Home of the famous basketball team New Yorker Knicks and numerous concerts by Billy Joel, the famous Madison Square Garden (MSG) of Manhattan is at the center of the controversy because they accuse him of a discriminatory use of technology facial recognition.
The performance hall, where Joe Frazier defeated Muhammad Ali in 1971 in the “Fight of the Century,” is under fire for using the software to identify and expel certain lawyers who attend arena events because they are associated with litigation. ongoing involving MSG.
For human rights defenders, it is an abuse of technology that sparks fears that it undermines privacy and becomes a control tool from the United States to China.
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“When the rich and powerful are free to use facial recognition to track citizens, we are all at risk,” says Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of STOP, a nonprofit organization that fights for privacy.
“This is a chilling example of how petty retaliation can be,” he told AFP.
In October, Barbara Hart and her husband were heading to their seats at MSG for a Brandi Carlile concert to celebrate their wedding anniversary, when they were stopped by security.
The tickets were in her husband’s name and the agents gave her name without even seeing their identity papers before expelling them, she says.
Hart, a lawyer, believes that security used technology to compare her face with a photo on the website of her firm, implicated in a lawsuit against the company MSG Entertainment, from the same group as the Garden, despite the fact that she does not work at the case.
“It was bewildering and disturbing. Intimidation with sophisticated tools”, says the 62-year-old lawyer to AFP.
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At least four lawyers have been kicked out of the theater because their firms are embroiled in a legal dispute with MSG Entertainment.
Kerry Conlon told the New York Post that she was banned from Radio City Music Hall in November with her 9-year-old daughter.
Two other lawyers told local media that they were denied entry to MSG to see the Knicks and New York Rangers.
Billionaire James Dolan’s MSG Entertainment recently said that “prevents lawyers from law firms that have active litigation against the company from attending events at our premises until the litigation has been resolved.”
New York District Attorney Letitia James warned Tuesday that such a policy “can violate” New York law.
State senators proposed this week to strengthen the 1941 law that prohibits “unfair denial of admission” to people with valid tickets to the shows.
“Orwellian”
For human rights advocates, the proposed amendment, while welcome, does not solve the problem of increased surveillance in the age of algorithms.
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Facial recognition technology is legal in New York. Airports and police use it.
In 2020, the state government temporarily banned its use in schools. Activists like Cahn advocate a full ban.
The Madison Square Garden example shows that a private company can use technology to “exclude those whose voice they want to silence,” he says.
The technology used by MSG uses an algorithm to compare images taken by a camera with a database of photographs, according to a 2018 New York Times report.
“The facial recognition technology system does not save images of people, with the exception of those who have been previously warned that they are prohibited from entering our premises, or whose previous misconduct on our premises has identified them as a security risk.” A spokesperson for MSG Entertainment told AFP.
The United States and the European Union are trying to regulate the use of biometric data, facial recognition and artificial intelligence.
Supporters say facial recognition strengthens security while critics say this flawed technology is prone to false matches between ethnic minorities and therefore discriminatory.
Critics also point out that Chinese police have used it to locate and detain protesters.
The use of MSG “paints an Orwellian picture of today’s society,” Daniel Schwartz, senior privacy and technology strategist at the New York Civil Liberties Union, told AFP.
Source: AFP
Source: Gestion
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