In Soviet Russia, bar keep tabs on YOU!
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2026
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Privacy
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Wow. Minority Report continues to come true.
As well as verifying ages, ScanTek boasts "collect marketing information from IDs and drivers licences, which business owners can use to target specific demographics with promotions"
And here we have the real reason why they want the scanning
Added security to keep the random asshole out, sure, but the marketing is the point. Fuck that shit, if rather not go out to a bar than this
Insurance companies are going to love that data. “Oh, Mr.Doe, your application says you don’t drink but once a year. However, we see you went to Moe’s Tavern twice last year. Sorry, but we can’t cover the cost of your medicine with these application discrepancies present.”
I don’t drink and go to bars. Sure I could show that’s a silly reason for a denial. Live music doesn’t require alcohol.
Hearing aids? Denied.
Yeah but it’s going to be more insidious than that. A few points in a vector somewhere in a large model used to personalise a quote. You typically never know what they fuck you about. Even here in Europe the right of access provided by gdpr might not reveal that bullshit: once the model has been training the atomic data is eventually purged…
Here in Slovakia I just show my ID to a bartender if he has any doubts about my age. And then he deduces my age based on the date of birth on the ID.
Here in America it's the same. Some places always check everyone, some just check young looking people. I don't love it, but it's better than face scanning
This is actually pretty minimal in Australia (as someone who has worked in Hospitality for 20+ years)
Very few venues actually require this to enter, the majority check at the door or once you ae inside the venue.
Edit: Some owners of multiple venues have rolled these systems out in the past that I've seen, generally ones that have seen a rise in patron issues. Its handy that if someone has caused issues in one place they won't get allowed into another; but it's not worth the privacy risk in my eyes.
Weren’t they just complaining that the youth of today isn’t going out anymore?
Oblivious idiots!
Sure enough it all that data collected flows back to the US oligarchy / fascism machine - Thiel, Bezos, Zuck, Musk.
Something tells me the demographics don't overlap very much. I'm betting that most people going to a club already have and use a Facebook account. Unless there's a massive cultural difference among young adults in Australia.
The worst part is all our data is stored on American servers run by megacorpos. ID information scanned by venue terminals is one, but even private health records and sensitive government documents are being chucked into Amazon S3, Azure/OneDrive and Dropbox.
The government should be prioritising secure, independent digital infrastructure but they're too busy giving our tax dollars to foreign consulting firms so they can build bad websites.
Far from being a passive participant in our information being disseminated everywhere, they are actively undermining our privacy everywhere. They want our information, all of it, so they've made sure they can get it without warrants or judges or oversight, but so too can everyone else.
They've had their priorities all screwed up. That's what was so frustrating about the president railing against the "deep state," the bureaucracies are a problem and do need to be reigned in, he tapped into the anger on that, and trade, and will make those things worse not better. Only able to because the opposition party sold out to the rich and powerful.
Every club I have ever been in has never been worth the price of admission
Going to the wrong ones mate. The best ones are cheap.
I take a illegal rave over this garbage anytime!
How is the most dystopian nanny state news always coming out from Australia first, and then the rest of the world rushes to copy them?
small island, basically brainwashed to be bootlicking liberals. taught from our past we are bore from criminals to allow the people to imagine themselves as free, while our politics are only a few years behind the fascist rhetoric of the USA.
this gives Australia the perfect environment to perform little 'tests' on the population to see how a white liberal audience will react.
I remember dance clubs taking photos of id's back in the 90's. first time I encountered it and I was like. WTF! thing is back then they did not have the equipment and infrastructure to hold it long term and were not part of a chain or had been bought up by holding companies. It was the same with security cameras that at most kept video for a few days and sometimes only one. Once we got to never delete data it became a nightmare.
This would just deter me from going to those establishments. I guess they're doing so well they won't miss my business.
Most people can't afford bars anymore anyway. It's a massive outlay getting drunk on the town nowadays.
It'll be grocery stores and the DMV soon as well.
Many states already sell your drivers license information.
It's been like this for years in some areas, i think it was in response to the one punch law thing, phrased as if you harm someone else you are banned at them all.
ID scanning has been a thing at clubs in Canada for a long time. There was no marketing associated, but I imagine it was an easy way to identify people banned from the bar.
It happened to me for the first time at Calgary Stampede this summer. I refused and was denied entry to a concert I'd already paid for.
I don't think it's legal in Quebec under provincial privacy laws.
In my state, they haven't had me come in to update my photo in nearly 10 years. I have both lost and then gained weight in that time, I have been balding, my hair is graying, and I have to wear glasses at all times while my photo doesn't have me in glasses. I have never had a passport and have only now been looking into getting one considering apparently a Real ID just isn't enough proof for citizenship apparently.
I can't imagine that the old blurry photo on my license would easily be matched to my current face. Seems like it would be easier for a human to make that determination.
I think it’s more that a company now knows you attended that bar, and everything about you listed on your license. I went to a bar a few days ago and they scanned my ID with some mystery app, undoubtedly selling that info to someone.
For sure, but it's also silly that it's probably not great at what it does. So we're sacrificing our privacy for something a human could do well enough on their own being replaced by something that might actually be even worse at being accurate.