[fivefives55555]

First just a disclaimer that I am not a proponent of facial recognition technology (I think it has a number of significant faults).

That being said, it does not seem like facial recognition technology is the issue here, at all.

The crux of the matter appears to be this:

> Businesses generally have the right to decide whom they want to do business with, as long as they are not discriminating by ethnicity, sex, religion, disability or another protected class.

This seems to be the issue that people are fundamentally disagreeing with. Facial recognition technology is one way of achieving that. If the venue just had all security guards carry a list of the lawyers' photographs, instead of using automated technology, would people be fine with the venue barring access?

Essentially it seems to me like people are disagreeing with the fact that businesses can choose to not to business with unprotected classes. If so, that's fine, but I don't understand why people are just couching this as an attack on facial recognition technology, which seems like in this instance is actually doing its job well.

The article ends with:

> Lawyers may not be the most sympathetic victims and their need to be entertained may not be the most compelling of causes. But their plight, Mr. Greenberg said, should raise alarms about how the use of this technology could spread. Businesses, for instance, might turn people away based on their political ideology, comments they’d made online or whom they work for.

But again...."Businesses, for instance, might turn people away based on their political ideology, comments they’d made online or whom they work for" with or without the use of facial recognition technology, so the fundamental issue appears to be that businesses _shouldn't_ be allowed to turn away unprotected classes?

[jedberg]

I think people would have a problem with an army of security guards with pictures. It's just never come up before because it was cost prohibitive.

I think you're right in that people aren't upset with facial recognition per se, but are upset with its efficiency.

However the best way to counteract that at this time is to push for a ban on the technology instead of a ban on the consequences, because enumerating all possible consequences now and in the future is hard.

[vlovich123]

I agree with your position. The issue is whether unprotected classes are allowed to be turned away for reasons other than visibily disturbing the peace.

However, I think the difference between automated image recognition and security guards with clipboards is one of scale. It would simply be impossible to have images of lawyers from across 90 firms on clipboards and would take long enough to be infeasible for every single patron coming through the doors. Automation makes this possible and easy and thus it’s worth having the discussion.

It’s like Google with self driving cars. While they were technically on public roads, the breadth and scale of PII being captured and displayed changed what was acceptable. Hence Google choosing to instead deploy automated algorithms to blur faces.

[ryandrake]

Some people tend to change their minds about laws/rules when enforcement becomes automated and scalable. Speeding: Person A can say "Yea, speeding should be against the law" when one cop struggles to pull over one speeder out of 500 on the road every hour. Then, when you put up speeding cameras, Person A's chances of getting caught go from 1/500 to 1/1, and he suddenly changes his mind.

I agree with OP that this is the only reason we're even talking about facial recognition here. Most people are fine with a business kicking someone out that they don't want to do business with. Trust me, we would not want to live in a world where you can't kick someone out of your business. But when the kicking becomes scalable and automated, some people have second thoughts about being fine with this. It's interesting to see people double-check and backtrack their world views when the world becomes automated.

[vlovich123]

> Trust me, we would not want to live in a world where you can't kick someone out of your business

Can you elaborate on this please? It's not immediately obvious to me that's a bad thing (within reason). I'm not talking about removing all ability nor about all businesses. I'm specifically talking about a severely restricted ability - you can kick people out of a public venue if they're being disruptive, causing a public nuisance of some kind, or not following the publicly posted rules for the venue that you are clearly enforcing evenly. But other than that, you can't just evict people. You also obviously need to make it a crime to hire people to harass the people you dislike to provide cover under the pretense of kicking both parties out which is what will happen with such a policy.

[ryandrake]

If you narrow the criteria to things like "disruptive" and "nuisance" then you end up constantly defining and clarifying exactly what these things mean. Rules-lawyer-type people will come in and walk right up to wherever the line was established. The whole "nyaa nyaa, I'm not technically touching you!" type. You also might forget things. If you establish a list of attributes/behaviors you can ban over, then people will do the other things that you didn't list. "Your sign says no fighting, but I'm just yelling insanely." "Your sign says no being disruptive but I'm just quietly wearing my pointy white hood." Better to have a list of behaviors you can't ban over (the special, enumerated things in the law) and reserve the right to ban over anything else.

Then you have people who are not disruptive themselves, but you know their presence will invite others who are. The whole "How to not become a nazi bar" example[1].

EDIT: Rules-lawyer example: Do you really want this guy[2] in your store? "Ackshually, it's 8:59 and you close at 9:00!"

1: https://twitter.com/IamRageSparkle/status/128089153745134387...

2: https://www.tiktok.com/@ragnar_helsson/video/718540983685770...

[vlovich123]

> If you narrow the criteria to things like "disruptive" and "nuisance" then you end up constantly defining and clarifying exactly what these things mean. Rules-lawyer-type people will come in and walk right up to wherever the line was established. The whole "nyaa nyaa, I'm not technically touching you!" type

I feel like you're really strawmanning here. I wasn't trying to lay out the exact parameters of the law. See a sibling response to you:

> To the best of my knowledge - this is the case in big chunk Europe, with a "for no reason" added on the end. You can't kick out someone out of business unless they are actively malicious. And no, working for a company that is suing an owner is not considered malicious.

Believe it or not, but that's the whole point of the judge in the legal system. It's to act as the arbiter of are you acting with accordance of the spirit of the law or are you engaging strictly in trying to get as close to the line as possible. And if you show a pattern of acting in bad faith, you get slapped with extra penalties. The American legal system seems to generally prefer "nyaa nyaa, I'm not technically touching you!" interpretations of the law but in reality this kind of interpretation only makes sense in a ridiculously small (if any) set of circumstances - in most others it's better to just let the judge interpret the evidence, figure out who's acting in bad faith (whether through summary judgement or jury if it's really required), and judge accordingly.

As for the closing hours things, that's again a strawman. The business is free to close whenever as long as it's applying this uniformly (i.e. preventing all new public access, trying to get existing public to exit etc). That has nothing to do with ejecting specific individuals selectively.

[kilotaras]

> Trust me, we would not want to live in a world where you can't kick someone out of your business

To the best of my knowledge - this is the case in big chunk Europe, with a "for no reason" added on the end. You can't kick out someone out of business unless they are actively malicious. And no, working for a company that is suing an owner is not considered malicious.

[donmcronald]

> However, I think the difference between automated image recognition and security guards with clipboards is one of scale.

This is exactly what it is. There's a non-trivial cost associated with banning someone the "old fashioned" way and it creates a barrier to abuse. It's hard to maintain lists forever and it's hard to share lists because the more people on the list, the more it costs.

There are so many abuses that become viable once the process is low cost and highly scalable that I can't imagine it being left unchecked.

[ryandrake]

What counts as "abuse"? Besides those enumerated special reasons like ethnicity, sex, religion, disability, you can ban someone from your business for ANY reason or even no reason. If the business owner doesn't like green shirts, he can ban you for wearing a green shirt. Is this abuse? If the business owner doesn't like how you smell, he can ban you. Abuse? They can even make a mistake and ban the wrong person. Is that abuse?

[donmcronald]

I don't think it can be the same definition for every business. If it's something like a restaurant where the person can go to hundreds of other competitors, I think banning for any reason is ok. If it's large venue where there's only one, or if those restaurants band together to ban a person from the whole class of business, I don't 100% agree with it being unrestricted.

What if all the hospitals are private like in the US and they all share the same ban list? Should they be able to ban you for wearing a green shirt?

[nradov]

Many US hospitals are owned by government entities. Patient access to all hospitals including privately owned ones is controlled by the EMTALA law. That law doesn't apply to other types of businesses.

https://www.cms.gov/regulations-and-guidance/legislation/emt...

[paulmd]

as another comment points out, that is not the case everywhere, and people citing such "dilemmas" often fail to consider whether that is a desirable thing at all.

why should you be able to kick out all patrons who wear green shirts? is that not against the spirit of offering a public accommodation?

even if your goal is to enforce a dress code, surely that can be done in a "content-neutral" manner similar to the "time, manner, place" regulations.

similarly to the "constitutional fetishism" in the US, where people dig in their heels defending really awful features and design goals of the system, people often really fail to stop and consider the difference between the way the system is and the way it ought to be. Being banned from public society en-masse by a privately-operated "social credit" system is pretty horrible even if it's perfectly legal under the current law!

but it wasn't feasible to do that en-masse back in the 1700s, so nobody wrote a law preventing it, just like one cop could watch traffic in 1780 means that it's legally fine to build a massive database recording everyone's movements in the 2020s...

[fivefives55555]

> I think the difference between automated image recognition and security guards with clipboards is one of scale. It would simply be impossible to have images of lawyers from across 90 firms on clipboards and would take long enough to be infeasible for every single patron coming through the doors. Automation makes this possible and easy and thus it’s worth having the discussion.

Sure, I definitely see that. What I am having a hard time understanding is what, then, are people who are against the use of facial recognition in this case but are not against businesses being able to bar access to unprotected cases in general, arguing here, exactly? That businesses should be allowed to bar as many people as they can manually?

Basically the position that "businesses shouldn't use tech to help them bar people, but should still be able to bar people" seems confusing to me, because then obviously bigger businesses like MSG can still do even manual barring 'at scale' (e.g. hire more security guards and distribute lists of barred individuals across them) that small businesses wouldn't be able to do, etc...

[donmcronald]

> Basically the position that "businesses shouldn't use tech to help them bar people, but should still be able to bar people" seems confusing to me.

It's a combination of things. The high scalability and lower cost make it much easier to ban people. Big companies are already demonstrating they're willing to ban people for unreasonable things and the continual reduction in competition between businesses means people that get banned have fewer alternatives, so being banned is a much bigger deal than it used to be.

Take it to an absurd extreme and imagine if you walk into a store where they have facial recognition identify you, look up your bank account balance, and decide you don't have enough money to be worth letting in. The potential profit is less than the average cost of serving someone from your demographic, so it makes business sense to refuse service.

The venue matters too. There probably wouldn't be a lot of complaining if a Rolex store discriminated against poor people, but what if grocery stores did it?

I don't want to have some algorithm giving me a pass fail score that determines where I can go and what I can do and it sure feels like that's the direction we're heading.

[vlovich123]

> then obviously bigger businesses like MSG can still do even manual barring 'at scale' (e.g. hire more security guards and distribute lists of barred individuals across them)

Are you sure about that? Image recognition isn't a horizontally scalable task if you're talking about guys with clipboards. And the larger that clipboard, the lower the accuracy gets. Think of it as you have to match each incoming patron against a database. If each security guard has the entire database, they're doing a costly time-intensive, & inaccurate search through the book (security guards are not only paid too little to care about this, but humans in general are going to perform poorly at a task of "does a picture of this person exist in these other 200 images of banned people taken in alternate lighting conditions, clothing, facial hair, etc". And remember, as a business your goal is to let in all the people who came in a timely fashion. Otherwise your business dies / people complain / laws get changed. So to do this, you'd basically have to have a close to 1:1 relationship between person entering and security guard screening. That doesn't scale, even for larger businesses.

Now you could invert the problem. You have the security guard take an image and distribute it to other guards who have their portion of their database that they're combing through and match against a subset of that. Still, that's a heck of a lot of extra man power that scales with the amount of bans you hand out and there's a natural backpressure for your business.

With automation though, you can scale this for pennies. So you don't have to be very discriminant about who you're banning which is a meaningful distinction. This isn't a bad PR approach. You probably can't muster enough political will to amend the laws to force venue owners to only ban people from public venues who themselves are being a public nuisance of some kind (which I think solves the problems a heck of a lot better than protected classes). But you can make it financially infeasible for them to do this by banning the new tech that lets them go after you.

[fivefives55555]

> If each security guard has the entire database

What I meant was that each security guard has a certain subset of the database, so they're only responsible for scanning for those people. Say, instead of having 10 security guards each with a list of all 100 banned people, each security guard has a list of 10 people.

> Now you could invert the problem. You have the security guard take an image and distribute it to other guards who have their portion of their database that they're combing through and match against a subset of that. Still, that's a heck of a lot of extra man power that scales with the amount of bans you hand out and there's a natural backpressure for your business.

I think that's then an open problem of 1) how many people can one security guard reliably track, 2) how many people are on the ban list, 3) is it cheaper to hire that necessary number of security guards for each event than it is to invest in facial recognition tech? 4) How much cheaper or more expensive is it, exactly?

But my main question wasn't about the technical implementation, it was once again about what the actual argument is. Is it that businesses should be allowed to bar people as long as they don't use technology to do so? How would that account for different businesses having wildly different enforcement capabilities?

[Shared404]

> Is it that businesses should be allowed to bar people as long as they don't use technology to do so? How would that account for different businesses having wildly different enforcement capabilities?

The issue is that the larger/cheaper the enforcement capabilities, the more likely frivolous bans are to be handed out.

Being able to implement small scale bans is reasonable including a "refuse the right to bar from service for any reason" type clause (which is obviously overridden by any protected groups legislation), but once implementing a permanent ban for large groups is a few clicks in a dashboard there's an issue.

[ROTMetro]

What happens when businesses create their own shared oisd image recognition list for un-welcome individuals and people start getting blacklisted from everywhere?

[CPLX]

Quantity has a quality all its own. When technology makes things possible that were impractical before it changes the underlying social bargain behind the rule.

For example anyone can sue anyone else, but mass filing of lawsuits by computer presents a novel problem.

This kind of issue happens all the time.

[ghaff]

Someone else mentioned speed limit enforcement (or really a lot of traffic laws generally). There's essentially a contract between people and the state whereby most people accept that there are traffic laws that they'll loosely follow and the state can enforce the laws but will almost universally ignore or miss minor infractions.

The situation would be quite a bit different in the US if automated tickets were sent out (or money were just deducted from a bank account) every time someone went 5 miles per hour over the speed limit.

[fivefives55555]

> There's essentially a contract between people and the state whereby most people accept that there are traffic laws that they'll loosely follow and the state can enforce the laws but will almost universally ignore or miss minor infractions.

Someone should let small town cops know about this contract. I've been ticketed for speeding 7, 5, and even 3 miles over the limit. I've also once had my car searched for running a stop sign (at 2 in the morning, when other than the cop car lurking in the parking lot, there were absolutely no cars anywhere). I was a teenager back then, and didn't know my rights, or had any resources to pursue legal recourse. But the point is that traffic laws are enforced extremely erratically, depending on where you happen to be living in a country.

[fivefives55555]

I guess my question is then, what is the limit? Should a business be allowed to bar as many people as it can do so without using automated technology?