LGBTQ+ bars in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood are using PatronScan, a system that scans IDs and potentially photographs patrons. While PatronScan claims it doesn’t perform facial recognition in North America, its business model involves collecting and sharing patron data, including names, dates of birth, and entry times, across participating venues. This practice raises significant privacy concerns, particularly in light of California’s ID privacy law, which restricts businesses from retaining or using information from scanned IDs beyond verification, legal requirements, or fraud prevention. The article highlights past legislative investigations into PatronScan’s data collection practices, which involved retaining data for extended periods and sharing it among venues, leading to concerns about potential immigration consequences for flagged individuals. Despite the 2018 law clarifying restrictions on ID scanning data, PatronScan continues to operate a system that appears to violate these regulations, prompting calls for venues to revert to traditional visual ID checks to protect patron privacy, especially in LGBTQ+ spaces.