Who cares what technology they use? They could also check ids at the door and cross-reference their naughty list. Everything seems to involve an id check these days.

Maybe there's some contractual issue here - they sold you a ticket, that establishes a contract, they're breaking the contract by denying you entry. They should have performed the naughty check earlier in the process?

I think it's all pretty stupid but occupation isn't a protected class.

It matters because of scale. Our current laws and social norms are based on a world where it's not feasible to check against a list of 1,000,000 disallowed people. Technology now allows this, and we should re-assess whether our laws and norms should change with this new reality.

Obviously I think we should add some new checks. Perhaps every blocklist should be transparent and have an appeals process. Or maybe blacklisting should be time-limited. Or maybe expand the list of protected classes.

Agreed. For me, the issue is that this restriction is upheld at point of entry and not point of sale.

I get it’s a harder problem to restrict who tickets are sold to, but if a venue like that wants to get petty about who can attend their shows then the responsibility is on them to communicate that before the event.

To flip this another way, in any other normal circumstance, when you get banned from a venue you’d get a very clear communication telling you so. There is no ambiguity, you know you’re banned. Yet here the venue is still happy to take peoples money but doesn’t want to admit them. They’re basically having the best of both worlds.

I'm not sure why everyone is assuming she was denied a refund.

Well, I'm sure she was refunded or that would be another part of the suit.

Now, look at these 2 situations.

"Hello, I see you are buying this ticket, but since we're not going to let you enter we will prevent you from buying it"

is much different from.

"Hello, I see you got a baby sitter and took an uber to come down here and now we're refusing you access to a place you had a ticket for, on a reason you could not have possibly predicted"

There is an accrual of many other costs on the second one that are not refunded.

Of course, there is also the fact she entered as a group (girl scouts) and most likely was not the purchaser. To get group rates, many venues make you purchase all the tickets by one person.

Given the power imbalance here, I'm inclined to side with the individual refused entry. MSG can claim whatever they like. They refused access to an event open to the public to someone who was apparently unaware of their policy. It could easily have been that MSG communicated their intent poorly or not at all. It could also be that the law firm ignored them.

What MSG did was petty and doesn't make only them look bad. Given how iconic they are, to me, they make New York City look bad.

I'm not sure I'd ever want to visit MSG. I work for a well known subsidiary of a well know NYC-based company. Who knows, maybe I'll be on the list one day! I see something like this in the news and think I'm not missing much having never been to NYC. Clearly, MSG hasn't thought through the optics of this. Or, if they did, they think they're too big to need to care. I hope they have another think coming.

But unless you are familiar with all the properties of MSG you still don't know which place may or may not allow entry.

If google sends you an email saying you may not use any services provided by google - that's one thing. But what about Youtube? Is that owned by Google or Alphabet? Does Google being upset with you actually mean that all of Alphabet properties are out of bounds?

How much of a business needs to be owned by a corporation before they can ban you from it? 51%? 20%? 5%?

Should you get a letter from each and every business individually?

This is a crazy path to go down that would lead to the fracture of society.

They refused an individual not acting on behalf of their employer though. I'm not sure that notifying their employer is sufficient. If they want to bar an individual acting for themselves, they should have notified the individual.

In a lot of cases the face value of the ticket isn’t the biggest expense.

You can have travel costs, parking, lunch (whereas you’d otherwise cooked at home), possibly some time off work. And that’s before you touch on the emotional expense of being excluded from an activity you were looking forward to and which your friends and family were let into.

While these are all expenses that the patrons happily take on, that is under the assumption that they are allowed to enter the venue.

I know I’d feel pretty peeved at having gone through all of that for nothing. It just adds to the frustration of the day.

They won't be able to refund her missing out on spending time with her kid.

A theater ticket is not like booking with an airline. The venue doesn't assign a validated name to each seat. In this case it was likely one name for the entire batch of tickets in their group.

They're sold as non-refundable.* (Non-refundable by the buyer's request.. yes you can kind of take it to the resell market.. but now that's being invaded by the people who sold the ticket)

I’m aware of that, hence why I said it was a harder problem to solve.

It's not that simple. Scale and ease of use matters. That is why when the government attempted to cross-reference the various administrative (mostly paper) files in a single database, around a single social security number, using a computer, it caused a huge scandal, the project was abandoned, and an independent regulatory agency was created in order to prevent something like this from happening again (and also deal with other data privacy issues).

To be fair, in the article, the venue management claims to have told the law firms involved about the ban well ahead of time:

“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.

Whether or not that notice was in fact adequate, it seems like they’re at least sensitive to giving the impression that they communicated the ban very clearly ahead of time.

>Who cares what technology they use?

A quantitative difference can create a qualitative difference. See all the discussions around cops tailing people in public when the laws were set during a time where that involved an actual officer following them the entire time, vs tossing a $20 dollar gps module on their car and being able to track the person at will

> They could also check ids at the door and cross-reference their naughty list.

They couldn’t, it seems impractical for an event of that scale.

Plus, it’s easier to bypass a door check or even convince the person doing the check to let you in.

This is in fact more practical than setting up face detection system, all you need to do is ID scanner and some simple OCR system to cross check the name on ID against blacklist, each person entering slaps ID against scanners (similar to how you do it with boarding passes at the airport or with public transit passes at gates), after one second either red or green light flashes. Shouldn’t take more than 5 seconds per person.

Here's how we know this isn't true: they evaluated how to do this at scale, chose facial recognition, and then implemented it successfully in a 6,000 person stadium.

Not because it's impractical to check IDs, but because facial recognition is less explicit and thus more easily "normalized".

That is not, in fact, how boarding passes at airports work. Identity checking is done by TSA, in a step that is very often the bottleneck and consumes enormous amounts of manpower and physical space.

That’s exactly how they work when you actually board the plane.

The thing they scan is your boarding pass.

They do not perform the ID checking, which because of varying forms of ID is a non trivial problem that they push back to the security lines.

> Who cares what technology they use?

As you say, they could accomplish the same thing by checking IDs at the door. Given the choice, I'd personally prefer an explicit ID check that I know is happening and is inconvenient for everybody rather than one that leaves me oblivious to the fact I'm being tracked and researched.

The technology isn't really important, but its what makes this possible. Without it, no one would do the alternative of employing dozens of people to look at faces and search them in record books of people they want to ban.

I'm also critical of the legal argument - too often in HN someone will about stuff that isn't illegal. My question is: so what? This is a forum for discussions, not a tribunal. We are not judging, we can argue that something is shitty, or that laws should be changed.

You can always refuse random ID checks. Of course the business still has the right to refuse service to you, but by law you don't have to ID yourself to random businesses.

Reminiscent of how things like license plate readers are legal, but maybe only because the legislators didn’t imagine a day when every person could be surveilled constantly, retroactively, everywhere.

I can't help but wonder how they got the pictures of all the employees from this law firm? Perhaps headshots on the 'about us' section of the web site? I can't wait to see yet more legal disclaimers added to everything...

My guess is they used something like LinkedIN Sales Navigator to feed the MSG "no fly" list.

There are many markets where our face is just another data point for sale. At some point most of us have been ‘tagged in a photo’ whether we know it or not.

It’ll be interesting to see if MSG is forced to report the source they used as part of the legal proceedings.

Thanks, makes a lot of sense

>Why not block people with [...] a criminal history?

Would be interesting to see the future where (almost) every business would refuse to deal with anyone with criminal record. Would we see lower crime rates if getting caught meant you basically couldn't function in society anymore? Or would that just spiral people who get a speeding ticket into mugging people for their groceries?

Imo it's fine if they can explain why and they're not discriminating against a protected class (or one that should morally be protected).

Obviously this woman should get her money back, and imo they should comp her for the pain/expense related to arranging her schedule/travel/lodging around this show since she wasn't denied at point of sale.

>Your totally ignore the key element here: a new technology is allowing denying entry at a whole new scale.

What's your opinion about Facebook or Twitter blocking people? I'm pretty sure they block people using computer technologies, and that these technologies let them do it at scale.

I do think there should be limits to automated decision making by these companies. It doesn't necessarily mean "no blocking" though. For example Twitter and Facebook both have published rules and an appeals process, which is two steps in the right direction.

Another good example is Google Account suspensions. These seem to be for unspecified reasons with no appeal. Given the damage losing your google account does, I think its fair to expect more from that.

Generally speaking I'd like to see tech provides be some kind of common carrier - where they have an obligation to provide equal service. However one exception that I would make is automatic discovery (ie algorithmic feeds, recommendations etc). On the balance of common good I don't think users have a right to their posts being shown to users that don't follow them or whatever. (frankly I think algorithmic feeds are the root problem of social media).

The technology is just means to an end. Would you be ok if security had a big wall with printed pictures of undesirables and kicked her out due to this?

I wouldn't care as much, because that big wall would be purely symbolic and impossible to enforce.

What if you have to make a reservation and they check your name against an alphabetical book of blacklisted names?

Low-tech and easy to enforce.

Not so easy to enforce, because most ticketing systems don't require the name of every single attendee. Adding that requirement would be really really bad for the sales funnel, and also require tickets to be 100% non-transferable.

And much less disruptive to the target, because they get told in advance and don't drive and park and go in and plan only to get kicked out.

I don't think that was a question and it has nothing to do with enforceability.

Of course banning people based on where they work is bad for business.

You brought up enforceability, so I addressed that. The policy itself is also bonkers, I agree.

Not me, the parent I replied to ;)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34075624

But I think we are on the same page anyway

> This is a specific person who is a lawyer for a firm which is actively working against MSG

Has there been allegations that the firm or its partners/employees have acted maliciously with respect to MSG, or are they just representing a client within the standard scope of practice for the legal profession?

It doesn't matter. They're legally forbidden to ban classes of people from service. They're perfectly within their rights to ban specific groups because of actions they've taken against them.

A cop can follow you on the public streets legally, recording where you go, who you talk to and want you say. But imagine drones cost 5cents, would we want the cops to be able to launch a drone to follow every single person every moment they are on a public street?

No, that would be a dystopia.

Technological change means the consequence of a law changes. And so perhaps a different set of laws achieves our societal values better in light of a change.

Why wouldn't it ? Speeding tickets being an obvious example.

The 1974 SAFARI scandal seems to be quite relevant here too :

https://www-lemonde-fr.translate.goog/blog/bugbrother/2010/1...

I just picture someone worrying about people dialing phone numbers while driving in the car in 1990? What a stupid thing to worry about since obviously the cord won't be long enough.

People aren't going to want to have a phone on them at all times anyway and risk possibly breaking or losing the phone. It will just hang on the wall like the rotary phone in a stand so you know where it is but you won't have to worry about the pesky cord anymore.

Technological progress is a linear process that is always good with zero higher order cultural effects based on how new features are used in practice.

Face recognition? What could possibly go wrong. I recognize faces literally every day!

While I'm not sure of the historical accuracy of the following article, well, many people should have realized that by the 90s.

https://thenewswheel.com/history-of-the-car-phone/

> Your totally ignore the key element here: a new technology is allowing denying entry at a whole new scale. Nobody really has an objection to organization blocking a single individual who is might cause trouble. But blocking an entire class of people is a) newly enabled* and b) much more harmful to society.

So you're okay with the principle of denying individuals entry to a private business, but you're NOT okay with businesses enforcing this with technology? How does that make any sense?

The two ideas are not incompatible. Consider that it’s much easier to drag and drop a list of faceless names and categories into a “Deny” list on a GUI, than it is to argue to a mother’s face that she cannot attend an even with her daughter’s Girl Scout troop because she happens to work at the same firm as some opposing lawyers. There is, or was, a higher cost associated to this action. Denying people access was OK back when you had to really care about it. The easier it gets, the more likely you are to exclude people that it just sounds like a good idea to exclude. The issue, of course, is that this leads to a world where your child gets excluded from playgrounds and theme parks because you had the wrong opinion on the Internet back in your 20s. Maybe you were too woke, or maybe you weren’t woke enough. We’d all be happy to forget about it after a few years, except that facial recognition databases won’t let you forget about it until the day you and all your progeny have died.

I'm saying there's a difference between blocking 10 people and 10,000, or 1 million. And I'm saying that technological change allows the latter, and we need to be cognizant of that when we decide what we're going to accept in society.

The scale means we need to get the reasons to discriminate exactly right. This is society fracturing/shaping technology here.

We've struggled to get to the point where we can legally say "No discrimination vs skin colour/sex/sexual orientation etc etc".

Facial recognition AND being able to build your own Farley files for every individual means you can discriminate on any other factoid you want.

The obvious "No woke/lefties" or "No conservative/righties" lines are obvious drawcards but the filter could be about anything - however trite - with whatever timescale.

Did you say something negative on social media 10 years ago, about a flavour of chewing gum? You and everyone who liked/shared your comment are banned from that brand structure now!

Did the mother brand even own the brand you dissed at the time you made the comment? Irrelevant! Timescale for selection of candidates for banning AND implementation of ban is completely arbitrary too!

https://www.marketing91.com/brand-architecture/

But I think the parents 4 questions are still an appropriate starting point for productive discussion. Are these rights that an individual or organization has? Technology is secondary.

If your answer is yes to all 4 is yes, the answer to 5 is also yes.

If your no or conditional to some of them, then you can discuss where the line should be drawn (e.g. numbers, characteristics, or technology allowed)

Curious why people react negative to this simple description of the debate. Anyone want to enlighten me?

I kinda get what he's saying and there isn't an easy answer. Things done bit by bit are often different than things done at large scale. Especially when automated by tech taking out the individual human element. The nuance between people making informed decisions vs algorithms dictating action off generalized heuristics can get muddy.

Just think of anonymized user data. Individually that info isn't really all that important, but taken at massive scale it can lead to worrying trends. Consider something like the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

10 deaths are a tragedy.

1,000,000 deaths are a statistic

Rephrased:

So you're OK with countries using guns to conduct warfare, but you're NOT okay with countries using nuclear weapons? How does that make any sense?

Hopefully you can see the difference.

You missed the point.

They're okay with the principle, AND they're okay with the technology, what they're NOT okay with is using the technology to microneedle and retaliate against tangentially innocent people.

The technology didn't decide to single the lawyer out, some manager or legal person did. It's not the tech that is wrong, it's the people's use of it.

eh, kind of both.

When you invent a hammer someone is going to use it to hit someone else over the head with it. It is an unavoidable foregone conclusion. Now, instead of a hammer in which society thinks they are useful and that anyone should have one, lets look at more controversial things like guns. In the US we tend to think everyone should have one, other countries tend to think the opposite, and are crime statistics reflect that.

And I would hold the same is true when it comes to 'business crimes'. The US will likely uphold that businesses can use advanced technology against the general public, and countries in the EU will more than likely prevent businesses from discriminating with it.

There is a reason we have laws regarding technologies. People will abuse them and the law is there to punish those who are abusers.

It has not transformed into a different thing. It is the same thing it was before. A person can deny someone access to their private property. The law is not “A person can deny people access to their private property but only in slow inefficient ways…”

What if it was an inverse, say you could only enter a business if you are a member of X group? Now most of the planet is banned from your property except a small group of people that qualify for X, where X could be as specific as “straight white males”.

It seems to me, some people just want the idea of the law but not the enforcement of it. Probably for their own self interests, mainly: getting access to someone else’s cool private property.

You can't be against cancel culture but for all the tools that allow its implementation.

In most civilized countries including the US you couldn't put up a sign that said straight white males only. In the US you cannot discriminate based on protected classes including not not limited to Race, Religious belief, National origin, Age, Sex.

Ability to recognize and ban people at scale is absolutely a game changer whether you want to acknowledge it or not. It is not remotely "the same thing" because it allows previously impossible consequences and failure modes. You are thinking too small if you are considering only this silly show. This kind of feature is in many cases in theory commendable and logical but equally problematic.

Consider shoplifters an odious bunch if there ever was one. Were I a shopkeeper I would certainly want to keep a fellow that ran out with some goods from coming back and its only friendly to share such a naughty list with my fellows. Steal from one and find yourself unwanted all over town. What could go wrong?

What if I DID pay for the goods but I was incorrectly flagged? For instance came back in with my just paid for goods to get something I forgot and went out a different exit.

What if said flagged person now cannot reasonably obtain food or other critical resources? For instance more than a few private enterprise operate public transit resources and a huge portion of the US has exactly one ISP. For instance I work for one ISP and utilize another. If they banned people who work for the competition I would literally have to move.

What if the person did wrong 10 years ago and has turned their life around since? Computers never forget and communicate across jurisdictions.

What if flagging is used not to punish actual criminals but merely those we disagree with politically?

What if its used to punish those who write negative reviews or do too many returns. Statistically if our supply chain has a certain amount of broken trash and we serve millions of people a certain number are going to get a much higher than average number of broken things or have more than average bad experiences.

I for one have seen both return fraud and plenty of people who cause their own problems and then complain endlessly. Were I to operate a business I would kill for a way to eliminate such worthless customers. What about the collateral damage of those legitimately wronged?

Looking at your profile you complain about "cancel culture" but seem oblivious to the fact that cancellation is implemented either directly as a million decisions about one's own personal property OR preemptively based on vendors who are acting to protect themselves from those same decisions. What you are arguing for is the method for cancel culture to explode in the public sphere.

Do you really want to worry about writing an honest negative review, being mistaken for someone else, saying something controversial on the internet, revealing yourself as part of a group disliked by some, or subject to a database error and find yourself banned all over town? Do you want to talk to a drone who tells you the computer told him you can't come in and he can't fix it but you can talk to his equally useless manager who will tell you the same thing?

Here's a laugh for you. Lets suppose I took your comment wrong and decided your bit about straight white males was an indication of homophobia. I make no such implication herein but suppose I did and added you to a bigot list that was ultimately picked up not by a single bad list but a web of bad lists as maintained by multiple people who pick up and push their lists to other more pervasive lists like adblock lists.

You find shortly that you can neither buy a loaf of bread nor get a sandwich down the street from your house anymore because we have collectively decided that our "cool private property" is not for you. You find a way to get off one list 3 steps removed from the genesis of your discontent but are re-added later courtesy of a different list. Nobody will tell you why you are on their list nor even if you are they just tell you that you aren't welcome. You spend the next 5 years chasing ghosts never figuring out that a single post on hacker news is why you can't get that job you wanted.

Again you can't be against cancel culture but for all the tools that allow its implementation.