Madison Square Garden created a file called "Facial Recognition Activists.docx" containing information about people who publicly opposed the venue's use of facial recognition technology, 404 Media reported on June 23, 2026. The document collected tweets and comments from those critics — essentially a watch list focused not on event attendees, but on people arguing against the technology itself.

One person profiled was Evan Greer, who runs the digital rights organization Fight for the Future. Fight for the Future noted that MSG's file on Greer contains a misgendering error — a mistake suggesting the document was put together carelessly rather than with careful research.

This discovery adds to a controversy that has been building for years. MSG's facial recognition system first became widely known in late 2022, when news emerged that the venue was using it to bar entry to lawyers whose law firms were suing the company. The New York Times reported that MSG had placed those attorneys on a blacklist enforced by facial recognition at the doors — meaning someone with a valid ticket could be turned away because of who they worked for. New York's Attorney General asked MSG for information about this practice in January 2023, and City Council members questioned MSG officials about it in February 2023.

None of these challenges stopped MSG from using the system. If anything, the newly discovered file suggests the venue became more protective of the program rather than more transparent about it.

Using facial recognition to exclude someone and keeping files on critics are two different things. But together, they paint a picture: the technology is being used for institutional control rather than safety, and people who speak out against it face tracking. It is unclear whether MSG intended to use these files to make future entry decisions.

This situation reveals a larger problem: facial recognition at private venues like MSG exists in a legal gray zone in New York and most of the United States. Venue owners can decide for themselves who to exclude. They must disclose when they collect facial data, but they do not need to ask permission first. This permissive environment means a venue can monitor who enters, create exclusion lists based on job or profession, and — as this case shows — extend monitoring to critics, all without breaking any clear law. The 2023 inquiry by New York's Attorney General does not appear to have resulted in any public penalty.

From a technical standpoint, facial recognition at venue entrances is no longer a hard problem — the cameras, the software, and the systems exist and work. What MSG's story really exposes is the harder problem: governance. Nobody has clear rules about who should be on a watch list, why they should be there, who checks those decisions, or what happens when the system is used for something other than safety. The dossier on activists shows what happens when an organization answers those questions by prioritizing its own interests.

Advocacy groups like Fight for the Future have called for years for a ban on facial recognition in law enforcement and commercial settings. MSG's conduct gives them a real, documented example: a security tool that started as venue safety but became something closer to political surveillance. Whether Congress or New York regulators treat this disclosure as a reason to enforce new rules, or whether it simply becomes a news story, remains to be seen. But the file exists, and its name is now part of the public record.