Why Are Gay Bars Building Databases of Their Patrons?

“A venue cannot claim to be a safe space while feeding its patrons’ data to a third party database.”

Castro bars are running PatronScan at the door, which logs names, birthdates, photos, gender, and timestamps. Flagged patrons stay in the system for five years, and the bans it enforces have averaged over 19 years. In Sacramento alone the vendor collected on 561,087 people in five months of 2018. A list of who walked into a gay bar and when is exactly the file nobody should be keeping, and California’s ID privacy law says most of it is not allowed anyway.