years or so (and almost never the other way around), so it's likely that we'll see the same behavior escape into the real world now that it's possible.
Hardly, the culture wars have been hitting in both directions for decades. The extreme right has been less successful at growing huge online companies, but giant companies can’t afford to kick off 1/2 their customers.
It’s really smaller website that can kick people off without consequences.
I've seen a video showing something like this, of a shop clerk refusing service to a customer because he had a maga hat (or some other sort of trump paraphernalia, I don't recall exactly.)
As far as I know, that was legal. But the clerk did lose his job when his boss found out.
In fairness the MAGA hat is generally understood to stand for hateful positions (screw your feelings, screw immigrants, remove rights to minorities and women), which is a bit antagonistic. I assume a different republican piece of apparel (like a McCain 2016 shirt) would yield no reaction.
I still don't think people should discriminate but I do think MAGA in particular is objectively tainted, it's essentially the slogan of an attempted coup after all (I know officially it was "KAG" at that time, but MAGA remained the main "brand")
Pre January 6th, you'd get about the response someone wearing a BLM shirt in red country would. Heckling and adversarialism, but generally civil interactions. Post January 6th, yes, someone wearing a MAGA hat is showing specific stripes.
Performative political advocacy makes you look asinine. Especially when the novelty wears off.
If you’re still on the red hat train in 2023, my associating with you makes me look a bit dim myself. It’s kinda like naming your kid Adolf… you’re projecting something gross.
Well thats A-OK because the good guys are in charge here! We love our corporations and when they work with government agencies we love them even more. You’d have to be some kind of nazi to have a problem with that.
Even the relatively lax enforcement of anti-competitive laws we do have is likely to prevent that particular scenario.
I'm not sure it is possible to write a good law that says you can't act against people for some set of reasons, without impacting the ability of venues to deny service in more reasonable cases. (Current trespassing law pretty much relies on notification, if you are told you aren't welcome in a private place and then refuse to leave or later re-enter it, you are trespassing).
Like say an attendant observes that someone is visibly intoxicated, sees them vomit in a spot that isn't part of the venue, and then tries to deny them service. In that case, an escape hatch that lets them add people to a list if they are ejected wouldn't work, but it's perfectly reasonable to deny that person entry.
The better mechanism to deal with things like this would be social pressure. Arbitrary denial of service is outrageous and people should punish them by not doing any business with them (don't book events there, don't attend events there). But no way is anyone going to inconvenience themselves over a few lawyers getting a bad deal. Maybe we'll get a more charismatic scenario sometime in the future.
You don't need a full-on monopoly. All you need is for a megacorp to have enough of a stake in a group of companies that it can dictate certain policies due to the damage it could cause by tanking the share price if they don't play ball. Something like "All of you must adhere to this ban list that we will keep updated". The megacorp doesn't outright own them so there's no monopoly, but that hardly matters to the poor sod who can no longer buy food because every single food-selling outlet in his area is affected, and toeing the line.
And it wouldn't even need to be this nefarious. Like all paths to hell, it could start with a "bad people" list that becomes homogenized across the companies because one of them has special skill in this area and it's cheaper that way. Then the list starts to expand, and since all of this group of companies are linked, they all follow the same ban, use the same facial recognition etc.
I think this is a bit of a blind spot for libertarian ideals. One tends to get the impression that people only need to be protected from the government.
I, myself, am quick to point out that the first amendment only applies to the government, but I'm starting to think it might be better if those kinds of protections are broadened.
Yes, I have been wondering for a long time why some libertarians seem to dismiss the issues of monopolies and cartels, even though these too are anti-free market.
I'm boycotting MSG over this, and it's an easy call: I didn't bust my ass for 30 years creating tech to have companies pull nonsense like this. Among the issues, this is a violation of their own written policy, stated that this is for "safety" when this clearly about retribution.
MSG, you want retribution, you got it.
I'm really hoping the CEO faces personal penalties over this, causing other companies to take notice and setting de facto limits on acceptable use of this tech. Normally, I'm not one to take reactionary stances, but the CEO absolutely knew about and approved this policy and exercised __extraordinarily__ bad judgment unbecoming of a public company CEO. A fifth grader would understand that this policy doesn't work at any scale.
Let’s take a step back for a second: is it the use of technology to ban certain people from the venue, or the way people are being chosen for exclusion?
If the former, and banning people you consider to be your enemies is not an issue here, then I guess I struggle with why using technology to exclude people efficiently is a concern.
If the latter, then I struggle as it should be within the rights of any property owner to exclude their antagonizers (or really anyone on any basis not covered by anti-discrimination laws) from their property. I feel strongly about inalienable property rights, and who is anyone else who hasn’t put money up to own the land to tell them what to do with it? Are we all just a giant HOA?
Or is the issue that it’s a public company and as such is expected to have separate standards?
I don’t mean to be pedantic - I am honestly trying to understand. As a landowner myself (of publicly accessible spaces), if I were to be sued by someone I certainly wouldn’t want to be forced to extend hospitality to those suing me by allowing them onto my land for their own enjoyment. If technology allowed me to do this more efficiently, I’d utilize it if I felt that strongly about the merits of the case against me. But I am not a public company, so perhaps that’s where the issue is?
To be clear, if they were excluding people based on things out of a person’s control or otherwise protected by civil rights, I’d understand that society restricts this - it isn’t a society we collectively want to live in. But I am not sure I want to live in a society where someone can antagonize someone else and we force that party to host the antagonizer for the antagonizer’s enjoyment. That seems somewhat dystopian to me as well.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
This isn’t a matter of private property rights. The owner of Madison Square Garden is free to sit inside it by himself and keep the world at bay.
But once he creates a business open to the public there are rules. There are rules about what hours he can be open and closed, rules about the number of fire exits, rules about the labels that have to be on any food that’s sold, rules about how loud sounds can be and how bright lights can be. If he sells someone real estate the contract must be in writing. If he sells someone a toaster there is a legally enforced warranty that it will be able to make toast.
This hypothetical idea that businesses have the right to sort of do whatever they want comes up a lot in arguments like this, but it has no real basis in law or tradition.
Businesses don’t now, and have never, had the right to do whatever they want. Their ability to even operate at all is a privilege that requires advance permission and registration.
The state regulates commerce that’s literally what it’s for. It enforces principals of fairness, honesty, enforcement of promises, and all sorts of other stuff.
If the state believes, correctly, that this kind of behavior is incompatible with the state granted privilege to operate as a business then it should prohibit it without hesitation.
I believe GP's point was that this is just the current law, not some profound legal principle like property rights. That is, the law already deeply limits property rights for businesses open to the public in various ways (e.g. by forcing them to abide by anti-discrimination laws, which private property owners have no obligation to). Making a new law that would limit public businesses' ability to ban people based on legal disputes would not constitute a difference in kind (only in degree) compared to current laws.
In a case like this, private property rights are probably more important. It is an entertainment venue, there are plenty of alternatives out there, and entertainment is not necessary for society.
Contrast that to something like grocery stores. I don't know what it is like in your neck of the woods, but almost everything in my area is controlled by three companies. Food is a necessity of life and there are not many alternatives. The grocery stores are large enough that banning someone will have very little consequence to the business, but it can have disproportionate consequences to the individual.
Even if you do accept banning people, where do you draw the line? A grocery store should have the right to ban shoplifters, but should it be a narrow ban (e.g. it affected a particular location) or should it be a broad ban (e.g. based upon some externally acquired list)? Should the ban be limited in duration, or can a person reasonably be banned for their actions ten years prior? It may seem reasonable to dismiss such people because the ban would be a consequence of their actions, but there comes a point where the consequences are excessive.
Then there is the question of who is being banned. The company stated their list extends to people working for the law firm, not just the people involved in litigation. If I recall correctly from another article, Conlon stated she wasn't involved in the particular case. In other words, there are instances of guilt and punishment by association. While it can be stated that one controls who they work for, is it reasonable to expect someone to quit their jobs because of legal (and possibly even moral) actions of their employer?
Treating inalienable property rights as a default is probably a good default position, but I am deeply concerned about it being used as an excuse to control others.
Synthesize your two examples and you get some really sinister results. Imagine getting banned from a national grocery store chain not because you shoplifted, but rather because one of your family, friends or coworkers shoplifted. The company just mutters something about thieves associating with thieves and now you can't buy food because you associated with the wrong people.
You just invented the Chinese "social credit" system all over again.
Sadly, I know a surprising number of people lamenting that we don't have it in the US - the thought is that collective punishment works to force a group to self-regulate, so why not apply it to groups of friends, family, etc and punish all of them as soon as one person steps out of line.
> In a case like this, private property rights are probably more important. It is an entertainment venue, there are plenty of alternatives out there, and entertainment is not necessary for society.
In principle I see where you're coming from. Nevertheless I disagree in this case.
While a property owner should have the right to say who can or cannot use his property I think this becomes a lot more fuzzy when you own a venue, which runs performances open to the public.
You can absolutely stipulate conditions upon ticket sales like accepted behavior or actions that a ticket buyer is prohibited from doing (no recordings or no smuggling of your own booze come to mind).
I think it's a hell of a lot more sticky if you exclude visitors based on totally arbitrary factors, which I think happened here.
If you provide a service, which is generally open to the public, this should come with the obligations not to exclude patrons for capricious or even frivolous reasons.
I don't think that grocery stores that are allowed (and are big enough to) have cameras everywhere and a security service should be allowed to ban known shoplifters. They can already focus on them, catch them in the act, immobilize them, and have the police deal with the offenders.
> If the latter, then I struggle as it should be within the rights of any property owner to exclude their antagonizers (or really anyone on any basis not covered by anti-discrimination laws) from their property.
If the business has premises in a city then it is subject to various planning laws. Planning permission could probably be made conditional on serving all members of the public without discrimination. I don't know whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, but that's one way to resolve the issue you quite reasonably raise of compatibility with property rights.
A lot of your personal property rights of throwing out who you want when you want why you want go out the window when you have a liquor license that says you are to not discriminate members of the public
> I don’t mean to be pedantic - I am honestly trying to understand. As a landowner myself (of publicly accessible spaces), if I were to be sued by someone I certainly wouldn’t want to be forced to extend hospitality to those suing me by allowing them onto my land for their own enjoyment. If technology allowed me to do this more efficiently, I’d utilize it if I felt that strongly about the merits of the case against me. But I am not a public company, so perhaps that’s where the issue is?
The nature and extent of this "private land" is at least part of the problem. This isn't some guy's living room or a small theater he built himself. MSG Entertainment Group owns venues all over the place. In New York, at least Madison Square Garden, the Beacon Theatre on Broadway, and this venue, Radio City Music Hall. Three of the largest and most historic venues in the city. Radio City Music Hall has been open since 1932, is an official New York City Landmark, and hosts the NFL Draft, Emmys, Grammys, Tonys, and VMAs, all globally-televised events. The Rockettes themselves are a national institution that has been around even longer than Radio City Music Hall.
You're effectively saying that the rights of James Dolan, a spoiled, petulant drug addict and alcoholic with a famously volatile temper, who happened to be lucky enough to be born to the founder of Cablevision and HBO, a daddy who could buy him things like Radio City Music Hall, is more important than the rights of the people of New York to take part in century-old community events that are part of the history and fabric of where they live.
One person is more important than millions because he happens to be richer.
Legally, you're right in most cases (maybe not this one because of the liquor license) that the rights of the owner are absolute. But should they be? What are the limits on what types of places a single person should be allowed to control? Imagine places that are currently public, like the Alamo, Central Park, Mt. Rushmore. If Texas, New York City, or the United States ever got so strapped for cash that they decided to sell those places to private owners, is it seriously now okay that some bratty rich kid whose daddy bought him a historical landmark can exclude anyone he wants for any reason?
What if one of the dancer's family members worked for this law firm? Now they can't come see their sister, mother, daughter perform because their employer's parent company is involved in a lawsuit against the Rockette's venue's parent company? The founders of our country went out of their way to enshrine and protect property rights because they were concerned about the past tendency of kings to just decide arbitrarily that your land was now under their control and you owed them more money than before or needed to send people to fight wars for them. It wasn't for shit like this. James Dolan is the shitty tyrant in this scenario. The Rockettes should get to say who gets to see them perform, not a global entertainment conglomerate that bought the venue they currently perform in.
From MSG's perspective the ban is about safety - albeit the safety of their own perceived attack surface from adversaries, not the safety of their customers. This is where they are twisting words to fit the "safety" narrative, and it is completely disingenuous IMO.
The Madison Square Garden group is currently trying to get permission to build a new entertainment venue in London (MSG Sphere London [1]). A history of poor corporate ethics/behaviour like this could be considered a strike against them.
Nothing wrong with face recognition itself, when used responsibly. People who commit crimes, for example, at MSG's venues should be banned! The problem here is that they're denying service to people who have done nothing wrong. In some cases just for being associated with a law firm which is representing clients against MSG.
Suppose Google decided to ban you from using all Google services, just because you work (or once worked) for a law firm that is representing someone in a suit against Google. Would that be fair?
Imagine if you had to sue a company for a wrong doing, but still would require the services of said company. They could pressure you to drop the suit, by using this tech to deny you access to their services.
So even if the suit had merit, the company escaped being sued. So this would produce unfair outcomes.
In other words, a company discriminating against customers should be illegal, except in specific circumstances allowed by the law.
That's usually done to unruly fans. This is controversial for two reasons: the tech angle (automatic facial recognition) and that the denial of service happened to an attendee who had shown no signs of unruly behavior and only happened because of her place of employment.
I'm sorry but ban this technology now. The nefarious uses are easy to see and are already happening apparently. If we find good uses later for the public good (I really do struggle to think of these), we can figure out how to use it responsibly. This seems way more threatening to me than AI at the moment.
I'm wondering if banks are doing this. Few times I got visibly nervous because e.g. the clerk was upselling "investment funds" instead of listening, or they didn't deal with cash deposits and withdrawals (the bank branch is basically showroom for selling credit deals). Next time... a clerk approaches me straight away when I enter the branch asking "how they can help".
People cry foul, and yet I’m sure they wouldn’t hesitate to scan a guest’s entire social media history for any unacceptable statements (i.e. racism, sexism, *phobias, neo-nazi, etc) and ban them from the venue.
If someone has declared themself to be your enemy by suing you, and seeks to do you harm, it seems reasonable that you might decline to offer them your hospitality.
(Obviously they didn’t come for the lawyers first - the lawyers were the first who were strong enough to pick a fight over it or know how to respond - it’s shrapnel holes in returned bombers)
It’s the lawyers right now. Next up it’s anyone who works for any company involved in litigation with them. Then it’s anyone who leaves a bad yelp review.
I already am afraid of leaving people who have wronged me bad reviews on Google and other services when they know my address.
That aside, to use the classic stick reserved for complaining conservatives, it's a private company and venue and they have a right to choose who they want in there.
They may or may not be free to choose that depending on what the liquor authority says. They certainly aren’t free to deny someone they’ve already sold a ticket to without cause. A ticket is a contract.
But beyond those points, we already make distinctions between private spaces and spaces open to the public that happen to be privately owned. When you invite in the public you waive some of your rights to free association. I see no reason why we can’t add further restrictions beyond the currently protected classes.
If you want to build a completely privately funded members only stadium, have at it.
That depends on the liquor board’s interpretation of their policy.
And it depends on whether the ticket holder can prove they suffered damages beyond the cost of the ticket. Or whether a group of people in a class action lawsuit can do so.
At least one law firm has already successfully sued to overturn their ban.
I honestly don't see why this is newsworthy whilst the social climate still celebrates conservatives being booted off various social media sites. It's a private company doing what they want; you have no god given right to attend Madison Square Garden. As progressives snarkily tell the conservatives, if these lawyers want a arena so bad, they should make one for themselves.
Yes you do, that's why you're posting here. As you note, it is completely of a piece with social media bans. It is obviously newsworthy because it now extends that sort of "ideological ban" to a physical space.
Presumably the rights God inconveniently forgot to give us were enhanced by our rights as private citizens and taxpayers?
MSG is not a members only club, there are laws about venues which are generally open to the public, and we also have civil court for contracts like buying tickets to concerts.
We will see what a jury of our peers will say. But I don't think progressive snark or bad jokes about lawyers will be in the court arguments.
While sucky I don't see how any of this is illegal. To me it looks constitutionally correct and I don't want the government legislating this. If the company can refuse to bake a cake, it should be able to refuse any kind of service. Pretty sure this should be covered by the 1st amendment.
If that’s the case, how far should they be allowed to go with a ban? What happens if they decide that fans of an opposing team shouldn’t be allowed to attend games? Or people who have been oppositional towards ownership or management, like the press. What about banning everyone who works for a vendor or partner because they are sour about a deal going bad or relationship ending? What about politicians or people with opposing views (I don’t believe that’s a protected class?).
Edit: updated to use examples that aren’t part of protected classes.
Half your examples would be flagrantly illegal. There's no comparing banning members of a rival company you don't like, and banning a race. These aren't even remotely similar from a legal point of view.
In many states you can legally discriminate against people based on politics. Not California however. Could be a very effective way to keep “that kind” out on both sides.
Yes, various states add more protected classes. Height and weight are protected classes in Michigan. I do wonder just how enforceable some of these are; if a bar in California bans somebody for wearing a nazi armband, I have a hard time imagining them losing a lawsuit about it.
Regardless, I don't think there's any state in which affiliation with an employer is a protected class. You can't compare this to race or sex, which are protected classes on the federal level, in every state.
If you are referring to the Masterpiece Cake suit from Colorado, I'm pretty sure that the cake maker won on a technicality: table single member of Colorado's ruling authority said something religiously discriminatory against the cake maker which made their ruling discriminatory.
The general question of "can a private cake maker restrict who he makes cakes for" is still unresolved (legally, in the US)
Don't confuse the issues. A major difference between the parallels you draw is the concept of a protected class [1]: a group which has been granted specific legal protections because of a long history of widespread discrimination. Or do you think it is also OK for the baker to refuse to sell cakes to black people? That is what is in play in the bakery case.
Let's say I have a video door bell and there's a pesky company making door-to-door sales and all the salespeople wear a uniform. Would it be fine for me to train a ML model to recognize when people who are wearing that uniform are ringing me so the button press gets ignored and I don't get startled during the day?
If someone is not wanted in a privately owned place then I don't see why using a model to automatically alert security or deny access is a bad thing.
Comparing private residences to public venues makes sense in a particular and limited sort of "technically correct" way, but is rarely the basis of a persuasive argument.
Because it's generally open to the public. Different rules apply to your home and your grocery store even though they're both "privately owned". The law, and most people, recognize numerous differences between the two even if you do not.
If the owner of the venue personally stood in front of the entrance and recognized and denied entry to those lawyers, would that be illegal? What's the part you have an issue with, the automation or the banning?
First, we're not talking about simply legal vs illegal, there's also ethics and civics involved.
These venues are often publicly funded, supported by public services, are generally open to the public. So all such actions around banning members of the public for their identity (versus their behavior or conduct at the venue) should be given heightened scrutiny.
To your point, I do not agree that the venue should be able to ban someone simply for who they work for.
But the technology is what enabled the venue to identify and ban this lawyer, so it is a simply augmenting the scale of abuse by increasing the "hit rate" of recognition that the owner standing outside the venue wpuld.
It is a force multiplier of discrimination. And it reduces the cost of such discrimination significantly.
Facial recognition tech gets woman booted from Rockettes show due to employer
(nbcnewyork.com)
703 points | 2 days ago | 660 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34066965