This ID Scanner Company is Collecting Sensitive Data on Millions of Bargoers

guest · Jun 1, 2019

This ID Scanner Company is Collecting Sensitive Data on Millions of Bargoers
PatronScan says it sells security. Privacy advocates worry it’s selling mass surveillance
May 29, 2019
https://onezero.medium.com/id-at-th...l-database-of-banned-bar-patrons-7c6d4b236fc3

Now imagine if a bar owner could flag that ejected patron digitally, documenting their transgression for other bar owners to see and placing them on a nightlife equivalent of a no fly list that stretches across city, state, and even international borders.
PatronScan allows bars to do just that. The PatronScan kiosk, placed at the entrance of a bar or nightlife establishment, can verify whether an ID is real or fake, and collect and track basic customer demographic data.

The system allows a business to maintain a record of bad customer behavior and flag those individuals, alerting every other bar that uses PatronScan. What constitutes “bad behavior” is at a bar manager’s discretion
According to the company’s own policies, the company readily shares the information it collects on patrons, both banned and not, at the request of police.

PatronScan represents an extreme example of the growing adoption of data collection at bars and restaurants.
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For bargoers, however, these systems create an uncomfortable new paradigm for partying, one in which data-sharing is a norm and technological tools can multiply the consequences of a single bad night.
And once a bar adopts an ID scanning system, even innocent patrons may never know where their ID data will end up, or how it will be used.
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This ID Scanner Company is Collecting Sensitive Data on Millions of Bargoers

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This ID Scanner Company is Collecting Sensitive Data on Millions of Bargoers

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