1. A laser-targeted law banning facial recognition technology used for the sole purpose of denying service.
2. Not letting corporations get as large as MSG in the first place.
I'm a fan of (2). If there's one thing I would hope people across the political spectrum could agree on it's that the Federal government has seriously fallen down on its anti-trust authority.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madison_Square_Garden_Entertai...
> A sign says facial recognition is used as a security measure to ensure safety for guests and employees.
Use of facial recognition is disclosed with a reason for its purpose. They used the same technology for a different purpose without full disclosure. This is grounds for a violation, although civil. IANAL.
However, she is going about this through another route. Liquor license does not allow them to eject people from service. MSG has a civil policy they will not allow anyone (including lawyers) associated in litigation to enter their venues. Obviously both policies contradict at this point.
My opinion is no one should have any policy that allows lawyers of parties to a lawsuit to be hurt in any way.
Personally I don't think facial recognition should be allowed for public identification.
On the other hand, I think it's perfectly fine to bar opposing attorneys actively working against you from entering your business. This is not a member of the "general public" and wasn't denied entry based on identity characteristics. She was banned because she (her firm) is SUING THEM. That seems like a pretty good reason right there...
You are not the company you work for. And she's not even involved in that case.
Critical of Ticketmaster online and they start to take notice? I guess you wont' be allowed into most venues or concerts for life on this continent. We also won't tell you why you were banned or offer a way out (because that's how Google and Facebook operate and it suits us). It's allowing people to be kicked out of "real world" walled gardens.
It was at the Chicago Theather and it was the Chris Rock show back in 2017. I bought the ticket, I don't believe that it had any special restrictions [this was a long time ago], the ticket had no indications about the "phoneless"/phone encasing demand. The event page didn't say anything about this. However they were trying to force this. I refused
Why did I refuse? The Bataclan attack* happened less than 2 years before this and mobile phones did [it was reported at the time] help people communicate for help and escape. This is a big venue, and I certainly don't trust a venue who doesn't trust their ushers who can't get people to stop filming. Think they're going to know how to call the cops/handle an emergergcy? lol.
What happened? Since I was denied, I asked for a refund from the venue. The main security guard corralled me against the wall, waited for the manager, the manager argued with me and refused refund [even despite the ticket saying nothing about this, their overall policy said nothing about this [I checked to see if I could bring my small camera with me]], when the manager left to get an artist rep she felt the need to "ban me" to another security guard, they got a "artist rep" trying to argue against me using "well this is the artist's preference". (Why they brought out the stupid artist rep is beyond me)
Ultimately I lost that 80$ and will shit talk Chris Rock, any venue, and any artist who uses the yondr device.
On the other hand it does kind of make sense that they would refuse service to people actively suing their company. I would do that too. I mean it's kind of common sense
Some people are suing MSG.
Those people hired lawyers.
Those lawyers work at a firm.
MSG is banning not just the plaintiffs (the people "actively suing"), and not just their lawyers, but every lawyer at the firm.
Similar to the video rental privacy act.
One would presume that there would be measures in place during checkout that would inhibit transactions that go against their policies to not go through.
Another angle is their insurer
Another angle is their payment processor
You can likely get them back into community expectations
I mean, I'm thankful to live in a place where we are too boring to even think of these kinds of shenanigans. We have our own but they are not as bad.
Like where do they get this data from in the first place? From a data broker? Is it possible to request to have facial data removed from the data broker?
Did she consent to them using facial recognition technology on her at the venue? (If this isn't already a law, that is to say requiring consent... it should be)
Please, no one make this.
I couldn't find a single reference to where the data set came from that trained the model they are using to do facial recognition.
Someone did theorize that it could be taken from a hypothetical law firm website but IIRC a single photo of someone is not good enough to reliably train a model that is not overfit.
https://www.liberties.eu/en/stories/anti-facial-recognition-...
https://www.survivopedia.com/6-ways-to-defeat-facial-recogni...
What a crazy world we live in...
For multi-national corporations, global clique analysis of investors, supply chains, competitors and regulators may be required.
The more we privatize, the more we allow to converge in the private hands of the wealthy few, the less recourse the "public" has.
I feel like it's to reduce "on the ground" discoveries in civil cases, but I don't understand why, as far as I know those are neither forbidden nor unethical, there is a later opportunity to debate whether those discoveries gets introduced as evidence in the case.
There is zero motive here other than retaliation.
Ah, the Devil is always in the Details.
> it seems like a sharp pair of scissors or a knife would get you in
You have neither of those during the time of an emergency. They've already taken those things away at the door with the metal detector.
They do "have an area where you can unlock it" however it's a restricted area.. and not much of a use during an emergency.
> It’s just inconvenient enough that everyone pretty much just complies
I feel like that's why it's gotten so far as it has.
Not only is it a numbers game (too many people to police), it is also very annoying for other patrons when people are constantly told to stop.
So banning the phones is a great solution that solves a number of problems.
> Think they're going to know how to call the cops/handle an emergergcy? lol.
Of course they do.
I really don’t think you rationale for refusing to hand over your phone holds up.
(Specifically, no video recording allowed, but most enforcement is too stupid so they have a blanket restriction.)
GP - what?
Not clearly telling someone with anxiety that their (very common) safety blanket isn't allowed in the venue before they buy the ticket it a problem, but it's a problem with how we treat Terms-of-Service and EULAs that are too long and legalistic as binding. It's good that people can't have their cellphones at comedy shows.
Why didn't you chargeback for services not received?
With regulation this a slam dunk.
With deregulation- they're getting away with "per venue's discretion" - But I have heard of medical staff being rejected because they were oncall or parents who had a baby sitter.
I've had success with keeping (small) pocket knives on me. Those metal detectors are almost always badly tuned since false alarms are disruptive. I used to consider getting some kind of fancy thermoplastic pocket knife but frankly any cheap small knife works.
To see a society in which very few limits were placed on who could see a concert, look up Metallica playing when the USSR fell, absolutely massive.
Most of the bits captured are/will be out of context and useless. My personal desire to "record" is short "i'm here" clips or pictures. (Music productions, clips, photo for the show) TM claimed "there was nothing extra" on the ticket. (I contacted them but did not try to pull a refund as that I know that TM is going to pull the "well this is the venues' issue")
Actual history shows the opposite. The entire reason for Yondr is precisely because people were posting bits that comedians were trying out, and then people were jumping on "so-and-so told an offensive joke!" on Twitter and it becomes a whole thing. Comedians are terrified of getting "cancelled" because they tried wording their joke a different way to see what the audience reaction would be.
If people were just recording "I'm here" clips then Yondr would never have existed.
1. They don't want their show recorded.
2. They don't want their show "leaking" on the internet ("loss of ticket sells")
3. People using their phones "ruin the experience"
Realistically it's due to:
1. They say libalious things. (Aka Hanable Burris talking about Cosby before formal conversations were had) Also, they say things that upset groups of people who try to "boycott." Aka Louie and the Parkland shooting joke./"Cancelled"
2. They are pissy about bad recordings going up on the internet and being caught behaving badly. (https://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/dave-chappelle-fan...)
3. It's there to protect notorious joke stealers from being caught in the act.
Most of the time who gets caught are the ones that bring a full video camera. (Poor Rammstein requests no filming but people have their phones out the whole time.. comes with a big show)
This is an extra enforcement deal I'm referring to.
The company who is doing this is Yondr. They've been doing this for years. They've been doing this with musicians, comedians, courtrooms, and even at schools. I'm amazed that they have been getting away with this for so long.
Yondr has had a lot of astroturfing over the years so it's harder to find the people who have had a bad experience over the years. You'll see non-normally participating people pop up in every comment section that mentions the phone ban: "well i like that everyone isn't on their phone" etc. Also, you'll see near promo news pieces on this. Additionally there has been no public comment with this that I know of, which is super auspicious from the US or Europe. (Just did the research Placebo and Bono have enforced this in Paris.. a bit brave considering the bataclan)
EDIT: Dang, yes I said the a word (ends with turfing), this is not a statement thats happening here.
A friend of mine uses their phone to run an insulin pump. Are there suitable exceptions? How about doctors which may have obligations to their patient's calls?
In theory I like the idea but in practice I agree with OP.
This is the statement that I want to go up to you in person physically grab you, shake you and tell you I love you for making that statement. It's frustrating to be gaslit by artist claiming that a youtube reproduction of their concert/show is going to cause a justifiable loss of future revenue. Looking back at the Rammstein stiched concerts only makes me want to go more.
Not quite as bad as chaining people in their apartment buildings to keep COVID-19 quarantines, but it certainly would be reason enough for me to avoid a venue.
Not trying to argue for or against that policy. But comparing it even remotely to the COVID situation you are describing (that is currently happening in a certain country) is about as self-aggrandizing and out of touch as it can get.
It would also be very interesting if the law firms that were litigating MSG started putting 'different' faces on their employee websites... a little bit of misinformation could cause lots of issues.
If there is a need for them to be there, law enforcement will be accompanying them.
You're mixing her up with her co-workers. She wasn't involved in any lawsuit against MSG.
b) the lawyers they're banning aren't employed by the plaintiffs, but happen to be working at the same firm the plaintiffs went to
For a long time now, governments have failed to modernize laws and regulations, and companies have stepped in with their own vigilante systems. We don't need more regulation, but we need updated standards for how technology like facial recognition can be aligned with previous norms and laws that came into existence when mass surveillance and communication tech didnt exist
Otherwise known as regulations. If it's just a standard that's not enforceable, companies will not comply.
Can we just make personal data collection and sharing illegal? We got by before this was even possible.
This seems like a very American thing to do all of this. The lawsuit, the facial recognition, the counter lawsuit. So very American.
https://www.wired.com/story/soccer-world-cup-biometric-surve...
https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/26/15435620/champions-league...
That someone needs to resort to clever liquor license dispute adds to the dystopian feel of this story.
But this is a controversy because Girl Scout Mom got spotted by facial recognition I guess. Not the fact that she was trespassing.
Last month MSG revoked the corporate suite leased by a law firm that was _actively suing them_. And they made the same big stink about how unfair it was that they can't go to Knicks games anymore.
It’s neither punitive nor petty. It’s simply practical from a legal perspective.
This isn’t someone who is actively suing them.
While it's reasonable to disagree with this policy, it's not really related to social dystopia, so I think it's dramatic to lament this in the vein of "today it's this, tomorrow it will be getting banned due to Tweeting about your politics", or whatever. I mean, yes, that may happen, but the only thing concerning about this case is the tech itself, and not necessarily the rationale under which it was deployed.
Tolerance for use of the technology without restrictions is, arguably, a way in which this relates to social dystopia.
Technology doesn’t do anything on its own; people using it (and other people allowing other people to use it) in certain ways is always social.
Don't show ID unless it's a cop demanding it (when it's legally required). Private parties can't demand ID. Don't give ID for routine transactions. Practice saying no to routine demands for your papers.
It doesn't improve unless a lot of us start ending the transactions.
What? Can you cite any laws legally barring people for requiring ID for a business transaction or to access private property? I've honestly never heard of such a thing. Obviously if a private person says "I want to see your ID for access or before completing this transaction" you may legally refuse, and they cannot arrest you or anything. But they can then in turn refuse to complete the transaction.
I'm not sure where your question comes from. Of course any private property owner can reject you for any reason, including failure to ID. But that's nothing to do with ID.
There are a ton of laws preventing this behavior by venues. Basically if you sell tickets to the public, you HAVE to let the ticket holders in, barring bad behavior at the gate or contraband. The idea that something is private means you can do whatever you want is very naive.
> if she doesn't like this policy she can start her own Christmas Spectacular show.
She can also just sue and demand hearings about licenses that further prevent this kind of behavior (i.e. public venue, hospitality, zoning, liquor, food and beverage, etc...). From a social/business standpoint, punishing lawyers for working for an opposing firm is very small minded.
Also facial recognition telling gate agents who a member of the public works for is scummy.
I was banned entry [Chicago Theater] (not formally but at the door which was weird as that I was not trying to progress in) for refusing to encase my phone in the yonder pouch. Once denied, I requested a full refund of my ticket. I don't recall having the notice when I bought the ticket and the the ticket didn't state the phone casing. (This was chris rock)
Pissing off a mom and pop store and getting banned from that one location is one thing, but treading on the toe of an enormous corporation and being met with this just doesn't sit right with me.
Tickets are contracts!
How can they prove this isn’t some bogus way to account for oversold seats? What if an airline did the same on oversold flights?
Ticket master also has anti-chargeback clauses as well.
Then I suppose it will come down to whether the ticket terms included a clause that the purchaser/attendee was not employed by a firm involved in a lawsuit against MSGE.
Instead of taking to the streets (or social media) in righteous anger, I suggest considering your economic support right now, of companies that build and operate societal surveillance machinery; that build and operate companies that rely on indentured servitude; companies that build and operate private shopping areas with pleasing music and eye-catching ads while paving the living earth and hiring private snoopers. worthy of scrutiny and operating widely today in your town, no?
Legally, under established precedent, it does not, though a legal doctrine that as creations of the state through law corporations are bound by the same due process and equal protection rules that would affect all other state organs would be interesting, as would the corollary that foreign corporations, as creations of foreign states, are arms of their governments, and that their agents, including employees and domestic subsidiaries and their employees, are agents of foreign governments subject to all the rules and restrictions applicable thereto would be interesting.
I don’t think anyone is arguing that this is outside of their legal rights.
Things can be undesirable without being illegal, and just as MSG can legally punish this lawyer for distant connection to a lawsuit against them without violating the law, other people can note the behavior, criticize it, and even punish MSG for it in their business relations without violating the law.
Best of all possible outcomes.
It's unfortunate that certain professions have extremely high walls around them: police, doctors, lawyers, even certain elected officials and select other professions are very hard to displace, while their position grants them very easy tools to displace, manipulate, or harm others.
It comes from your assertion that "Private parties can't demand ID." That was your claim. I'm saying that as far as I know private parties absolutely CAN demand ID. Including for "routine transactions". And if you don't cooperate then you don't get to do the transaction.
You seem to have just completely reversed yourself with this post so now in turn I'm not clear on what your first one was for. If you were somehow conflating "demand" with criminal penalties or force then that's a weird reading, and also this entire discussion is purely about a business transaction. They didn't arrest her, they "jsut" didn't honor her ticket and booted her, which is what people are (reasonably IMO) concerned/upset about. But refusing to show ID wouldn't have helped with that quite the contrary, even places with zero such tech may require identity verification for a transaction and ID is the only widely existing low friction way to do that.
Listen, if you’re going to be a pedantic law critic, at least be iron clad.
Jim Crow laws were passed and enforced by the government. There are countless examples of businesses having no choice but to discriminate because government told them to.
The government itself determined that segregation was A-OK as long as things were "separate but equal."
It’s a gross system.
I live in Uruguay and you need to use your ID very often when doing commercial stuff.
1. How much time would this take
2. How willing would attorneys be willing to persue this?
3. How many attorneys can you actually contact about this? (This deals with the entertainment industry.. they're very well funded and very aggressive.
---- Then it came down is.. is it worth reaching out to the IL Attorney General about this? I didn't because I was exhausted by then and they probably wouldn't take it up due to the complexity of the transaction.
This situation simply is: A third party holder of tickets (TM) issueing a ticket to a show venue (Chris Rock+MSG|Chicago Theater), rejecting entry to an individual (me) with a ticket, but preventing me from being able to honor the ticket (due to rules from the Chris Rock group to the venue). And the whole case involves a group v 1 conversation involving all parties except for TM.
Sure they can do this without anyone getting sued, but they can still face consequences for doing it (like people not going to see the Rockettes).
People like the OP seem to forget that legality is not the ultimate moral code.
I’m just saying people who lean on “the law is this, they are in the right” ignore a major part of society and commerce to their own detriment.
That's not what happened though. They sold admission to a person and then rejected it because that person works for a firm that has an open case against another company that they're conglomerated with.
It smells like retaliation to me, but I guess it will come down to what the courts decide.
It can be a good thing while we regularly and objectively evaluate a principle's worth. We humans have a history of allowing principles to obtain rigidity and the diminished outcomes that follow. We also tend to allow principle creep w/o sufficient examination.
The idea that the law is just a bunch of words and your job is to advocate for them to change if it improves your life in any way is not a great guiding principle.
This is a very easy thing to say as a member of majority groups, but American (and South African and European, and...) history has shown that this attitude leads to some of the most grotesque outcomes in history.
And where does it end? Should subsidies and variable tax rates be illegal (hope you're not a member of a church or a supporter of the arts!)? Those are control mechanisms the government uses to influence behaviors.
Should federal employment be illegal? I don't think most Soldiers would risk their lives if not for the paycheck/benefits.
Is the problem only with mandates?
Is it facial recognition that's the problem here, or the policy itself? In theory, they could hand out pictures of everybody who wasn't allowed in to the security staff and use low-tech facial recognition to enforce the same policy - assuming it was scalable, would it be OK then? I remember reading that IBM got into trouble when it first computerized its personnel files because some exec noticed that the computer could scan through all the personnel files and fire people who were close to retirement to save on paying out their pensions. It would have been prohibitively expensive to pay a person to do that, but with the computer, it was a quick SQL query (or whatever query language IBM used back then). The problem wasn't that the personnel files were computerized, it was that they were being used in a very evil way.
For instance, say 18 year old "Joe" gets caught stealing soda from a fast food place. The manager kicks him out and bans him from the store. Fast forward a decade, when Joe walks back into the store with his wife and kid to buy a quick meal.
Without facial recognition: Joe's grown up and matured. The manager was either replaced years ago, or doesn't remember the incident, or vaguely remembers but doesn't care about it anymore. Joe and his family pay, eat, and leave.
With facial recognition: the system notices that someone on its "do not allow" list has entered the store and summons police to deal with the trespasser.
When human judgment is involved, we rarely deal with absolutes. A lifetime ban isn't really for life. It's until both parties grow up and the situation cools down. A ban on a competitor's employees isn't absolute. Maybe you won't serve the owner, but if his dishwasher comes to your place on a date, you're not gonna hassle the kid. We're really, really bad at designing automated systems that handle nuance. It's way easier to write code like `if photo_hash in banned_people: ...`.
assuming it was scalable, would it be OK then?
However, today, with facial recognition, it's possible for Madison Square Garden to have blacklists consisting of thousands, or even tens of thousands of people and check against them just as quickly and as easily as if they were a list of a dozen people. That's a qualitative change, and I think it's valid to treat it as a separate kind of thing than a bunch of security guards, each with a stack of photographs.
Yes I think so. Some technologies are inherently no good, lacking any obvious positive use cases, but enabling obvious abuse. It is a mistake to shift the blame to "policy" or malevolent actors and claim the technology is merely a neutral enabler. No. The technology itself contains a gamut of evils.
There’s a level of enforcement where a reasonable policy or law becomes unreasonable.
Cameras on every street corner enforcing every infraction, no matter how minor, is an extreme. There’s a threshold before that extreme where the policy combined with the enforcement becomes unreasonable.
I think the combination of policy and enforcement outlined in the article is well over the line.
The problem is not that it provides new opportunities, the problem is determining which of these opportunities are acceptable to pursue, and under which circumstance.
I don't like the "this is bad because it allows current laws/practices to be efficiently enforced" attitude that a lot of people seem to hold.
Oh no, in my opinion, by all means, make it 100% efficient, cheap and easy to enforce _EVERY_ policy under the sun.
We need to get on with cleaning up and amending policies until it's not a complete shit show.
Any policy should be written as if it will be effectively and quickly applied to 100% of the cases, and if that makes it look shitty, then it is and must be fixed.
But guns sure help.
The most devastating tool for fighting crime is not increasing the penalties or making jail more miserable. No, the most effective way to stop crime is by drastically increasing the chances of getting caught and correctly sentenced.
> Asian and African American people were up to 100 times more likely to be misidentified than white men, depending on the particular algorithm and type of search. Native Americans had the highest false-positive rate of all ethnicities, according to the study, which found that systems varied widely in their accuracy.
One. Hundred. Times. The camera may say it recorded John Smith breaking into a house, but it’s incredibly likely that it was actually Ron Jones. Who’s the jury going to believe, though: John Smith who was at home with his girlfriend at the time, or the hugely expensive video system that the city just bought?
Facial recognition doesn’t work. It’s bullshit tech, and we should stop using it until we make it deliver on its promises AND decide how to deal with its ramifications.
[1] https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2020/racial-discriminatio...
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/best-algorithms-struggle-recogni...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/12/19/federal...
A video completely indistinguishable from the video presented by the prosecution. Not sure where we go from there.
<< A lot of people seem OK with it when it’s policing the bad parts of town. This is their reminder that it can be used against them, too.
What is fascinating is that AI recognition did not reach individual homes yet ( say.. won't let you add family members to 'approved' members to open doors, but maybe I should not be giving ideas ). I did hear about it being a toy for the rich though.
CCTV and facial recognition are both used around the world accross cultures and political systems and not 1 citizen voted for (or against) them. Not in totalitarian regimes nor in countries that pretend to be democratic.
If the venue manager had kicked her out because he personally recognized her, would that be better?
Corps are a lot like the "Sponsored Nation" concept from the 2300s, but without the discrete geographical boundaries. This makes it, by design, as some argue, too easy to find one's self in violation of Corporate policies. Usually someone makes a wrong turn or enters the wrong door and winds up in front of an Adjudicator.
Since the merger, however, enforcement of overlooked policies has been on the rise. Given the complexities of the merge conditions, it became very difficult to remember who was employed by whom, which inevitably led to misassociation with non-colleagues. What used to be a social faux pas, paid for with a sheepish smile, would now find you among the Unemployed.
1. I, as an individual, am allowed to deny entry to persons I dislike from my private property.
2. I, as an individual, am allowed to deny entry to persons affiliated with a business I dislike from my private property.
3. I, as a business owner (eg: a restaurant), am allowed to deny entry to persons I dislike (eg: a previous patron who was violent) from my business.
4. I, as a business owner (eg: a restaurant), should I not be allowed to deny entry to persons affiliated with a business I dislike (eg: the next door restaurant employee who is copying my menu) from my business?
He worked for a company that Miller Brewing company contacted with and a newspaper took a photo of him at a public event drinking Budweiser.
Different situation, same kind of pettiness and retaliation.
Why do spokespersons frequently speak in non-sequiturs? They simply underline the absence of any good argument. I hope it isn't because many people don't realize this, though I fear it might be so.
I also hope the second sentence will turn out to be as logically incoherent as the first.
I think it's more that we automatically try to fix them. If you asked somebody to recall and reproduce those sentences after reading them, they would unconsciously add information to what they recalled until it turned into a reasonable defense.
Notice that there is no claim here that it is a safety issue.
If MSG fears certain employees may reveal things it does not want known, it should constrain those employees from contact with the public within its venues.
The key part of the second sentence: they are confident. Tricky to argue just how confident they are.
But if I want my face catalogued next to my social credit score why not go all in and move to China?
It’s not great but the only mechanism in sight that seems equipped to deal with this is restraint semi-enforced by social consensus. God knows Congress isn’t going to do anything: piss off both law enforcement and tech? Yeah I think that’s a hard pass from them.
High level, perhaps private venues shouldn’t be able to ban someone from a venue simply because of who employs them? Perhaps craft the legislation around annual patrons served.
On the other hand, they sold her a ticket to a show and then unilaterally voided that ticket without warning based on something that had only the smallest connection to her, which could be considered retaliation against the law firm that is handling the case.
There isn't any doubt about the facts of the case, the only question is how will a judge and jury allocate fault and responsibility.
That's a really good case for any competent lawyer and I'm pretty sure their legal team is not very happy right now.
I'm surprised that the policy of banning litigating lawyers ever passed their legal department to begin with. It's just inviting a guaranteed headache without providing any additional legal advantage.
The law firm's previous personal injury lawsuits against MSG were because they served alcohol to someone who later drove drunk. Multiple lawsuits were successful, in one case getting $20 million.
In general they appear to represent drunk driving victims and associate with MADD.
> "I don’t practice in New York. I’m not an attorney that works on any cases against MSG," said Conlon.
> But MSG said she was banned nonetheless — along with fellow attorneys in that firm and others.
But I can see how this has a chilling effect if you can lose access to goods and services because you're taking legal action against the company. Reminds me of the story I heard, though I forget the details (or even if it was true), about someone retaining numerous law firms which made it nearly impossible to find a lawyer who could sue them without it being a conflict-of-interest.
Maybe said company can have such a policy, but they probably shouldn't.
Funny, that's the opposite of what I thought. Corporate revenge via technology sounds very American to me.
That must be really tickling the layers when it's time to ask for damages in civil cases: "well, we're asking to hold the entire group in solidarity for damages, since they conduct business in solidarity, whatever subsidiary we are actually naming in the suite".
But yeah, this is James Dolan, he's banned people for refusing to take jobs before.
I am very glad to live in a country where you have to just delete everything after a while, which includes data extracted from said material. I don't feel less safe because of that, although I would even prefer to not have these solutions at all.
https://www.dsslaw.com/our-firm/attorneys/kelly-analiese-con...
It wouldn't take much to feed the 7 pictures into a system.
For example, getting banned from all McDonald’s restaurants is qualitatively different from getting banned from one McDonald’s restaurant.
So how does one go about qualifying / quantifying (1) the potential risk or harm caused by an individual violating terms for service and (2) the harm caused to the individual resulting from corrective actions; and then balance the two against each other?
Booting one chaperone from a trip could put the entire party out of compliance with the organization's policy and require exclusion of some fraction of the group or possibly cancellation of the trip.
Typical Girl Scout policy here:
https://www.gsnorcal.org/content/dam/girlscouts-gsnorcal/doc...
(Note the requirement that at least one chaperone be female and at least two of the chaperones be unrelated, and note that if you have to split the girls you probably need to send a minimum of two chaperones with each half..)
For discussion, let's take MSG's statement in good faith, and assume the attorney was notified twice.
Are there legitimate reasons to do this other than a "pretext for doing collective punishment on adversaries who would dare sue MSG" as suggested?
I don't think barring someone from your property is a good punishment against someone who is trying to sue you, since that kinda implies they "dislike" you already and wouldn't want to engage with you
Example of a different firm where you can even filter by school: https://www.wlrk.com/attorneys/?asf_l=View%20All
I'd bet she self-identified as being an employee and posted to social media about it.
IMHO, it’s a bullshit story because the issue is whether a lawyer working for a company suing MSG should be booted from other MSG venues.
Companies/venues had blacklists (deny lists) before face recognition became ubiquitous.
> Conlon is an associate with the New Jersey based law firm, Davis, Saperstein and Solomon, which for years has been involved in personal injury litigation against a restaurant venue now under the umbrella of MSG Entertainment.
"I don’t practice in New York. I’m not an attorney that works on any cases against MSG," said Conlon.
But MSG said she was banned nonetheless — along with fellow attorneys in that firm and others.
No, no it is not. It is very much American. The one thing more American than that situation is Americans saying something bad is un-American. You are what you do, not what you say. US Americans need to get their heads out of the sand and stop being blinded by the con of American exceptionalism. You’re not better than others, you’re not revered, other countries don’t look up to you. You are not a bastion of freedom or justice. You are a country drunk on its own kool-aid, being played by the worse people you have to offer. You need the courage to admit you’re not who you thought. Only then can you enact change to who you want to be.
Quoting George Carlin: “they call it the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it”.
What an absolute cluster. I don't envy the courts. It's going to be interesting if everyone starts weaponizing every aspect of political affiliation, employment, residence location and social status.
If a venue kicked out a lawyer who was actively working on a lawsuit against the venue, nobody would bat an eye. But kicking out every person on payroll at any firm that has a lawsuit against any venue in the parent company, the scale has now transformed this into a different thing.
The next step people worry about is that this same technology could be applied to more than just busniess you dislike. Why not block people who have disparaged your business on social media? Why not block people with poor credit scores or a criminal history?
So you could draw a line between (3) and (4), but you should also be adding
5. I, as a business owner, should I not be allowed to invent new ways to deny entry to entire categories of people.
* obviously blocking people on visual characteristics like skin color is already possible. And that is widely regarded as unacceptable!
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.
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?
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.
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.
If I do not want X at my establishment, then what does it matter whether X is picked out of a single file line by a bouncer or picked out of a crowd by a security camera? I don't want them there. In what manner they showed up is irrelevant to me.
And you're comparing apples and oranges. This is a specific person who is a lawyer for a firm which is actively working against MSG, not some nebulous class of individual.
I actually don't see that as the key element at all - Doing something that is already legal, faster, doesn't make it illegal does it?
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!
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?
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.
Basically, as an individual regarding your private property you have total control to discriminate freely. That's individual freedom. You're allowed to choose your own guests. (Note that if you're renting a room though, that becomes a business, so this no longer applies.)
Regarding #3, as a business owner, it's necessary to create policies to be able to ban individuals based on their relevant reasons that is set as policy, which includes past demonstrated misbehavior (e.g. violence). But not because you "dislike" them. Feelings don't matter, only relevant (non-arbitrary) policies do.
Similarly for #4, again feelings don't matter. No, a business should not be able to discriminate against people who work for or own competitors. (You can ban taking photos however, since that applies to everyone.)
Basically this is all predicated on a slippery-slope argument -- as soon as you allow bans for arbitrary "dislikes" rather than "relevant reasons", you're opening it up to racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. That's the immoral part. People's desire for equal accomodation from a business strongly outweighs a business owner's "dislikes", especially as a business owner is often the exclusive one providing a certain good in a certain area.
And so this case, I would strongly argue that banning employees of a law firm which is suing you from purchasing entertainment tickets is immoral. It's ultimately no different from a Democrat-owned business banning Republicans. It's nothing more than a "dislike".
You’re suing my restaurant because you claim a patron of mine was over served by a bartender and subsequently killed someone while driving drunk.
I do not want your lawyers or their investigators or staff coming in and chatting with my staff or poking around my business without my lawyer being there.
Your business place, assuming a public business, is indeed that: a place open to the public by default.
In France (and, as far as I'm aware, most European countries), there is a very clear line: either your business place welcomes the general public, or it does not.
Once you fall in the first category - and, as soon as you're selling something in that business place, you are in that category - then you must have very strong arguments if you refuse to let a prospective customer in or even if you refuse to sell to a particular person the products or services that it is the purpose of your business to sell.
Those arguments usually boil down to either (i) some law preventing you to sell something to that prospective customer or (ii) that prospective customer actively disturbing the public order or presenting a high risk thereof (eg: they're a thief, they're drunk, they can't prove that they will be able to pay, ...). Of course there are provisions for specific settings, but which merely soften the (ii) to allow filtering on public safety grounds for places welcoming more than X simultaneous guests - including eg nightclubs and such.
Anything not in falling into these exceptions is just what it is: discrimination. And actually, this seems very sound to me. The fact you own a business puts you in the public world: you may not refuse to serve someone because you don't like them.
In the USA at least, you can kick out or ban anyone you want from your business for any reason, unless it is one of a very small enumerated list of disallowed reasons including race, religion and so on. If I don't want people wearing green shirts in my store I can kick/keep them out. I'd be an asshole, but I am 100% allowed to do that.
Actually, no. At least in New York State. While you can ban someone for the "violent" offense you picked, you cannot "deny entry to persons [you] dislike."
The victim in this case, being a lawyer, is taking the clever and lawyerly route with this:
Davis is now upping the legal ante, challenging MSG’s license with the State Liquor Authority.
"The liquor license that MSG got requires them to admit members of the public, unless there are people who would be disruptive who constitute a security threat," said Davis.
That's the thing that gets me. I get the desire to retaliate against people you feel have wronged you somehow, but as an actual strategy it seems like playing games like this with lawyers invites more trouble than it's worth. If they're trying to collect evidence, they will just send in an uninvolved third party to do it, not go themselves. But by attacking them personally, now they're going to use their legal skills to give you a headache.
I think that's 100% legal, even in NYS. You can't deny entry based upon membership in a protected class, but other than that, you can't be forced to serve someone!
"Yes, we took your cash in return for promise of delivering goods and services, but our policy forbids us from delivering" sounds more like Rule of Acquisition.
If you were not letting other, strangers, in for money. (Unsure if "for money" matters) then you are not, or should not, be so allowed.
If you are in trade than (in civilised jurisdictions) you cannot refuse to trade with a person because of prejudice and/or bigotry.
This is a slippery slope.
Facial recognition matched with digital currencies is a real serious problem.
If you removed a person from your business because of something they did, then denying them subsequent business is an extreme measure and will most likely not hold unless there is language in laws that you can use, like violent activity, criminal behavior, etc.
The law is like code. If you say, "persons I dislike" but you mean people of color, you have Jim Crow, which is deeply immoral. On they other hand, your point #3 is clearly valid. To resolve this, 42 U.S.C. §2000a talks about protected classes (https://www.justice.gov/crt/title-ii-civil-rights-act-public...). People with good and bad intentions have been arguing ever since then about what is a public accommodation and who belongs to protected classes. In this case, even if it's legal, MSG is not being terribly smart to 1) use dystopian technology to enforce bans 2) be petty and expansive about banning people 3) do so against a now-very-angry legal expert.
Lawyers work for their clients, and in the vast majority of cases are not personally invested deeply in the case (except when you do dumb crap like in the article). They request evidence via the court, they do not go gather it themselves. If further on site evidence is needed by non-standard methods a PI will show up at the location, and if they are any good will never be noticed. By banning the lawyers they are either petty, or they feel they are still involved in some kind of potentially illegal activity and need to reduce risk. Not a good look.
See https://www.eeoc.gov/statutes/title-vii-civil-rights-act-196....
However federal law does not prevent discriminating on other grounds. Such as political affiliation or profession. For example landlords can choose not to rent to lawyers, and every so often someone gets fired for political views.
State law may disagree. And her liquor license trick is an example of how.
This is similar to
5. I, as a government, can lock up people who engage in behaviors I dislike (e.g. because they were violent.)
6. I, as a government, can lock up people who are affiliated with groups I dislike (e.g. political groups not in power)
Not sure if Budweiser / AB does the same thing back but its a really backwards way to run a company culture.
Fired for driking Bud Light. Is that even beer I ask as a German...
Now whether it's GOOD is a different question.
And to answer your question, yes, it is beer, as defined by https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-27/chapter-I/subchapter-A...
The Constitution wasn't designed for a multi-racial democracy, either. It took a bloody civil war to settle the slavery question though.
Thinking about it, why would we be? I can't see a good answer to that without appealing to weird/nationalistic/naive ideas about the moral character of states themselves, or simply the understanble nonlogic of "well this is my country, they wouldnt be like that here." At the end of the day, priorites are priorites, incentives are incentives. Efficiency doesn't know or care about culture, it is self-justifying.
As someone who has spent many years of my life living outside "America and the West": this is not remotely true.
This is such black-and-white thinking. Most EU countries are kilometers ahead of the US, and the US is miles ahead of Russia. Putin would love for Russia to race to the bottom and get to China's level, but Russia is way behind China in terms of technical expertise, investment, infrastructure, and actual coordination/coercion between government and industry (vs crony corruption). And then there are the new Chinese colonies in Africa who get all the surveillance and none of the benefits.
So the chance of false positives is minimal.
It depends on the purpose. For identity verification purposes, when you already have independent reason to suspect that someone is specifically Person X, then a "very low" false positive rate is likely sufficient.
For filtering, however, "very low" isn't enough. Suppose your facial recognition system has a 0.001% false positive rate (one per 100k), but you have a list of 1000 banned faces and your venue sees 10,000 visitors per night. You're making ten million comparisons, and that "very low" false positive rate will still result in 100 false matches.
That could still be okay, if a match just involves (here) pulling the patron aside for an ID verification. Asking 100 people for ID is much more benign than turning 100 people away at the turnstile. MSG here did appear to follow the match with a secondary verification (per the article), but I shudder to think of all the venues that will hear "very low false positive rate" and not really think through the consequences.
And the government never makes mistakes.
They're taking an image, segmenting out the face and they're improving an existing model for that individual. Super scary stuff that's going on. (Other than the fact that they have an existing image)
If she was in IL .. she should persue them with the BIPA act.
SPOILER
When Tony and Carmine are getting divorced, Tony consults with every lawyer in town, creating a conflict of interest and not allowing Carmine to use them.
No. Very easy to disprove: there are many examples of protected status that is not easy to tell just by looking at someone.
1. Race (esp. mixed race)
2. Religion
3. Pregnancy
4. National origin
5. Sexual orientation
6. Disability
7. Genetics
Easy targeting was not the issue, the combination of pervasiveness and the belief that it was unwarranted and/or resulted in an excess of social strife if tolerated was. (Sometimes, it is misportrayed as being about innate characteristics, but this is very obviously not the case with religion, where freedom of religion as a right waa very clearly the outcome of exhaustion with centuries of strife, largely between different factions within Western Christianity.)
There is certainly a line that needs to be drawn, since I somewhat understand the intent behind the ban. However, this will quickly get out of hand now that we can effectively disciminate on so many new factors scale.
A business owner should be able to decline to host someone adversarial to that business.
> "MSG instituted a straightforward policy that precludes attorneys pursuing active litigation against the Company from attending events at our venues until that litigation has been resolved. While we understand this policy is disappointing to some, we cannot ignore the fact that litigation creates an inherently adverse environment. 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.
Seems pretty cut and dry if true. The law firm is litigating against the company, and the company notified the law firm of their policy to not allow employees to attend their venues.
If anything, lawyers deserve this treatment.
I can kind of understand the lawyers actively involved in the case being banned from the arena, but why should a lawyer who is not even licensed in NY, and does not appear to be involved in the case be banned?
Should lawyers be banned from going to hospitals they are litigating against?
- identifying people legally banned from premises who are not self-identifying
-returning lost children with their parents by identifying last-known location of parent
The list goes on. The technology itself is not evil.
No we look at the primary suspect's digital footprints and analyze metadata, look for other nearby video feeds, etc. We try to see if additional evidence is corroborating.
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).
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.
The 1974 SAFARI scandal seems to be quite relevant here too :
https://www-lemonde-fr.translate.goog/blog/bugbrother/2010/1...
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.
It’ll be interesting to see if MSG is forced to report the source they used as part of the legal proceedings.
> I run a home business. Does that mean the general public are free to enter and roam around my home office?
So you're in the second case. What's complicated about this?
If they don't like it, they can sell named tickets, and BTW since Girl Scouts are known for being vicious hooligans, maybe they should have instituted football-like regime up to and including stadium bans for their mothers.
I loved your .001% example, I'm going to steal that when I talk folks. We often describe how systems fail at scale and talk about how being wrong 1/1,000,000 times can wildly backfire at large numbers.
All that being said, I just don't want people around this forum thinking facial recognition is some fringe, low accuracy modeling exercise like they used to be. The models are actually incredibly impressive these days.
No, but there are mechanisms in place by which the Constitution can be Updated.
The case was strong, and I had no trouble hiring a reputable firm one town over to litigate, but it was inconvenient and one can imagine a scenario in which there is no "one town over" with alternatives.
I know more than a few MD's that refuse to see lawyers as patients - can't say I blame them.
Regarding the policy, is it really that absurd? They are being sued, presumably, by the law firm. When I was at a company with ongoing IP litigation, there were extremely strict measures put into place while that went on. The law firm was even notified. So the lawyers purely ignored it. Lawyers are pretty apt to point out when you ignore communication, so why did they do it? They could have communicated prior to the trip, but instead they showed up and gave their surprised Pikachu face.
> Should lawyers be banned from going to hospitals they are litigating against?
Irrelevant hypothetical because that's not what happened here, and there are different rights to medical treatment than there are for seeing an entertainment show.
In either case no.
On the first count, no, because I don't believe in "non-transferable" tickets for arts and entertainments. The holder has every right to give or sell their purchased property to family or friends and "non-transferable" instruments violate that first-sale right.
On the second point, no, because the singular specific "okay" case (even the tear-jerking one that saves poor fluffy dying from kitten cancer) has no bearing on the profound but nebulous harms inflicted on society by an essentially rotten technology (on a purely Utilitarian principle)
To me this screams "MSG is doing illegal/contract breaking shit"
I think printing BS company (and politician, etc.) statements as is, often at the end of an article, is a major issue affecting the reputation of journalism. I don't know the full history but it is related to defamation issues that need to be taken into consideration in some way. I think the situation is something like: printing the company's response makes it much harder for the reporter/publication to be sued for defamation and so the easiest thing to do is to just attach the response as-is without further consideration. They could (and IMO should, and occasionally do) ask questions like "how does this statement relate to the question we asked you" but companies mostly will just ignore such questions (they can print that and I think usually do if they actually ask the question). There can potentially be unexpected complications that arise if they press the company that make the story more difficult to write and/or defend legally. I don't know how much of it is legal considerations if there is a lawsuit vs a kind of unwritten agreement not to push to hard to avoid lawsuits. It partly relates to these quick stories that publications don't want to put much effort into, but even long expensive articles don't seem to have a good record IMO. They do seem to just hope that people will recognize it as BS but even when that is the case printing BS affects their reputation as well.
The Forbes article that voidmain0001 mentioned linked to this routers article:
https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/madison-square-g...
It seems the lawsuit that prompted the ban is minority shareholders suing the wealthy family who were the majority owners of two business they recently combined.
You can try to train your fast system to see a "because" and flag it and/or discard it entirely, though. You do enough of this and you start looking "cynical", but in the hostile epistemological environment we live in now, if you're not "cynical" you're being taken advantage of. Even as a cynic I advise against it as a philosophical position; there are good things in the world, there are reasons for hope and charity and love. Cynicism can be a corrosive philosophical position. But it's simply a necessary intellectual posture nowadays.
(In that case it would be purely the holding employees with no connection to the specific actions responsible for what their employer does.)
Australia has 2 main supermarket chains, and they also own numerous other stores/brands. If one decided to ban you from every store it makes it very hard to shop for food.
https://www.businessinsider.com/ballmer-snatches-microsoft-e...
It was never an actual policy, which is why the employees reacted the way they did.
In the future ounishowill be swift and eternal
We got to see the Honda equivalent parked right next to the Yamaha we were considering (Honda Scoopy vs Yamaha Mio Classico) and decided it looked nicer. Didn't decide yet but she'll probably get the Honda.
So if people are going to the building to be impressed by your bikes, yeah I can see that it's reasonable to avoid having them parked right next to your competitors bikes where the customers will walk past them. That counts x1000 for the head office where the customer might be shopping for an entire dealership instead of just one bike.
This doesn't mean it's ok to say what bikes your staff can drive or what beer they can drink, of course. But branding at your own company premises is something that you can and probably should control.
The racial bias issue is still important for now, but it's fast becoming irrelevant. We should be asking ourselves where our priorities lie even if bias weren't a concern.
Furthermore, an accurate system is not the same as a morally just system. A ubiquitous system which recognizes people with 100% accuracy could be used for evil if it ever fell into the wrong hands. Such powerful systems should never be created in the first place, the juice isn't worth the squeeze.
That ship has sailed. You no longer have a reasonable expectation of privacy in an airport. Courts have ruled that safety concerns override privacy considerations inside them. Alright, well, if this is the system we’re stuck with, then we might as well make it efficient. Now we have TSA PreCheck where you can give up all pretense of personal privacy in exchange for a relatively pleasant airport experience. And the facial recognition kiosks I’ve seen don’t seem inherently more invasive than having a human security guard doing their functional equivalent, and we’ve had that for many years.
I’m not thrilled about the situation, but feel powerless to change it. It seems like the majority of my countrymen think this a good tradeoff, so I can’t say I’m fully on the right side of the argument anyway. So if stuck with a system I can’t change, and most people don’t want to change, if this makes the practical experience of dealing with that system faster and less unpleasant, then fine. So be it.
That system was created to avoid what you mention earlier, privileged people in society being inconvenienced and feeling motivated to speak out against these systems. Instead of subjecting the movers and shakers to the full brunt of the TSA, such people are allowed to opt out of the tyranny for a small (to them) fee.
I don't mind a security guard checking my ID. I do mind some random contractor building a facial recognition system that does it automatically and saves my picture and my identification information for all time without my consent or control.
I also don't see how we can ever get rid of it. There is a large psychological component on the topic of safety and flying. That we cannot get rid of it again is a problem though. Doubt we can have low security planes for those that don't want to be screened.
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?
Any other occupation isn't allowed to use their occupation to retaliate
Sure they do. It happens all the time. Politicians do it. Food service workers. Tradesmen.
One place I worked pissed of a local plumber's union, and guess what — a week later the city condemned the sewer pipe leaving the building. Once we made up with the union, the city magically changed its mind.
By analogy, if a lawyer is denied entry because they are black and they sue, that isn't retaliation it is just requiring the business to follow the law. If a lawyer is denied entry for some legitimate reason (say drunk and belligerent), and they dig up some other unrelated offense to sue about (while ignoring the hundreds of other establishments with the same minor offense), then that is retaliation.
But we'll just have to watch cases like https://thewire.in/caste/cisco-case-caste-discrimination-sil... to see whether the courts agree with us that caste discrimination should be illegal in America. (And if the courts disagree, time to lobby the politicians...)
https://www.americananthro.org/ConnectWithAAA/Content.aspx?I...
The postmodern term is "ethnicity" (which does get mentioned in your article), with the understanding that it's overwhelmingly about culture, and while genetics do matter in very specific cases (like for lactose tolerance), typically they matter very little, and your ethnicity is something that you can change (though it gets ever harder after your teenage years).
P.S.: I really don't know enough about "caste" and its history to comment on that, though the ancestry issue doesn't look good.
(One thing that has been bugging me for a while is how the number of our ancestors grows exponentially with each generation - at least before inbreeding starts to dominate - which seems like any of those ancestry-based discriminations are just arbitrarily stopping at some convenient for them point/in complete coverage, and can basically make up excuses about discriminating against you or not. But I guess that I shouldn't be surprised about it when totalitarian regimes do it : the fear of the arbitrary is a powerful weapon they have, and so it's likely on purpose !)
How? Dalits aren't from Dalitland.
It'll come down to a judge, but it doesn't seem like a stretch to put a caste group under that umbrella.
[0] https://www.justice.gov/crt/federal-protections-against-nati...
Basically because it wasn't on the radar of American legislators when they wrote up the lists of protected classes.
I can take your photo in public, and there's nothing you can do about it.
I can even distribute that photo, and you can't, and if you do, I can sue you for copyright infringement. I own your likeness, in a finite way.
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/but-it-s-a-photo-of-me-cel...
https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/ilcs3.asp?ActID=3004&C...
I think anyway, IANAL but I believe this law prohibits the collection of, in this case, images/facial recognition, etc.
So, you can take my picture in public and keep it on your phone, you cannot upload it to say Instagram without my permission, all kinds of recent lawsuits about it. I think the intent of the law is to prevent my picture from winding up in say Instagram without my permission but for sure it cannot be used in the way it was used in the article - to scan it and prohibit me from entering an establishment. Apparently, no matter what state I go to....
https://www.reuters.com/technology/one-us-state-stands-out-r...
It's a complex law and a complex topic in general so I am not 100% sure what is and isn't covered....
edit; spelling
Regarding commercial use of photos taken of people in public, the law varies by state. Some states have stronger protections.
Low-tech and easy to enforce.
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.
The water company shouldn't be able to turn off your water because they don't like your associations or unrelated Behavior. However, if a licensed plumber doesn't want to serve your house because of the flag you're flying in front of it, that is fair game. They might be the only plumber in your area, but the state isn't preventing someone else from starting a business
For example, if the state is protecting the Monopoly from competition, I don't think they should be able to discriminate.
Same with grocery stores. While food is a necessity to live, the state isn't preventing someone else from selling groceries.
It's not free, because if it were free then everybody would apply for the lineskip privilege and it would cease to be a lineskip privilege because now everybody is in that line. So, like amusement parks selling lineskip passes, they price it high enough to discourage most people from buying it.
So now companies don't put that as the termination reason, & fire them anyway for 'culture fit'. Or leave the term reason blank, b/c 'At-Will'.
"Protected class" isn't very protected, as it leaves burden of proof to the victim, who needs to lawyer up & chase the proof via discovery.
No, for large companies (those at risk of being sued) it works the other way round: they collect very detailed data to objectively justify any firing, otherwise they are at high risk of losing a discrimination lawsuit.
Hence "improvement plans", "needs improvement" ratings, etc, etc.
It is likely true that small and medium companies can get away with abuse though.
Surely though, you understand and agree that having this law is better than the alternative, where employers ARE allowed to fire someone simply for being a member of a protected class, and are even welcome to brag about doing so.
1. They're inherently unjust and anti-equality.
2. In the case of stuff like race and gender, the law doesn't even clearly define what terms like "black" and "white" are supposed to mean. There is no scientific definition because in physical reality race doesn't exist. It's assumed everyone follows race ideology, but even if we assumed that to be true then the premise of such suits is that someone committed a thought crime. Such cases are bound to lead to wrongful convictions as well as actual discrimination going unpunished because it can't be proven. These discrimination suits are the modern day equivalent of medieval witch trials.
3. They create division and conflict. That may be an intentional feature instead of a bug though.
Why are people outside of this range not protected? Am I oversimplifying something here?
1. The "Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act" specifically bans using "Genetic Information" in certain circumstances, which is generally understood to mean e.g. DNA testing. Discriminating on height does not fall into this.
2. You could still fall into issues with e.g. the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by having a height requirement if e.g. far more men than women fall into that height range, however there are exceptions[A] built into that act when a job has specific requirements, one being you can ask for "male models" to model clothing targeted at men.
A: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bona_fide_occupational_qualifi...
Because legislation has been written to target certain characteristics. The experience of short people in American history doesn't quite match that of black, gay, or disabled people, and thus it hasn't been legislated.
The unfairness here came with selling someone a ticket to a venue they are prohibited from accessing. Solve that problem and the rest of the "unfairness" goes away.
… And if you are incapable of responding to the argument without snarky running commentary, kindly refrain from replying.
After having been warned and then being prevented from going in, her response is to sue them again.
You could be like "you see some particulars and generalize too quickly, countries do live and die by principles, not 'efficiency' or abstract incentive. You're turning everything grey, and forget that there is light and darkness, good guys and bad guys, black and white." That seems to be what you want to say to me, no?
I'm sure many/most people would be happy to talk to you about how some countries are worse than others, why even choose to respond to me, where such things aren't adding anything?
Frankly if you're running a public business then I don't care if you don't want lawyers there, the same as I don't care if you don't want people of another race there. If people are coming to eat and they're not being disruptive, then serve them, end of story. It's not your private home, it's a business open to the public.
Which was not the case here. You can not summary ban every employee of a large company that's doing something you don't like.
Kelly Conlon is not involved in the case against MSG, and (as far as I understand) had no knowledge of the case.
Which laws forbid this?
If you don't see the big picture, it's not my place to enlighten you. But oh the irony of butting into a conversation you don't like to complain about participating in it. lol
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!
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)
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.
1,000,000 deaths are a statistic
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.
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.
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.
Of course banning people based on where they work is bad for business.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34075624
But I think we are on the same page anyway
We’ve seen this countless times. However upset people are about Medicare and public welfare, they still want to get some support when they need.
It is a factor for instability in the long term, but it is an unavoidable cost of having free speech. Ideally, it would be fought against with a good public education system.
Jury Duty, but a couple Weeks a Year of Camping in the Wilderness with your Family.
Other differences, such as a belief in democracy, free speech, freedom of religion, etc. flow from this.
Also, what is the argument for being able to collapse culture and state together, such that the state can/will manifest this trans-historic character of a group of people? Or rather, if we grant that relation either way, does the argument have anything to say about any of the tumultuous events of politics and culture in Russia or China in the 20th century? Are they just hiccups along the overall trend? Such that the CCP isn't an authoritarian regime from without which harms china now, but an inevitable symptom of some trans-historic Chinese culture?
Wanna see some examples proving the opposite? That is not how it works at all, what you describe is an example of equal legal rights, I already mentioned these laws are anti-equality. Anti constitutional even, not that many in the US seem to care.
I suppose if you had an airline called "cleavage air" and had all the flight attendants wear low-cut tops, then you might get away with it.
This is technically wrong, in that the First Amendment limitation on title VII is separate from BFOQs, and race can expressly never be a BFOQ. But the effect of the limitation is similar to allowing race to work like a BFOQ in certain circumstances in artistic contexts.
The first amendment protected the Boy Scouts' right to express their disapproval of gays by not employing them. Is race different from a first amendment perspective?
So this is indeed how it works.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Everyone in this thread has already recognized how many faces so far today with their eyes and nothing blew up?
Look at the personal computer? It is just a better place to hold your recipes. We basically live in 1980 + having a more efficient way to hold your cookie recipes instead of in cumbersome recipe books.
“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.
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 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.
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.
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.
It's been argued in the 7th circuit that "sex" and "sexual orientation" apply to employment, but not elsewhere; Title IX was decided in favor of making orientation a protected class in education in 2020. 22 states protect sexual orientation by law (with 19 of them also including gender), and there's an executive order protecting both for federal jobs and contractors. But if you're in Texas, Florida, Alabama, or 25 other states? It's absolutely legal to be fired for being gay.
Recent Supreme Court precedent says that discrimination by sexual orientation is a type of discrimination by sex. If that's what you're referring to here:
> Title IX was decided in favor of making orientation a protected class in education in 2020.
The result wasn't that orientation is a protected class. It was that discrimination by orientation is an example of discrimination by sex, and sex is a protected class. So if it's not legal to fire someone for being female in Alabama, it also isn't legal to fire them for being gay, since that's the same thing.
But none of that would apply to the first amendment, since it's statutory and the first amendment is constitutional. Is there a distinction between race and sexuality relevant to the first amendment?
Well, exactly - that explains a lot of the current political/cultural fragmentation of the U.S. population. Although you can definitely argue that though it is a "short" story in comparison, the founding of the U.S. as a revolution to gain independence from the British Crown to found a state by the people, for the people, with its own constitution and Bill of Rights is a "big" story nonetheless.
As to your other questions - good questions - one could write a whole book (or several) addressing them.
It makes me sad just knowing people hold these beliefs. It's like internalizing the world as a bad fantasy novel.
MSG claims to have notified the company twice.
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.
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.
The only way Hooters could in principle discriminate on the basis of race is if they come up with some first amendment pretext for it; e.g. the waitress job is actually an artistic performance and for some reason the art demands the performer be a certain race. That works for movie productions, but for a bar hiring waitresses? In practice it wouldn't work because the courts and the public would both write you off as an obvious racist.
I'd be interested in something that gives more context, details and examples than the wikipedia article, but not targeted at lawyers and not excessively long.
How does that work in practice for a company like Hooters - do they spend millions on lawyers to be able to defend their position? What if you'd open a local place working in similar way to Hooters - would you go bankrupt trying to defend yourself?
They certainly spend millions on lawyers. They've been sued for not hiring men several times, AFAIK always settle out of court. They defend their position by claiming being a woman is a BFOQ for working at Hooters, but aren't eager to risk losing in court.
It doesn't take a lawyer to tell that Hooters' primary product isn't chicken wings (Chris Rock even made a joke about it).
The reason behind the laws isn't common-sense, in the case that the 1964 Civil Rights Act is basically a list of "things currently happening that we think are bad" rather than an exhaustive list of things it's bad to discriminate on; it's also limited somewhat by the legal framework that the US congress was working within.
Labour laws in the US are also weird for similar reasons. There was a point at which union members were beaten and killed, with the local police being bought-off to not intervene. It escalated to at least one pitched battle between a private army and workers. Things like assault, battery, and murder are enforced at the local ("state" in the US terminology, not in the meaning everywhere else in the world) level not federal level, so rather than arresting the people doing this, laws were passed giving special protections to unions. Then a few decades later people argued that the special protections made unions too powerful and a bunch of extra rules limiting what unions can do were passed.
And just to recapitualate, this is all just for you to say that the U.S.A and China are distinct enough that the former would never use surveillance on citizens (or whatever) like they do in China. And ultimately proves my point that you can't make that claim without nationalistic thinking!
And for another thing, intelligence agencies are by design resistant to electoral turnover. And regardless, such agencies for the most part have broad bipartisan support, because in fact, both parties have ultimately the same incentives with stuff like this.
So I'll accept this new thing as a good argument, but history as it has unfolded has made me weary to put such total trust in even the finest examples of democracy and statehood. Because, again, incentive and efficiency are powerful forces to even the most principled people.
There have been references to the ban lists going from one venue to another.
Reminds me of the hidden low-level-banking-employee blacklist that some would end up on for not forcing enough customers into expensive products they didn't need.
Or the opiate painkiller registry that doctors use to centrally track folks who come to them for painkillers, and which by the way counts any painkillers you might have gotten from the vet for your dog.
Fewer central registries please!
> There have been references to the ban lists going from one venue to another.
The linked article mentions bars, where does the school bit come from?
Another reason to keep wearing masks…
This is especially worrying when no humans are involved. If your Google account gets banned by some automated bot for whatever reason, you might find any attempts to create new accounts be considered "ban evasion".
Regardless of the fact that you have very few options for things like ad networks or publishing Android applications, even before you consider losing access to your e-mails or any servers you might have.
Because bad policies can do only damage.
And tech can do both good and bad.
She doesn't work on the case, and the venue has nothing to do with the case either, besides that a huge corporation owns both the venue and the restaurant under litigation.
> "MSG instituted a straightforward policy that precludes attorneys pursuing active litigation against the Company from attending events at our venues until that litigation has been resolved. While we understand this policy is disappointing to some, we cannot ignore the fact that litigation creates an inherently adverse environment. 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.
Besides, if the law firm really wanted someone in there for hand-wavy reasons, why would they not just hire someone for it? Blacklisting is petty, counter-productive, trivial to abuse, and solves nothing.
There’s a happy medium in there somewhere. You don’t want to let repeat offenders off scot free, but there needs to be a cooling off period, too.
I'm not sure I see what's unfair here. They were notified. If they wanted to negotiate around it, they could have done ahead of time. They're lawyers. They should know to read material they're sent.
Can you think of any policy anywhere that never results in unfair outcomes?
As any good lawyer would say, "It depends."
Please keep in mind that some people on the sex offender registry are only there because they were peeing in public, or because they were sexting while underage.
If it were protection .. to prevent a lawyer from witnessing something at a public venue that might be used as evidence agains them ... then there is no protection possible.
A sensible law firm would not use one of their employees with a public image available, they'd use a contracted private investigator to gather evidence.
This smacks of punitive behaviour to not only punish the law firm (for doing their job) in a petty manner, but to also intimidate any other law firm thinking of taking them on.
Eg: Hypothetically if Disney were to ban all members of any company that challenged Disney on ride safety .. how would that appear?
Or just, like, not doing this at all. This is James Dolan, the owner of Madison Square Garden, being petty as usual and banning people from the venue who annoy him. e.g. Spike Lee for saying bad things about him, Woody Allen for the wrong reasons (he refused film ads for Dolan), &c
I am under no obligation to contort myself to assume good faith on his part in the face of a pattern of behavior that indicates otherwise.
(a) Conlon does not practice law in New York where Radio City Music Hall is located.
(b) Conlon is not an attorney pursuing active litigation against the MSG Entertainment. She works for a NJ-based law firm who representing another party in litigation against an unrelated restaurant which now happens to now be owned by MSG Entertainment. She's not part of that ongoing litigation.
(c) > A recent judge's order in one of those cases made it clear that ticketholders like her "may not be denied entry to any shows."
(d) > "The liquor license that MSG got requires them to admit members of the public, unless there are people who would be disruptive who constitute a security threat," said Davis. "Taking a mother, separating a mother from her daughter and Girl Scouts she was watching over — and to do it under the pretext of protecting any disclosure of litigation information — is absolutely absurd.
Refusing her entry doesn't even make sense according to their stated policy, and it is absolutely _draconian_. She doesn't work on the case—she just happens to work for the same company. If this firm was representing a client suing Meta or Google or Apple, would it be okay for Meta/Google/Apple to ban all attorneys from using all of their services? This type of behavior just discourages firms from taking on clients suing large companies.
Does the law firm have 100,000 employees? According to their website, they have about 29 attorneys in the firm. Bringing up companies the size of cities compared to that is completely ridiculous and irrelevant. And companies like Meta, Google, Apple, etc. will absolutely enact draconian policies when IP and other litigations are going on. The secrecy and policies those companies put in place likely go well beyond simply not letting a lawyer part of a law firm that is suing one of your businesses into your building.
Why does it matter where she's licensed? It's irrelevant.
Lawyers play these little games all the time. I'm not necessarily for the policy or the use of facial recognition to enact it, but they were told ahead of time. They should know better. If they wanted to argue the points ahead of time and get approval, they could and should have.
How is that relevant? A stupid and harmful policy is stupid and harmful, regardless of who was notified and how. If I send an email to Google to notify my displeasure, it is not reasonable to expect all Google employees to be aware of it and avoid my business.
Despite the fact that personally punishing individual employees for a beef your holding company has with some of their colleagues is stupid. There is no other way of putting it.
> Lawyers expect others to abide by such notifications, do they not?
There is so much wrong here. Lawyers are not omniscient. They also expect companies to abide by their own terms of use, and routinely ignore unfounded or groundless “notifications”.
> Bringing up companies the size of cities compared to that is completely ridiculous and irrelevant.
So, where’s the limit? What company size makes this reasonable?
> And companies like Meta, Google, Apple, etc. will absolutely enact draconian policies when IP and other litigations are going on.
So, it is draconian after all. Show an example of individuals being booted off Google’s or Apple’s platforms only because of their employer.
> Why does it matter where she's licensed? It's irrelevant.
But then, none of the points you’ve made are, either.
I started out reading the article wondering 'OMG, what is it that this mom could've possible done that she's banned?' and then when it says "lawyer at adversarial law firm" I immediately switched to "oh yea, makes total sense".
None of the counterarguments here stand up to scrutiny.
"Isn't involved in litigation" and "not a Security threat" - she is totally a security threat: today she's a mother of a girl scout and is not working on the case, and tomorrow she's a loyal employee helping out with the case.
"Part of girl scouts trip" - Does she have a firewall in her brain between personal and professional?
'Conlon said she thought a recent judge’s order in one of those cases made it clear that ticketholders like her “may not be denied entry to any shows.” - You know what the best thing about America is? Our endless appeal system.
This entire article is a non-story (someone denied access to a business), and yet, it's somehow making the rounds. The paranoid cynic part of my brain is interpreting this entire situation as "A law firm that sent in an employee for some snooping, and then got caught, and now is making some noise in the papers." The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
This is kind of an ironic case because I've noticed that lawyers make themselves immune to non-compete clauses via state laws in most states. In California famously, regular employees are generally immune to N.C. In my state lawyers are not impacted by NC by law, but regular devs are subject to them, even sandwich makers have been blocked from changing jobs. There's been a big battle from devs to get rid of them, it hasn't yet passed the state legislature. My own leg rep said she didn't think there was a problem - of course she's a lawyer. The lawyer and business class wants to keep them.
For something like starting a fight, you can go by actual court records, which are public and have processes in place to correct them if they're wrong (and we have rules about e.g. when convictions should be expunged). Just sharing lists of names is too abusable.
I have several concrete problems with these lists.
1. Secrecy. I should have a right to know if I’m on the black list.
2. Due process. There is no process to being put on the black list. Partially because you don’t know it’s happening, there’s no way to contest it.
3. Permanency. The punishment should fit the crime. If you do something at 18 that shouldn’t be a lifetime punishment. However being on a secret list of names and faces distributed between companies is a lifetime punishment.
> If the list is too inaccurate, it stops doing its job and becomes a net-no-help to the venue using it.
This is an extremely optimistic take. In reality, what is the threshold of false positives where the list stops being useful? One percent? Five percent? Hell, even if the list is 10% wrong you’re still denying people who should be denied 90% of the time. And there will always be a stigma against people who are on such lists. “You must’ve done something to get on that list.”
A community of people aren't built around absolutism. They are built around give and take.
You can't have your best day, every day.
This isn't about having your best day. I've had many bad days, yet somehow never assaulted anyone.
I really dislike this way of thought. It could be me that one day went my world went to shits. And then I’m also burned forever.
> I don't want to board an airplane with someone who has a history of assaulting people.
> Do you want a loose cannon who has assaulted people in the past on a tin can with you at 50,000 feet?
If this someone paid whatever price a competent court of law imposed on them, then I have no problem boarding a plane with them. People make mistakes, even grievous ones, and even ones that you or I wouldn't make on our worst of days. The law encodes the penalties for those. Beyond that, what you're advocating for is extrajudicial punishment.
That's a key problem here. People don't agree on what's acceptable and what the proper criteria for forgiveness is.
If somebody did one of your more unambiguous transgressions, like assault (proven to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt, i hope?), but reformed themselves, how do you know and who decided that? Maybe they did it because of a drug habit, mental illness, some other extreme condition that they've now worked past. Maybe they really don't want to do it again, and would not.
These are the types of problems that can arise when you split the world between good and bad people. Not everyone who does something you disapprove of is irredeemable.
Remember everyone arguing that Twitter pre-Musk is a private company, so they could ban anyone they wanted? This is the same thing, only in a physical location.
The venue knows not, but that venue is a tiny cog in an empire owned by the parent group.
The parent group compiled the ban list by trawling the large law firms website for images .. and the parent group knows which offices and groups of personnel are involved in a specific case.
With large and potential trans national groups doing this it has a parallel with, for example, one country banning an entire countries citizens from entry or doing business .. on the basis that a small group of citizens took action that was undesired.
Very large companies have very large numbers of employees and many different activities on the go.
Should, for example, several thousand people be banned from watching streaming television because 15 people in the company they are associated with are involved in a class action against a media group?
And again, why are the lawyers so surprised when they knew ahead of time? If they had asked, it could have even been pre-approved, and thus a non-story. If anything, I'd almost consider this to have been an intentional act by the law firm because they knew ahead of time and took their Girl Scout troop anyway, knowing it could look bad for MSG.
What if the company was Google? What if it was a healthcare provider with a patented/proprietary treatment?
As a matter of fact, didn't we recently have articles in hn where people were commenting they are reluctant to charge back to Google because they don't want to risk losing their gmail and the rest of it?
> I'd almost consider this to have been an intentional act by the law firm
Good for them. The legal system is the only way corporations can be effectively held accountable. You can hate lawyers as much as you want but this is directed at us via proxy. Lawyers litigate for clients.
"Sorry we can't take your case. We use Google products extensively."
Do they? I don't work in law but at every company I've worked we adjust who is working on what based on needs at the time. Why wouldn't a law office temporarily shift more people to a case if they needed some extra manpower?
Someone else posted that the law firm has 29 members, not "very large numbers of employees".
The law firm is a personal injury firm, which in my experience and understanding can be (not always) very shady. Why is it required that MSG let lawyers suing them come into their venues while being sued? One could argue that the policy should be targeted towards certain venues and lawyers, but that is a lot of overhead that is solved by a simple, blanket policy.
I honestly don’t see the outrage here. Sure, there are a lot of what ifs that make this seem worse, but those hypotheticals are not what seemed to happen here.
And it’s the law firm showcasing punitive action. They’re now suing MSG for the denial for something that basically seems like a stretch of a loophole. I almost would guarantee the law firm did this on purpose, and that’s why I can’t stand lawyers. They don’t play by the rules everyone else has to, and they get to make the rules.
This is not a black and white issue, and there are valid points that can be made pro or con of either side. Even the likely possibility (I agree with you on that) that this was all planned does not change this. This fuzziness of the line that would obviously delineate right vs wrong is the issue.
That is why I added that "proxy" bit in there. One could argue for the position of law firms or the position of corporations, and I am urging you to now consider it from the pov of lonesome you, the possibly innocent bystander, caught between these two powerful social forces. You may still reach the same conclusion but it is a distinct analysis and you should do it if you haven't already.