Why Are Gay Bars Building Databases Of Their Patrons?
from the surveillance-society dept
Recent reports have raised alarm about the use of PatronScan, an ID-checking and face-scanning system, at multiple LGBTQ+ bars in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood. Much of the attention has focused on reports that the system photographs patrons as they enter venues and questions about whether those images are used for facial recognition.
A broader privacy concern also deserves scrutiny. For years, PatronScan has marketed itself not just as an ID-verification tool, but as a system that allows bars and clubs to identify patrons, keep records about them, and share information across venues. As one news article published in 2019 documented, PatronScan built a network that allowed participating bars to flag patrons and share information about them with other establishments.
And in California, it’s not at all clear how PatronScan’s business model of scanning IDs and sharing the information from those scans with other bars comports with the law. California’s ID privacy law, which was amended in 2018 to add ID “scans,” states that no businesses shall “retain or use” any information from a scanned ID card except for limited purposes such as to verify age, comply with a legal requirement, or prevent fraud.
Californians should be deeply concerned about businesses that collect information from government-issued IDs and use it to build databases about where people go, whom they associate with, and whether they should be allowed into other public gathering places. That concern is especially strong in LGBTQ+ spaces, which have long served as refuges for people to go without being tracked, monitored, or put on lists.
We reached out to Patronscan with questions regarding their practices and their views on California ID law. They referred us to their published FAQ question “Is Patronscan privacy compliant in California?” which claims that the use of Patronscan kiosks is legal in California. They also said “Patronscan does not do facial recognition in North America, or any kind of automated analysis of the ID or the live photo image.”
The California Legislature Has Investigated PatronScan’s Business Model
In 2018, the California Legislature published bill analyses (on that year’s AB 2769) that went into detail about PatronScan’s business. Reviewing PatronScan’s own materials, the California Senate Judiciary Committee found that the company had collected and retained information on 561,087 customers in Sacramento alone during the first five months of 2018—a remarkable figure for a city whose population had only recently topped 500,000.
Lawmakers also found that at that time, PatronScan retained information for at least 90 days or longer in some cases, shared information among participating bars, and maintained bans that lasted an average of more than 19 years. A PatronScan “Public Safety Report” used 10,000 scans collected on a single day to report on “where customers live, how far they have traveled, and how many different venues the customers patronized.”
This was not simply checking IDs at the door. PatronScan was building a database.
An immigrants’ rights group, the Coalition for Human Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), wrote about its concern at the time with these growing ID databases, saying that “placing individuals on a database that labels them a “threat to public safety” has “significant immigration consequences that could lead to deportation, revoking of current status, or denial of future immigration relief.”
Today, PatronScan states that it retains personal information about all customers for 21 days, and about flagged customers for up to five years. This includes the customer’s name, date of birth, photograph, gender, and zip code. It also includes the dates and times that the customer entered particular bars. Such databases are a grave privacy threat. Personal data is routinely stolen by thieves, misused by a company’s employees, seized by government agencies, and diverted to new purposes by a company’s executives.
California Law Still Bans ID-Scan Databases, And Bars Should Follow That Law
In 2018, California lawmakers closed what they viewed as a loophole. Existing law already prohibited businesses from retaining or using information obtained when they “swiped” a driver’s license, except for the narrow purposes of legal requirements (like a judicial warrant) or “preventing fraud, abuse, or material misrepresentation.”
After reviewing companies like PatronScan, the Legislature amended the law to make clear that the same restrictions that apply to businesses that “swipe” ID cards also apply when those IDs are “scanned.” PatronScan opposed that change, arguing it wanted to preserve the ability to share information among bars so participating venues could decide whether to admit patrons.
The bill became law anyway. Yet PatronScan continues to market and sell a system that apparently retains information from scanned IDs, and allows participating venues to flag patrons and share information across its network.
At a minimum, that raises serious questions about how those practices fit with California’s existing ID privacy law. Bar and nightlife venue owners who utilize PatronScan should think twice about its effects on their customers, and consider going back to standard, visual ID checks. These physical checks have been effective at keeping underage patrons out of 21-and-over venues for decades, and don’t present the serious privacy dangers of creating a private database of bar patrons.
For venues serving vulnerable communities like immigrants or the LGBTQ+ community, the stakes of using this technology are even higher. It’s disappointing and alarming to see some of California’s more well-known LGBTQ+ nightlife spots instead lining up as PatronScan’s early adopters. A venue cannot claim to be a safe space while feeding its patrons’ data to a third party database. These businesses should reject PatronScan, return to the standard ID checks that every other bar has been able to utilize, and prove to their customers that their privacy and security still matters.
Originally published to the EFF’s Deeplinks blog.
Filed Under: age verification, california, id privacy, id scans, id verification, privacy
Companies: patronscan
Comments on “Why Are Gay Bars Building Databases Of Their Patrons?”
“Preventing fraud, abuse, and material misrepresentation” is such an absurdly broad category that I doubt anything you did with that data would not be covered by it. Building a database of people’s activities and sharing it among other entities is obviously covered under those terms, as that is the main method used by everyone to prevent fraud. By the government, by businesses of all sizes, it’s even a major part of the legal remedies courts commonly award victims for misuse of their collected data (though it’s usually called “identify theft monitoring”, rather than “have some rando build a database about your activities and share it around”).
Turns out plenty of queers are lazy and want money like every other demographic. It solves the problem cheap and fast and keeps the money flowing.
Re:
Oh look the resident MAGA shit bag is here.
Do you ever get tired of being such a human bag of shit, or is that what you live for?
Re: Re:
Swing and a miss, dipshit.
List of businesses?
Is there a list of businesses/bars that are using this “technology”?
” Why Are Gay Bars Building Databases Of Their Patrons?”
Because JD Vance wants to find out who he can secretly hook up with?
A few thoughts...
A few things of note from the queer side of the fence (and I’m not at all ok with this regardless).
1) Some ‘gay’ bars are actually owned by straight people who don’t really ‘get’ their patrons, hence bone headed programs like this one along with undervaluing the contributions of performance queens, etc.
2) Many gay bars and clubs are actually *scared* and so are their patrons. After the Pulse Nightclub attacks and just recently the terror attack in Berlin on Pride festival revelers, companies that offer snake oil security services are being hired to help reassure patrons, employees, and owners.
3) Some of the owners aren’t reading the fine print on these agreements, and either aren’t sympathetic to the patrons that can’t allow their sexual preference, gender, etc. out in public are going to pay the costs for that callousness, or oblivious to the logical outcome, especially with breaches now so common they aren’t even making the news any longer. All the oxygen is being sucked out by the AI hype gold rush and basic, sensible identity precautions are thrown to the wind, either for additional income at the expense of the rest of the queer community, or a false sense of security in security theater snake oil.