Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
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Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
#2> If Rekognition is not reined in, its use is also certain to spread
The tech isn't new and certainly not limited to Amazon, it's going to exist regardless of whether Amazon wants to be the one providing the APIs
Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
#3> If Rekognition is not reined in, its use is also certain to spread The tech isn't new and certainly not limited to Amazon, it's going to exist regardless of whether Amazon wants to be the one providing the APIs
I agree that it's going to happen with or without Amazon but I'd rather not support this system.
Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
#4> If Rekognition is not reined in, its use is also certain to spread The tech isn't new and certainly not limited to Amazon, it's going to exist regardless of whether Amazon wants to be the one providing the APIs
I agree that it's going to happen with or without Amazon but I'd rather not support this system.
Limiting the power of surveillance is only going to come in the form of passing laws, there's always somebody willing to build the tech for the military industrial complex. It's lucrative
Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
#5At some point in time we Americans are going to have to come to grips with the computational abilities of the state. There are way too few safeguards in the system and the Bill of Rights does not seem to be adequate in dealing with the new reality that private companies can acquire a vast amount of information on us and thereby sell it to law enforcement. Law enforcement can use privately obtained information without a search warrant [1].
What happens with false positives? What's the recourse? This very real, pernicious circumstance is rarely well thought out in advance. The no-fly list is a great example of what happens when there are not sufficient safeguards in the system.
The reality of the computational state is not going to go away. As technology progresses the informational capacity of the state increases. Are we prepared for this? At present I think not. See the reaction to the NSA warrantless surveillance of phone calls. Our leaders for the most part decried the leaking of the surveillance rather than the act of the surveillance.
[1] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/searches-private-cit...
Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
#6At some point in time we Americans are going to have to come to grips with the computational abilities of the state. There are way too few safeguards in the system and the Bill of Rights does not seem to be adequate in dealing with the new reality that private companies can acquire a vast amount of information on us and thereby sell it to law enforcement. Law enforcement can use privately obtained information without…
It's the leaking they fear most. The implementation of surveillance technologies is unavoidable. Ban them all you like, they will be used regardless. Privacy is dead, and nobody can save it.
What we DO have a shot at controlling is what is done with the data. Probably the best hope for safeguarding things like freedom and democracy lies in making surveillance data transparent and public.
Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
#7At some point in time we Americans are going to have to come to grips with the computational abilities of the state. There are way too few safeguards in the system and the Bill of Rights does not seem to be adequate in dealing with the new reality that private companies can acquire a vast amount of information on us and thereby sell it to law enforcement. Law enforcement can use privately obtained information without…
> There are way too few safeguards in the system and the Bill of Rights does not seem to be adequate in dealing with the new reality that private companies can acquire a vast amount of information on us and thereby sell it to law enforcement. Law enforcement can use privately obtained information without a search warrant [1].
Ultimately what the Bill of Rights means is determined by the Supreme Court. It could limit the Third Party Doctrine, which is really what gives the government warrantless access to that information, in light of new technology and social circumstances.
Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that it's going to happen with or without Amazon but I'd rather not support this system.
Limiting the power of surveillance is only going to come in the form of passing laws, there's always somebody willing to build the tech for the military industrial complex. It's lucrative
Law enforcement is not part of the military.
Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
#9At some point in time we Americans are going to have to come to grips with the computational abilities of the state. There are way too few safeguards in the system and the Bill of Rights does not seem to be adequate in dealing with the new reality that private companies can acquire a vast amount of information on us and thereby sell it to law enforcement. Law enforcement can use privately obtained information without…
> There are way too few safeguards in the system and the Bill of Rights does not seem to be adequate in dealing with the new reality that private companies can acquire a vast amount of information on us and thereby sell it to law enforcement. Law enforcement can use privately obtained information without a search warrant [1]. Ultimately what the Bill of Rights means is determined by the Supreme Court. It could limit…
We could rely on the Supreme Court but I'm skeptical that they will put the public interest above the government's interests. I think a new Bill of Rights will be needed if there is sufficient outcry over abuses.
Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
#10I find this article a bit funny, and see it mostly as hype.
I worked very revently on a large internal face detection service for a legal and compliance application at a large US company.
Being pragmatic engineers, the first thing we did was to pilot test Rekognition against an in-house prototype built by modifying some open source deep learning approaches.
Rekognition performed so poorly compared to our prototype (which was not state of the art or anything, just good enough for our company’s bespoke conpliance problem). It was just so bad. Overall intersection-over-union scores on our training & acceptance data was really poor, and perhaps worse, the latency of the requests to Rekognition was abysmal and completely unusable for us, especially for images that had a large number of identifiable faces (Rekognition service calls isually timed out at 5 seconds and returned whatever amount of faces it could process).
Our very simple prototype could fully process upwards of 30 faces with 1 second of latency, and so if using a similar 5 second timeout limit, we could process around an order of magnitude more faces (which happens more often than you think, e.g. crowds, people in public places).
I just could not believe that the web service, backed by a team surely comprised of at least hundreds of top Amazon engineers, was so slow and inaccurate.
We didn’t even bother trying to price out how expensive it would be for our expected amount of throughput, because we knew from a simple accuracy and per-request latency point of view, Rekognition just couldn’t cut it.
As I’ve moved into a more lead role with machine learning teams, this experience really opened my eyes to how seductive cloud solutions can appear to non-technical managers.
They will act like severe bean counters when they see a high salary request from a really experienced machine learning engineer, but they won’t even bother with due diligence or estimating cost-per-request or cost-per-unit-accuracy for dropping money on a cloud service.
Instead of empowering a small team to do something much more cost-effective for the company, they’ll ball at their internal engineers while setting a pile of money ablaze.