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Mom of Girl Scout removed from Radio City Music Hall over her JOB thanks to facial recognition tech

December 24, 2022 | | Print Article

Thanks to facial recognition technology coupled with pettiness, one mother was recently unable to watch a Christmas-themed show at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall with her daughter and her daughter’s Girl Scouts troop.

It turns out the mother, Kelly Conlon, works for a New Jersey law firm — Davis, Saperstein and Salomon — “which for years has been involved in personal injury litigation against a restaurant venue,” according to local station WNBC.

Here’s the problem: The restaurant venue is reportedly owned by Madison Square Garden (MSG) Entertainment, the same company that owns Radio City Music Hall.

And apparently, MSG is one very petty company.

According to WNBC, when Conlon arrived at Radio City Music Hall with her daughter and the Girl Scouts troop the weekend after Thanksgiving, she was approached by a team of security guards who already knew who she was and didn’t want her there.

“They knew my name before I told them. They knew the firm I was associated with before I told them. And they told me I was not allowed to be there,” she told the station.

How did they know who she was? Because of facial recognition technology.

“I believe they said that our recognition picked you up,” Conlon explained.

And so what happened was that when Conlon arrived at Radio City Music Hall, a camera identified her by her facial features. And then, once MSG staffers figured out who she works for, they apparently sicced the guards on her.

But there’s a problem. Though Conlon works for Davis, Saperstein and Salomon, she’s never been involved in the MSG case. In fact, she doesn’t even work in New York.

“I don’t practice in New York. I’m not an attorney that works on any cases against MSG,” she told WNBC.

However, this apparently doesn’t matter to MSG.

“MSG instituted a straightforward policy that precludes attorneys pursuing active litigation against the Company from attending events at our venues until that litigation has been resolved,” the company said in a statement to WNBC.

“While we understand this policy is disappointing to some, we cannot ignore the fact that litigation creates an inherently adverse environment. All impacted attorneys were notified of the policy, including Davis, Saperstein and Salomon, which was notified twice,” the statement continued.

Neither Conlon nor her colleagues appear to care too much for this policy.

“This whole scheme is a pretext for doing collective punishment on adversaries who would dare sue MSG in their multi-billion dollar network,” colleague Sam Davis, a partner at the firm where she works, said to WNBC.

“I was just a mom taking my daughter to see a Christmas show. I did wait outside…It was embarrassing, it was mortifying,” Conlon herself said.

In a separate statement to the New York Post, she added that while her daughter and her peers watched the show, she was forced to just walk around outside f0r 90 minutes straight.

“I was caught off-guard – I just complied with what they asked me to do and I left my daughter inside the venue with her troops. I had driven multiple people in my car so I couldn’t leave to go home,” she told the paper.

Davis, for his part, appears to believe MSG may have violated the law.

“The liquor license that MSG got requires them to admit members of the public, unless there are people who would be disruptive who constitute a security threat,” he told WNBC.

“Taking a mother, separating a mother from her daughter and Girl Scouts she was watching over — and to do it under the pretext of protecting any disclosure of litigation information — is absolutely absurd. The fact they’re using facial recognition to do this is frightening. It’s un-American to do this,” he added.

He’s not alone in feeling fright over this usage of facial recognition technology. In fact, there’s now a whole movement of people who say that the usage of such technology should be banned outright for everybody.

“We’re talking about a powerful corporation’s petty grievance. But it’s just really scary to think about the ways this technology could enable powerful individuals, companies and institutions to target critics, business rivals, journalists, love interests — you name it,” one of the folks featured above, Evan Greer, said to The New York Times.

Greer is reportedly an activist with a digital rights group called Fight for the Future.

“Ms. Greer has called for a ban on the use of facial recognition in places of public accommodation, such as retail stores, bars and event venues,” according to the Times.

Republished with permission from American Wire News Service

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Vivek Saxena
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