Asking a company to please not sell something doesn't seem like a scalable approach. As long as there's a market someone will try to enter it. Either make it illegal for companies to sell this technology or illegal for police departments to buy it. It's a political matter.
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
#12Why? The surveillance is there.
I used this with some personal video surveillance to identify some thieves who were casing driveways to find cars to get into. Instead of wasting hours looking at footage, I was able to give the police excerpts that helped them identify the perp. Also, because of the circumstances and footage, they were able to charge him with a more serious crime than petit larceny, which means he won't be back next week.
It's an effective tool. If you're allowed to have a camera, you should be allowed to look at it with whatever means you want.
The reality is that the horse is out of the barn. The Federal government has been doing this type of surveillance either using facial or LPR data on interstate corridors since at least the 90s.
Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
#13Reminds me of the Palantir / New Orleans situation.
http://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/news/crime_police/art...
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predict...
Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
#14Police should be given full access to the latest technology. The criminals will have the latest tech. DNA, face recognition, speech recognition, big data, ML, AI, whatever comes next. However just like with guns and wiretaps, there should be laws controlling the appropriate use of these powerful tools to avoid becoming Big Brother.
Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
#15Asking a company to please not sell something doesn't seem like a scalable approach. As long as there's a market someone will try to enter it. Either make it illegal for companies to sell this technology or illegal for police departments to buy it. It's a political matter.
And this is ignoring the use cases that are 'for good'.
http://www.marinusanalytics.com/articles/2017/10/17/amazon-r...
Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
#16I 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 (w…
> 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).
Criticizing the technology's performance is tangential to the emergence of the technology on public streets, and its adoption by local governments for surveillance. It does not matter what performance it has now; I argue and predict it will improve, and then your statement becomes moot.
The issue is not how well it performs. The issue is allowing it to happen, and without trust from the people.
My fear is: government wants surveillance, and businesses pursue revenue, so there is no incentive among those two to question their actions.
Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
#17Does anyone know how good Amazon Rekognition actually is? If the technology is not good then it might post more problems than it solves.
Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
#18At 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.
Ban them all you like, they will be used regardless.
We'll see about that. I'd say legal bans are worth a try at least.
Privacy is dead, and nobody can save it.
If you keep repeating that to yourself as you go to sleep each night - by gosh, eventually it will become true.
Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
#19Police should be given full access to the latest technology. The criminals will have the latest tech. DNA, face recognition, speech recognition, big data, ML, AI, whatever comes next. However just like with guns and wiretaps, there should be laws controlling the appropriate use of these powerful tools to avoid becoming Big Brother.
In all honesty, we already have Big Brother.
All this does is allow his Little Brother to help him keep tabs on us.
Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
#20Key quotation: "Facial recognition is not new technology, but the [criticizing] organizations appear to be focusing on Amazon because of its prominence and what they see as a departure from the company’s oft-stated focus on customers."
This is an interesting side-effect of the success of AWS. Amazon's customers are not just individual consumers or even sellers anymore, but organizations on the scale of multinational corporations that rely on the cloud and national governments. Interesting to see how this will play out in future AWS offerings.