Privacy advocates and musicians rallied outside Madison Square Garden on Friday, pushing for new legislation to prevent facial-recognition technology at the venue and other public spaces in New York City.
“MSG and its CEO, James Dolan, have been flagrantly abusing biotechnology,” City Council member Shahana Hanif said at the event on Friday, after leading a chant of “ban the scan.” In January, Hanif proposed a bill that would prohibit public venues from using biometric recognition tech such as Madison Square Garden’s facial-recognition systems.
Madison Square Garden is well-known for its biometric data collection practices. As WIRED has previously reported, fans who are critical of Dolan or the New York Knicks can end up on watch lists, their faces filed in MSG’s extensive database. In one instance, MSG security tracked the movements of a specific fan at a Knicks game down to the minute, cataloging their movements, who they spoke with, when they ate, and where they sat. Hundreds of lawyers involved in disputes with Dolan or Dolan-owned properties have been banned from Dolan’s venues, including a mother who was blocked from taking her daughter to a Radio City Music Hall show.
In July, WIRED reported that MSG also maintains a database that assigns risk scores to around 400 celebrities and VIPs. Some of the dossiers also include the race and sexual orientation of those who attend the arena. MSG filed a defamation lawsuit against WIRED later that month.
At the rally on Friday, Hanif was joined by Brooklyn-based country musician Paisley Fields, a representative from the democratic-socialist working group NYC DSA Tech Action, and members of the digital rights advocacy group Fight for the Future.
Hanif’s “Ban the Scan” bill now has 27 endorsements, more than half of the City Council. Members are in talks with speaker Julie Menin about advancing the legislation, according to Hanif.
“People have been recognizing each other’s faces since the beginning of time—we just do it electronically,” an MSG spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
Hanif tells WIRED that, as a Muslim who grew up in post-9/11 New York, surveillance isn’t new. However, she says, many may not understand the extent of the surveillance that they’re exposed to simply by attending a Knicks game or a concert at Madison Square Garden or one of its associated venues. The fact that Dolan, who has a long relationship with President Donald Trump, is the one collecting the data worries Hanif even more.
“New Yorkers need to understand, right now, between AI and all these tools that are being sold to us as being for … our city’s safety, are actually making us less safe,” Hanif says.