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Posted by cdrnsf 10 hours ago

Madison Square Garden compiled a list of activists against facial recognition(www.404media.co)
282 points | 82 commentspage 2
adolph 9 hours ago|
[flagged]
afavour 8 hours ago||
It isn’t really a normal thing to do, no. Do you think they keep dossiers on everyone who complains about concession prices? About long lines to get in? Do you think people who have done either of those things get denied access to MSG?

The fact that they’re this motivated to track people on this niche topic sounds alarm bells for me.

adolph 3 hours ago||
> Do you think they keep dossiers on everyone who complains about concession prices?

That would be not unexpected. How else would an organization be able to tell the difference between someone who makes frequent and spurious complaints from a genuine feedback? [0]

0. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/01/th...

newaccountman2 8 hours ago|||
"This seems like a pretty normal thing to do." - adolph

(relevant username)

adolph 2 hours ago|||
How is my French descent real life human name at all relevant?

Yeah, I've gotten it from people with minds like your's for a long time, continually since grade school. Your comment illuminates more about you and your fellow noticers than me.

ghurtado 7 hours ago||||
I'm not sure what's more concerning, a Nazi who's in the closet or one that is "out and proud"
robby_w_g 8 hours ago|||
I may be out of pocket here, but I think the Hacker News crowd of tech bros who spy on people for a living have a biased opinion on whether spying on people is normal
LastTrain 7 hours ago|||
> This seems like a pretty normal thing to do.

(Name checks out) yeah this is not a normal thing to do. Man we need mandatory ethics classes in school.

adolph 3 hours ago|||
Ok, name the ethic or ethics being violated by the behavior described in the article.
mrguyorama 5 hours ago|||
Mandatory ethics classes don't change the fact that asshole "Tech" bros don't pay attention to them.

The people who said "This is bullshit" in my ethics class are the ones who went to work at facebook and such so they could be rich. They don't care that you get hurt in the process.

Education can only improve a situation caused by lack of education. Most people doing shitty things aren't doing it because they don't know it's shitty.

You see people here on HN making up rationalizations all the time because they know it's shitty. They just don't care that they cause harm. They were raised by people and society to think it's okay to harm someone for your own gain because that's basically what America has advertised for 50 years.

Catloafdev 9 hours ago|||
Crazy to see this attempt to be normalized here.

No. No, this is not normal.

smallerize 8 hours ago||
People are making a concerted effort to force your business to do something, and you don't want to know their names or how much influence they actually have?
orlp 8 hours ago|||
Actually, they're making an effort to force your business to not do something.
ghurtado 7 hours ago|||
> People are making a concerted effort to force your business to do something,

What a contrived way to spell "democracy"

smallerize 6 hours ago||
Ok? It's democracy. You want to know who the people involved are and what influence they have.
GuinansEyebrows 9 hours ago|||
> This seems like a pretty normal thing to do

sorry to the rest of the esteemed hn community for the low-effort reply, but... gross.

zulux 9 hours ago||
We have a document detailing our competitors. So I guess I have to ask...

Am I normal?

afavour 8 hours ago|||
If your document details personal information about your competitors employees and their personal contact details then I think the situation might be comparable.

And very much not normal.

adolph 3 hours ago||
From what I recall (the article is register-walled now), the document had twitter handles and public statements. Did the article specify they gathered nonpublic information?
Catloafdev 8 hours ago||||
You think having a document detailing competitors is the same thing as compiling personal information of people who have publicly commented against what you're doing?

The sandbagging on this story is crazy.

Spooky23 8 hours ago||||
Competitive intelligence and customer info is one thing. Do you block your business competitors associates and family from accessing public venues?

Dolan does.

ramon156 9 hours ago||||
Do those documents detail personal information, like face identification, family, etc.?

Its usually about the company, not the individual

rolph 7 hours ago||||
if you attach some kind of socially hostile mandate to that list, and accumulated resources to actuate that mandate.

its one level of unhealthy to point at a demographic and say, "them they the source of the problems" , thats like archie bunker.

going further, individual names and dox, curated summarized to a quick read list, gathering weapons building a cell, thats historically malignant.

chasd00 8 hours ago||||
when i'm doing large presentations to prospective clients my company gives me what they call a "look book". This is a deck with information about every person in the audience all the way down to personality traits, triggering words/phrases, and negotiating style. I think it's pretty normal.
Permik 4 hours ago|||
That's a personal information database and making one without consent of the people detailed is _super_ illegal in Europe.

There's a few examples of entities like Jehovah's witnesses making do-not-visit lists that have been considered as a personal information database and such have been in hot water many, many times about that. Yes, even though you might do them to help you personally, you're acting as an agent of the org you're associated with, and such you're not supposed to be doing that.

LastTrain 7 hours ago||||
Are the potential clients aware that you have this? Are you willing to say who you are or who your company is or would that be embarrassing? I would absolutely not be your client.
esseph 6 hours ago||||
> I think it's pretty normal.

It has been normalized to you.

It is not normal.

If you ever showed up at my business with something like that, we would never meet again, and I would tell all of my peers, other businesses, etc.

What you're doing is called PsyOps and it's a military function.

GuinansEyebrows 4 hours ago|||
> when i'm doing large presentations to prospective clients my company gives me what they call a "look book". This is a deck with information about every person in the audience all the way down to personality traits, triggering words/phrases, and negotiating style. I think it's pretty normal.

this is antisocial manipulative behavior normalized under the auspices of "good business".

esseph 8 hours ago|||
Some of you run in dark circles, and this is coming from a guy who got paid to kill people.
1attice 9 hours ago|||
"Normal" here requires a time bound. I would say it's pretty abnormal if the window is "the last thirty years", and pretty normal if it's "the last thirty days."

Because of the thing.

wbl 9 hours ago||
Dolan is known for being extra petty.
esseph 8 hours ago|||
> This seems like a pretty normal thing to do.

That is NOT normal.

darth_avocado 8 hours ago|||
Not the one to make this discourse Reddit like but I do find the username pretty unfortunate for the comment.
CamperBob2 7 hours ago||||
"I will make it normal." - Adolph
iso1631 7 hours ago|||
Well you'd like to think that. I agree it shouldn't be normal.

Half the tech industry thinks its fine though -- at least as long as it's not the government doing it.

2d8a875f-39a2-4 9 hours ago||
Yeah, not much to see here. Each of the activists named likely had a similar "dossier" on MSG and the Dolan guy. Knowledge workers are going to practise knowledge management. People use to do this with a Rolodex.
joxdosba 9 hours ago||
[flagged]
nla 9 hours ago|
In NYC, you can trespass anyone from a private business at any time and for no reason at all.

NY Penal Law § 140.00 says a person in premises open to the public is there with license/privilege unless they defy a lawful order not to enter or remain, personally communicated by the owner or another authorized person.

So, in plain English:

“You have to leave. You are not allowed back.”

The owner does not need to say: “You have to leave because…”

There was a ton of hoopla around this when Radio City and MSG trespassed lawyers that were suing the company and venues.

Everyone was up in arms and nothing happened.

cdrnsf 7 hours ago||
Ownership's behavior is entirely too extreme and frequently crosses the line.

https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/knicks-owner-extreme-measu...

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/msg-facial-reco...

petsfed 7 hours ago|||
As I recall, the main issue with that was that because it used facial recognition, the labor burden of enforcing that was significantly lower. If its just human beings looking at every visitor and trying to decide if they match a description, the venue has to decide "has this person done anything so egregious that all this extra effort is worth it?" which makes the tactic self-limiting.

With facial recognition, enforcing a trespass order becomes nearly zero cost, so it can be applied for basically any reason. I can sort of get to understanding the tactic for "this lawyer is actively suing us", but if its "this person said something mean about us online, and we can get a facial recognition match from their profile picture", it seems like a wild abuse.

Which is why that whole Radio City Music Hall situation was such a good illustration of the actual harm of facial recognition systems. If a potentially bad action is only kept "good" because the high cost (in labor or lucre) causes discernment in its application, then removing the cost will necessarily remove the discernment, almost guaranteeing bad actions.

Business owners should have the right to bar someone from the premises, and legal recourses to enforce that right. But enforcing that right should be sufficiently cost prohibitive that enforcing that right does not grant the business outsized power to limit the public's rights to e.g. express negative opinions of that business.

monksy 1 hour ago||
> With facial recognition, enforcing a trespass order becomes nearly zero cost, so it can be applied for basically any reason. I can sort of get to understanding the tactic for "this lawyer is actively suing us", but if its "this person said something mean about us online, and we can get a facial recognition match from their profile picture", it seems like a wild abuse.

Also the ban was not communicated. So probably counts as theft as well.

dec0dedab0de 8 hours ago||
i don’t think anyone is claiming it is illegal
Spooky23 8 hours ago||
It’s billionaire people pushing the bounds of their enclosure, Jurassic Park style. The similar behavior in the west coast are the people who create various hoops to deny the public access to the shore.

NYC grants significant concessions to developers in exchange for public access. It’s important to overreact and push back to every incursion into the public sphere as every incremental pushback of public benefit is cumulative over time.

Manhattan in particular is a precious resource that is already largely a playground for the rich. Normal people used to live there.

redsocksfan45 8 hours ago||
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