Facial Recognition an Invasion of Privacy

We live in a technology age. It has grown from infancy to toddler to adolescence. It is approaching its teenage years in fits and starts where it will determine the human races real destiny with our own intelligence. Will we reach a point along the lines of the “Terminator” Movies, or will we enter a period of growth and adjustment like “Bicentennial Man.” Right now the choice is ours, but we could see that choice taken from us by technology.

The latest legal battle brewing is going on with the owner of Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall. He is using facial recognition software to bar lawyers from law firms suing his companies from entering the venues. He is also using it to bar troublemakers, and others as well.

Do you have a problem with that? Personally, I don’t, as long as using it is not in violation of any laws.

It is a private facility and the owner has a right to serve or not serve anyone for any reason, provided that it is not based on a barred discriminatory basis, like race, sex, skin color and such. I don’t think being a lawyer falls into that category. We wrote the laws, we should live by the laws.

A good reason for him to be doing this is to protect his rights from self-incrimination, in a sense. As a lawyer, I can imagine that if I were suing a venue for slip and fall, or some other tort, I would want to see what the responses from the owners team would be in the type of setting that the incident occurred.

I could imagine in a case of a slip and fall, where there is a duty to fix the condition as quickly as possible once the facility is notified of it, I would want to test that theory out while crowds are running around the facility. So, the attorney could watch some one spill a beer or soda, then notify someone from the facility and time how long it takes to get it cleaned up.

More than likely, this would be handled by an investigative team, not the attorneys in the firm, but then the attorneys are the ones with pictures on their website, not the investigators.

However, that does not mean governments or people cannot do things to protest this act. If Madison Square Garden is getting public funds or public discounts, the government granting those may, if lawful, pull those funds. The State Liquor License Board may legally pull the license if what I read is true about not being able to bar people for any reason from a place serving alcohol. But then they would require him to stop barring other people as well and should have done so when he first started using it.

Back to the topic of technology. I grew up before anything like a personal computer was just a dream. I learned about computers in my senior year of high school. I found a little room with these big teletype machines (dumb terminals) that printed in dot matrix lines that connected to a mainframe in the school district headquarters where you could run simple codes. Someone showed me a program for golf where you inputted the club and the computer would printout a little story of where you hit the ball, how far. I learned Cobol coding on punch cards in college.

I only started working on a desktop computer (Radio Shack Tandy 80) in my second job and the software was run strictly on the desktop computer. I went on to Apple II and Apple III, then Wang, then IBM PC. Then computers started to branch out and it was 386, 486, and the flood gates opened up and business changed forever. Business wise, I grew up with desktop computers, from their infancy to now where we have circled back to where it all started with software run from a mainframe (now server farms) on the cloud, with desktop computers a high end dumb terminal. Well not quite dumb. I sit here writing this in Microsoft Word, with three monitors off an older Dell Optiplex.

And yet, I believe we haven’t seen anything yet.

What people my age consider an invasion of privacy may be considered by the youngest generation as who knows what. They may very well and will see things from their own lens of growing up in an age entirely different from what I and my age group grew up under.

So, it is always a new world and which path we travel will determine our outcome.