100 Bands Including RATM Boycott Venues Using Facial Recognition Technology (rollingstone.com) 46
Rolling Stone reports:
Over 100 artists including Rage Against the Machine co-founders Tom Morello and Zack de la Rocha, along with Boots Riley and Speedy Ortiz, have announced that they are boycotting any concert venue that uses facial recognition technology, citing concerns that the tech infringes on privacy and increases discrimination.
The boycott, organized by the digital rights advocacy group Fight for the Future, calls for the ban of face-scanning technology at all live events. Several smaller independent concert venues across the country, including the House of Yes in Brooklyn, the Lyric Hyperion in Los Angeles, and Black Cat in D.C., also pledged to not use facial recognition tech for their shows. Other artists who said they would boycott include Anti-Flag, Wheatus, Downtown Boys, and over 80 additional artists. The full list of signatories is available here.
"Surveillance tech companies are pitching biometric data tools as 'innovative' and helpful for increasing efficiency and security. Not only is this false, it's morally corrupt," Leila Nashashibi, campaigner at Fight for the Future, said in a statement. "For starters, this technology is so inaccurate that it actually creates more harm and problems than it solves, through misidentification and other technical faultiness. Even scarier, though, is a world in which all facial recognition technology works 100% perfectly — in other words, a world in which privacy is nonexistent, where we're identified, watched, and surveilled everywhere we go...." New York venue Citi Field as well as Cleveland's FirstEnergy Stadium, Miami's Hard Rock Stadium, and the Pechanga Arena in San Diego are among several venues across the country that have used face-scanning.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike for sharing the story.
The boycott, organized by the digital rights advocacy group Fight for the Future, calls for the ban of face-scanning technology at all live events. Several smaller independent concert venues across the country, including the House of Yes in Brooklyn, the Lyric Hyperion in Los Angeles, and Black Cat in D.C., also pledged to not use facial recognition tech for their shows. Other artists who said they would boycott include Anti-Flag, Wheatus, Downtown Boys, and over 80 additional artists. The full list of signatories is available here.
"Surveillance tech companies are pitching biometric data tools as 'innovative' and helpful for increasing efficiency and security. Not only is this false, it's morally corrupt," Leila Nashashibi, campaigner at Fight for the Future, said in a statement. "For starters, this technology is so inaccurate that it actually creates more harm and problems than it solves, through misidentification and other technical faultiness. Even scarier, though, is a world in which all facial recognition technology works 100% perfectly — in other words, a world in which privacy is nonexistent, where we're identified, watched, and surveilled everywhere we go...." New York venue Citi Field as well as Cleveland's FirstEnergy Stadium, Miami's Hard Rock Stadium, and the Pechanga Arena in San Diego are among several venues across the country that have used face-scanning.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike for sharing the story.
Re: Blackcat is part of the Comet Ping Pong conspi (Score:1)
I'm on their side, but (Score:3)
If a vintage group like Rage Against the Machine is the highest profile performers they could come up with, it's not gonna have the big venues quaking in their boots.
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They sold out arenas last year and their music is more relevant than ever.
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The Rolling Stones still sell out arenas. Paul McCartney still sells out arenas.
It comes down to how old the people are that have their butts in the seats. RATM isn't pulling in that many young people... it's the same individuals who were at their shows 20-30 years ago.
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You'd be surprised actually. Young people get into bands that were around long before they were even born. Not to say a large portion of the crowd was like you said, gen-x, older millenials but every time i am at a concert for an older band or watch video of older bands today a surprisng amount of younger people are in the crowd, which makes sense, this is the music their parents listended to.
I was raised on classic rock so even though the Beatles, Zeppelin, Pink Floyd were all basically over by the time
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You'd be surprised actually. Young people get into bands that were around long before they were even born. Not to say a large portion of the crowd was like you said, gen-x, older millenials but every time i am at a concert for an older band or watch video of older bands today a surprisng amount of younger people are in the crowd, which makes sense, this is the music their parents listended to.
Exactly this. Elton John just headlined the Glastonbury Festival [wikipedia.org] here in the UK. The majority of the crowd weren't born when he had all his classic hits in the 1970's and 1980's, but they still knew the tunes and the lyrics. Great music stands the test of time.
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Its no surprise plenty of young people like the old bands, the music industry has been garbage recycling since the mid 90’s
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You a big Ted Nugent fan?
Re: I'm on their side, but (Score:2)
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If a vintage group like Rage Against the Machine is the highest profile performers they could come up with, it's not gonna have the big venues quaking in their boots.
I'm surprised that with all the machines out there, they even have time for music.
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Rage has a huge catalog of songs in regular rotation on rock radio, still headlining tours and festivals, students of guitar still look to Tom Morello for inspiration. He recently had signature guitar model released by Fender or Gibson. Very much still a relevant and active band.
I did laugh when they mentioned Wheatus [youtube.com] though.
If itâ(TM)s used only for its purpose (Score:2)
Re:If itâ(TM)s used only for its purpose (Score:4, Informative)
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yep, like spunk rat banning people from twitter he doesn't like the opinions of.
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> To keep troublemakers out isn't a bad thing
Yes, we need to keep pressure on the COVID-19 unvaccinated. What if they spread the worlds most deadly virus to a crowded concert event. It could kill millions if not billions or even zillions (think of lost future lineages).
We can't let up on these unvaccinated not for one second. They are the cause and source of all our current problems.
And you do what they told ya (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, now you do what they told ya
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If I owned a venue (Score:4, Interesting)
If I were an owner, damn right I'd want to keep out people known to commit crimes or even be a nuisance on my property. And damn right I'd be willing to enter into reciprocal data sharing agreements with other property owners.
As a customer, I'm not so much on board with that.
I think the best (though imperfect) solution is to legislate the job to a government entity, one with a fast and reasonable appeals process. All the property owners get (paid subscription) access to a database of ID data they can use to hunt for hits, and a submission process for adding new entries. They're responsible for keeping their database up to date, and they're liable for making false entries. Make it tiered - anybody can ban anyone they like from their own property, but if they want to share the data and receive shared data, they need to include a reason they might have to defend in court some day.
And it can't be the cops, it has to be an arms-length agency that only gives info to cops with a valid warrant.
Then again, I've thought since Internet bandwidth became a trivial concern that ID cards should just be link to a central DB that returns a photo and relevant info. You can't make a fake ID if the ID is just a reference number that has to match something you can't access directly. The same agency could handle that.
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I think the best (though imperfect) solution is to legislate the job to a government entity, one with a fast and reasonable appeals process.
And I'll bet you want a pony, too.
If that were even possible today (it's not, especially today), in the very near future it would be corrupted by people who would use it to control any form of dissent, to entrench themselves forever in positions of power.
Much the way that, say, China has already done using the same technology.
It's not likely, it's inevitable. It can't not happen.
Re: If I owned a venue (Score:1)
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Race-blindness is interesting, considering we all seem to be using the same technique for spotting familiar faces and it shouldn't be affected by skin colour or eye shape or anything like that.
Distance and size ratios between major facial features plus occasional identifying marks isn't just the way computers do it, we probably do too. But when you start trying to identify people of an ethnicity with which you're not familiar, that basic function seems to be depressed or overridden.
I'm sure there's a fasci
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If you were a concert owner and wanted that badly, you would have the option to do it as a booking photos for your local venue, and if you really wanted, you could exchange sheets of photos to add to your book with other venues, and then you could ask your human bouncers to try to memorize these photos and look for those people and then look through the photo books as people were coming in.
Then if a match was found it could be double checked before messing up anyoneâ(TM)s night. But of course it would
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*you would have the option to do it as a book of photos
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The question would be though what nuisances or troublemakers does this tech stop that say just having more actual security at a venue doesn't, especially at live events where your primary issues are physical altercations.
The the proposition is "everyones privacy goes to risk because venue owners are looking to scrimp and save on actual security" that's a far different scenario.
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Seems like a lot of opportunity for things to change, fall into the wrong hands, or something else. Our own government agencies and credit reporting agencies can’t be counted on to act ethically. This would get abused the second it existed.
Venues have been around for a long time and for most of their existence the people who used them and profited off them were able to get along fine without even security cameras.
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If I were an owner, damn right I'd want to keep out people known to commit crimes or even be a nuisance on my property.
I think these sort of venues are not individually owned. What you could be the CEO of the venue, and you would have to find the narrow path between what the shareholders tell you, what the bands or the public tell you, and the cost of each solution. The cost will be directly monetary or indirectly from image, and both if you make a move in any direction or if you don't. You'd comparing "destroyed material, fans angry, reduced business" vs "super duper expensive camera system, civil liberty groups angry, sta
These bands are in a bind (Score:2)
On the other hand, every single one of those band members knows, deep in their heart, that 1 out of every 100 fans is legitimately diagnosably insane, security measures are never perfect, and all it takes is one deranged fan.
In other words, their boycott is for show. Im sure the venues have gotten the wink-wink-nudge-nudge from the entire industry to quietly go ahead with whatever security measures they can get away with. And I
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"If we let the insane, dangerous people rule society, we wind up with an insane, dangerous society", I type, while advocating the continued advancement of the paranoid surveillance state due to my deranged fear over imaginary insane dangerous people.
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Metal detectors at venues are a relatively-recent phenomenon.
You have the right to think I'm "Pollyannish". I personally think you're being hysterical, especially considering that even at the deadliest spree shooting [wikipedia.org] (I'm not counting Mandalay Bay since all the overbearing security in the world wouldn't have made a difference) there was barely a 1 in 3 chance of getting hit by gunfire, let alone killed. And that's among people who were already at the venue at the time! The odds of it affecting you as a conc
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The old fashioned method that is not controversial, is you hire a professional spotter or super-recognizer who memorizes the undesirable faces from previous events. See here about this profession https://www.vice.com/en/articl... [vice.com] Note: this is not well paid, my info is it's paid 1500 euros per month for a if you're a beginner recognizer in Western Europe working for private events (very good ones working for the police probably get better pay). The problem exposed criticized by civil liberty groups is the c
Welp (Score:3)
Zack De La Rocha (Score:1)
"Hi, this is Zack De La Rocha of Rage Against the Machine, and every time I get tired from my fight against the power, I grab one of my favorites: Almond Roca. I love this candy so much--unlike their capitalist opponents- that I think it should be called Almond ROCHA!"
(FADE OUT WITH LYRICS)