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June 29th, 2024

'It's completely invasive': New app lets you spy on SF bars

A San Francisco startup, 2Night, offers an app livestreaming local venues for patrons to assess crowd levels. Privacy concerns arise due to recording without consent, prompting adjustments like face blurring. Users' opinions on app convenience vary.

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'It's completely invasive': New app lets you spy on SF bars

A startup in San Francisco, formerly known as NightEye and now called 2Night, has launched an app that livestreams local bars and venues to help patrons gauge the vibe and crowd levels before heading out. The app features a network of cameras in various venues across the city, allowing users to check real-time footage and upcoming events. Despite the app's intention to enhance the nightlife experience, concerns have been raised about privacy and consent issues. Some patrons feel uncomfortable being recorded without their permission, while venue owners like White Rabbit have expressed frustration at being listed on the app without consent. In response to criticism, 2Night's founders have made adjustments to blur faces in the livestreams and ensure that recordings are not saved. While some customers appreciate the convenience of the app, others find it invasive. The app creators aim to address privacy concerns while promoting local businesses and events in the city.

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Link Icon 13 comments
By @pm90 - 5 months
I use Google Maps feature where it shows you if a venue is busy or not a lot. I feel like Google maps could easily make this feature more accurate and widely available and completely obliterate these fucking weirdos who want to livestream and broadcast bars.

As someone who likes to go to bars/nightclubs, blurring isn’t a solution. Its not just random people, think about crazy exes that can recognize you from your clothes/build. This is a really dumb idea.

By @eigenhombre - 5 months
The mention of Jamie Zawinski[1] caught my eye; quoted in the article as owner of DNA Lounge in SF, he is probably known for many other things by HN dwellers: namer of Mozilla, one of Netscape's initial employees, Lisp hacker during the 80s/90s, and featured in Peter Seibel's book, Coders at Work (which is why the name stood out for me).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski

Edit: typo

By @petesergeant - 5 months
Feels like you should be able to use some basic image recognition to build out a privacy-preserving version, perhaps providing a cartoon rendering of the crowd. Surely the key information here that's wanted is "how many people, and what demographic"
By @jrflowers - 5 months
I like this app that curates a list of bars to never enter or go near. Cutting out the subjective nature of reviews to establish “terrible venue ran by staggeringly stupid individuals” and replacing it with an objectively correct list of volunteer entries is very efficient
By @underseacables - 5 months
I like this idea. I paid to get into a bar in Philadelphia, and it was completely dead. That could've been a special case, but it would've been really cool to just open an app and see inside the bar and say oh, there's nobody there, so I'm not going to go.

Reminds me of traffic cameras.

By @OJFord - 5 months
Seems like 'blurred audio' would be better? ('blurred' such that you can't hear a conversation even if it's quiet and the speaker's close to the microphone) plus a couple of photos of the sort that probably exist on any website or Google Maps entry anyway to show 'typical' and give an idea of the aesthetic/vibe.

Public CCTV does just seem weird, I'm not sure what you could do to it to fix it that would keep it useful. Maybe pretty extreme blurring, but think they'd have to be really established to the point that everyone expects it everywhere, and knows & trusts how extreme the blurring is. Otherwise when you first hear of it you'll be on edge until you've seen it yourself however much it takes to trust how blurred it is...

By @hindsightbias - 5 months
This would actually be useful for me in the inverse case.

Maybe I could macro on this for the introverts. But what is the correct max of introverts before a bar becomes “hopping”?

By @stavros - 5 months
I love jwz's comments about the app.
By @_DeadFred_ - 5 months
Seems like a huge liability risk from predators using this to take advantage of identifying inebriated potential victims.
By @uyzstvqs - 5 months
Is this supposed app actually real? The only reference to it online appears to be this article.
By @xeno42 - 5 months
Isn't this a dupe of SceneTap from a decade+ ago?
By @LarsAlereon - 5 months
It seems like you could easily address privacy concerns while keeping the app useful by automatically blurring faces or just lowering the resolution. I really love the idea for this app because the number one challenge when going out is finding venues that aren't too crowded to enjoy, trying to tell based on recent visit metrics helps but is sometimes misleading.