Two San Francisco bars recently discontinued their use of Patronscan Guard+, an AI-powered facial recognition and surveillance technology that uses cameras and scanners to collect patrons’ personal data, including an image of their face and government-issued ID as well as their names, addresses, genders, and even patron behavior inside the venue.
Patronscan is used to flag “blacklisted” customers, track fake IDs, assist with criminal investigations, and alert other companies using its services about flagged patrons. However, opponents of the tech worry the collected data could help empower anti-LGBTQ+ attacks, especially amid the current administration’s persecution of LGBTQ+ people and their allies as terrorist extremists.
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“Effective immediately, we are pausing the use of Patronscan while we review our ID verification and security practices,” Brian Aranda, director of operations at both Toad Hall and Badlands, told the San Francisco Chronicle. “Our security teams will continue to thoroughly check IDs manually during this time. We appreciate everyone who has shared their concerns and remain committed to providing a safe and welcoming environment for all.”
Patronscan’s website says it doesn’t sell or share any patron’s personal information with third-party companies. But, despite its assurances that it doesn’t conduct facial recognition analysis and only stores patron’s data for 21 days (unless the patron requests the company to delete it beforehand), the company itself admitted that it saves the data of flagged patrons for anywhere from one to five years.
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“For bar and nightclub clients, we collect: full name, date of birth, gender (if available on ID), zip code (if available on ID), and expiry date (if available on ID). If an additional authenticity check is required, a venue can run a one-time comparison of the full address against publicly available information to confirm it is a real address (e.g. Google Maps),” the company wrote. “This comparison is not saved in our system and is not shared on our flag network. Patronscan limits data collection to only what is needed to verify age, avoid an inaccurate match to our known flag list, and complete formal data requests made in connection with a reported crime.”
“Our venues in The Castro represent a community that has fought hard for the right to exist freely and joyfully. We want to help protect that. That’s why we’re here,” the company added.
Toad Hall and Badlands were just two of nine bars in the city’s Castro area using Patronscan, including The Mix bar. Despite outdoor signage warning about the use of the technology, patrons of these bars told the media in June that they were unaware that the bars would photograph and store images of their faces. It’s unclear if The Mix bar or other Castro venues will continue to use the technology.
Sarah Phillips, campaign director at digital rights organization Fight for the Future, calls use of the technology at LGBTQ+ venues “a complete betrayal”; the group has been warning against it for years.
“As we speak, the federal government and anti-LGBTQ actors across the country are putting together databases of trans people and attacking our community in every way imaginable,” Phillips said in a statement shared with LGBTQ Nation. “Gay bars should be a space where we can gather without the fear of dangerous and invasive surveillance technology that has historically been weaponized against vulnerable communities.”
In April, the Department of Justice listed, among types of “domestic terrorists,” people whose “views [are] associated with anti-Americanism … anti-Christianity … extremism on gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
The FBI’s Joint Mission Center, made up of 10 federal investigative agencies, said it would work to counter these fomenters of domestic terrorism by “integrating intelligence, operational support, and financial analysis to proactively identify networks and prosecute domestic terrorist and related criminal actors.”
LGBTQ+ people and allies worry the federal government and its sympathetic agents may try to obtain data on LGBTQ+ communities in order to persecute them as a national threat. The current presidential administration has already used legal and political pressure (and false pretexts) to try and get sensitive, identifying personal information on transgender people, their families, journalists, voters, Social Security recipients, and public critics.
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