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Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Big Brother Is Bouncing You

Posted by on April 25 at 15:16 PM

It’s billed as “the future of nightclub security.” According to an article in by Patrick Sisson in XLR8R, BioBouncer is an “electronic face book” based around “a system of unobtrusive cameras that uses 2D and 3D facial recognition technology to identify unwanted or troublesome customers.” The system doesn’t collect personal data; it simply captures facial images. Sisson continues:

BioBouncer is a simple setup. A pair of video cameras scans and analyzes patrons and checks them against images in the club’s database of problem customers. These customerswho were kicked out for causing trouble or violating club policyhad their pictures captured by trigger cameras at the exits and added to the system’s database. When they try to re-enter the venue at a later date, BioBouncer picks their photo out of the database and alerts the owner and security personnel (via a computer screen or wireless message), and the real-life bouncers get to work.

New York-based BioBouncer founder Jeff Dussich of JAD Communications and Security wouldn’t comment on when and where the system made its debut, but he notes that club owners from the U.S., Germany, Italy, and New Zealand have expressed interest in it.

Does BioBouncer make you feel safer or is this going too far to keep out the riff-raff?


CommentsRSS icon

Face recognition software is notoriously bad. Tampa Bay installed a system that used existing surveillance cameras, and they never identified a single criminal in the two years it was running. They abandoned the system in 2003.

Simply changing your expression from a smile to a frown is all it takes to thwart the system. I can't imagine this working any better in bars.

It sure as hell wouldn't make me feel safer. It's not that I oppose security in bars, it's just that it is a step in a very, very dangerous direction.

Back in California, ID-checkers at some bars/clubs had cigarette-pack sized "age readers" that would read the magstripe on the California driver's licenses (no 2D bar code like Washington's) and compute the person's age in numbers big enough to read easily. The real reason for the scanners (not that bouncers don't have enough trouble counting past 21,) was so patrons' addresses could be captured and sold to gawd knows which marketing company or list.

Good eggs, bad eggs, jumbo eggs, AAA, AA -- all eggs will better fit into their appropriately designed containers as, concurrently, your palette of colors fades to grey.

I dunno what Lloyd's talking about, but Lark Hawk is right: face recognition is terrible. I'll bet they have an error rate of 25% or more, both ways. Most gee-whiz hi-tech bio-recognition stuff is garbage; you can beat some eyeball recognition thingies with a photograph, fingerprint gizmos with a piece of tape, etc. etc. And that's where people are focusing on being recognized, not swinging through a bar.

Sounds like marketing to me.

This technology assumes people don't gain/lose weight, shave/grow facial hair, let their hair grow/get it cut, get nose jobs, etc.

it's just another attempt to take the human factor out of the fine art of bouncing. if bars paid bouncers well, gave them benefits, treated them right, then they'd stay employed in one place longer and spot the troublemakers they kicked out last week themselves.

So if I go to a club and I have the same features as some troublemaker, I'm gonna get bounced?

Fuck this idea.

Isn't sneaking back into a bar you've been 86'd from one of our God given rights as Americans?

Hey, Earl's on the Ave, remember when you kicked me out for being 18, well I made it up to you by puking all over you when I turned 21. Such fond memories.

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