A national digital rights group issued a safety advisory this week naming Badlands, Toad Hall, and The Mix — urging Pride attendees to make informed choices. The bars and the device maker are pushing back, but the company's public claims contradict earlier reporting about what the system actually collects.

The advisory landed ahead of Pride weekend, naming three nightclubs on or near Castro Street: Badlands, Toad Hall, and The Mix at 4086 18th St. Fight for the Future, a national digital rights organization, issued the warning Thursday, urging SF Pride attendees to make informed choices about where they celebrate — on the eve of a weekend that organizers expect will bring roughly a million people to the neighborhood.

The devices at issue are Patronscan kiosks, manufactured by a Canadian company, which require door staff to scan a patron's ID and take a digital photograph before allowing entry. Fight for the Future's Evan Greer framed the concern in explicitly political terms: "It's really not a safe time to start making databases of queer people that could be accessed by the Trump administration, by a private company, by a bad actor." Greer noted that similar concerns over Patronscan have been raised at Madison Square Garden in New York.

Patronscan responded Thursday with a detailed statement asserting that its system does not use facial recognition, does not collect biometric data, and deletes all ID and photo data in California within 21 days, in compliance with state law. That position sits in direct tension with reporting by Gazetteer SF — which The Dissent covered in June — documenting the company's Guard+ product as collecting names, addresses, gender data, and behavioral observations from patrons, and linking them across a nine-venue "flag network." Patronscan has not publicly addressed that discrepancy.

The general manager of The Mix, identified only as Nick by NBC Bay Area, defended the technology by invoking a specific incident: last April, a customer followed an employee after their shift and attacked them near the Castro Theatre. "It keeps my customers safe. We've had no bar fights, vandalism and theft is down," he said, adding that the bar would drop the product immediately if it found that patron data was being shared with third parties.

A regular at The Mix, Eric Norman, told NBC Bay Area that his reaction evolved as he learned more. "This is way more than just verifying my ID," he said. "The more I learned, it went from me being annoyed to an actual concern, and feeling like we shouldn't have this technology in use." Norman said he was calling for dialogue with bar owners and city government, not a boycott: "I would never encourage anyone to not go into a bar."

San Francisco's 2019 facial recognition ban — the first citywide ordinance of its kind — applies only to government agencies. Private venues operate entirely outside it. That gap is what Fight for the Future's advisory is pressing on, in a weekend when the Castro will be as full as it gets.