
San Francisco's Least Welcome Start-Up Explains Itself - dwynings
http://allthingsd.com/20120518/scenetap-interview-san-franciscos-least-welcome-start-up-explains-itself-video/
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MBlume
_blinks_ I've already been told I have a defective sense of privacy, but I am
genuinely confused about why people would object to this.

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awolf
It scans your face in a public place in order to do facial recognition. What
happens if I want to go to a public place WITHOUT having my face scanned for
facial recognition and inclusion in some startup's dataset? Do I not get a
say? Is that not my right? Where do we draw the line?

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citricsquid
a bar is not a _public_ place, it's a private place that the public are
invited into.

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jrockway
Aren't bars more formally referred to as "public houses"?

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citricsquid
sure, but public in "public house" (or just "pub") means open to the public,
it doesn't mean that the public have some sort of _right_ to access, whereas a
_public_ street means it's accessible by everyone.

Relating to the usage of the word public, humorously in England we have
"public school" which is the American "private school", in America if you go
to public school you're considered normal and in England if you go to public
school you're considered rich.

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waterlesscloud
It's a logical idea for successful scene-type bars to use. The guy sounds a
little clueless about SF culture, but other than that I expect it to be a
reasonably successful project.

He needs to be more aware of what bars he signs up, and probably more upfront
with the owners. Pissing off a bunch of owners is not a good start.

If they added an "attractiveness" algorithm (with an artificial boost, of
course), I bet it would be even more of a feature for the right bars.

I dunno. It's got potential for misuse, which will almost certainly happen,
with them or their competitors, but it also seems like enough of an advantage
to certain venues that it seems inevitable in some form.

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sriramk
The funny thing is jwz's DNA Lounge broadcasts from their venue at all times -
and this is a _feature_.

I have to admit that my wife and I once used that to figure out whether we
want to figure out whether we want to go or not.

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jrockway
People react to things differently when given a reason. Imagine you are out
walking around, and someone comes up to you and shoes you as hard as they can.
You trip and fall and get mad. The pusher explains, "I hate all white people!"
You are probably not going to feel too good about being pushed.

But imagine the pusher had a different reason: "Those bricks were going to
fall right on top of you! I saved your life." Chances are, you're going to be
pretty happy about being pushed. It's all about the reason.

Going back to the DNA Lounge; people don't mind being recorded and broadcast
because they 1) sign up in advance (it's the DNA Lounge's "thing"), and 2)
they do it for their own entertainment. They can call a friend and say, "hey,
check me out on the webcam", which is fun.

When the cameras are there to increase the bar's profit margins by collecting
personal information, though, people are less likely to be happy. They're
giving something up but getting nothing in exchange. Most people don't like
that. If the deal was, "we record your face, you get the cheapest beer in
town", then people would be less upset. But when you use people as currency
and don't give them anything in exchange, the value proposition center of
their brain tends not to be happy.

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dsrguru
The whole point is that the customers _are_ getting something in return. They
open their mobile device and look up which venues have people at the moment,
so they know where to go. In fact, it sounds like that's the only thing this
app does.

The only problem is what rdl said--that some customers might think the cameras
are actually doing some kind of facial recognition and storing the results
(which you wouldn't get from the regular security cameras already at those
places) as opposed to just counting how many customers each place has. But
then again, customers who aren't going to trust the maker of this app might as
well assume that the government is also secretly connecting all street cameras
to facial recognition software with huge hard drives to spy on us. Which could
be true, but if those people are already willing to go out in public with
their faces oncovered, they shouldn't be further afraid of going to these
bars.

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voyou
I like the phrase "a nearby camera-like sensor for facial detection." It's
"like" a camera in the sense that it actually is a camera, right?

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schwap
I think they phrase it like that due to the fact calling it a "camera" implies
that it's saving what it captures. Assuming that they're being truthful, this
is not the case with their device.

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miahi
This looks bad just because they publish the results. If they kept the results
for the venue owners, nobody would know, as they do not know or care what the
video surveillance installed in all those venues can show. A possible picture
while you enter the venue is nothing compared to a video of all you did
inside.

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roycyang
Beyond the privacy implications, I wonder if the technology actually works.
I'd be amazed if it's accuracy was even higher than 50% but I guess this kind
of tech has probably been perfected by the gaming industry.

It does go down a scary path. So beyond gender and age, what's to stop
tracking by race, etc?

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n72
I don't object to the privacy aspect, since this will never take off. I object
to the utter unimaginative/douchy aspect of this. Who with half-a-brain hasn't
thought of this and immediately rejected it as a stupid kind of frat boy
inspired 'where the chicks at' idea?

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stephenhandley
this should have launched in the UK.

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georgieporgie
When I was younger and actually cared about going to bars and clubs, I quickly
learned that you're kept entirely in the dark until you get inside. I waited
in line and paid too many cover charges to get inside and find out the place
was deserted.

So, yeah, I see definite value here.

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ktizo
Like having a party in an open prison.

