Six Ottawa bars now Scan your ID & take Your Photo to get into their bars

[bmdbley'sBro]

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Six Ottawa bars now Scan your ID & take Your Photo to get into their bars

The days of sneaking into bars could be drawing to an end.

So far, six nightclubs in the Byward Market have installed new security measures to ensure the safety of patrons and staff, with more planning to adopt the system throughout the summer.

Pier 21, Pub 101, The Drink, My Condo, Liquor Store and Industry Room have installed new technology to scan photo IDs and take pictures of patrons before they enter the bar.

Stephen Monuk of York Entertainment, the group that manages all of the bars with the system, said it is not an infringement on privacy, but a tool to help gather basic information for safety reasons.

“There have been concerns about privacy issues, and there are none with this system at all,” he said.

“There’s probably more risk of people giving away information at an ATM or buying something online than with what we’re doing.”

The ID scanner collects nothing more than a person’s age and name — automatically calculating an age without collecting a date of birth. Their address is also withheld from the system.

A photo of the person is also taken to correspond with the data provided.

Monuk said the information disappears after 24 hours, providing the person isn’t wanted in relation to any incident.

“The staff love it, they think it’s great. Anything to help make their job as simple as possible,” he said. “And the customers think it’s a great idea. We’ve had no negative feedback whatsoever.”

Along with patrons, staff at bars are scanned to ensure full security.

“It’s just about individual safety for the customers and the staff,” he said.

Similar security systems have been in place in British Columbia, but Monuk said these measures are fairly new to Ontario, and a first for Ottawa.

“One of the reasons Ottawa keeps coming up as one of the No. 1 places to live is because people feel very safe here. And we want to continue that,” he said

http://www.ottawasun.com/2012/05/11/...on-bar-patrons

wtf

comments are worth reading - as they give me some hope, some awake people

[calegrant]

How often is you picture taken on CCTV in a large city in a given day? How many of us host pictures of ourselves online? I imagine we've all voluntarily given away vastly larger amounts about ourselves when it benefited us, but are up in arms when a business expects to take a little themselves. I don't agree with it, but I'm not going to do anything more than refuse to go there. Everyone has the option to avoid this as well.

[325isdan]

See no issue with this.

[sirex]

oh here we go, now all the people are going to talk about how "well I dont care I have nothing to hide"

[calegrant]

Anyone who takes that attitude is a moron and likely to bend over and receive whatever is handed to them. It's like the response I got from many people when I asked about cops demanding ID. "Just give them the ID, stop making their job more difficult", screw that.

Scanning ID's and taking pictures however is nothing new and has been going on for years, with scanning ID's being a decade old thing now. Whether or not they abide by it I cannot say, but bars are required to delete all data stored about a patron past the 24 hour mark unless they were involved in an altercation and then they can be blacklisted by all bars using the same software.