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Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk

nytimes.com

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Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk

#21

Post by onetimemanytime »

I think this is going to happen, regardless of ACLU or whether Amazon pulls the service or not. Face recognition will be refined and sold as a package. Probably every cop car will have it one day. Courts will say that when you're in public you give certain privacy rights away etc. etc. Expect cop cars next to you if you missed a court date or violated parole.

The scariest part is the DNA fishing expeditions through cousins like https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2018/04/27... . They find a hair in a crime scene and 17 years later, more or less, you need to prove that you didn't do it. Maybe the victim was next to you at Starbucks or picked your hair with his /her shoes. Good luck

Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk

#22

Post by thinkling »

Currently you have to pull out your phone and use their app to enter the Amazon Go stores (the no-cashiers convenience stores).

Interesting to think that Amazon could use their face recognition tech instead to let you enter without doing anything, just like you exit "without friction". You'd just need an app the first time for them to learn your face.

They haven't done this. That means they either think it'd be perceived as too creepy, or the tech isn't good enough yet.

Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk

#24

Post by ProAm »

teachrdan wrote: post #20

Key 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…

Is it me or has Amazon ever cared about customers, always marketshare and profit margin. I've never felt Amazon was a pro-consumer company, merely a side-effect that they need consumers.

Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk

#25

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

eatbitseveryday wrote: post #16
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #10

I 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 la…

I agree with you generally. But I differ in the sense that my default belief is that these technologies are over hyped and cannot provide the scale of performance or detail of prediction that could make them effective as oppressive surveillance tools, at least not for a long time.

Mostly they are “surveillance theater” akin to useless (but costly) TSA surveillance. The way it interacts with society is by being vague and scary, not by actually enabling truly scary scales of surveillance.

Another way to look at it is that the government buys these contracts and services and rarely holds the provider accountable, perhaps especially in fields like machine learning where people can more easily make political arguments out of the debate over whether it’s working or not.

Since agencies are happy to drop big money even when the technology does not work then providers like Rekognition actually do not have incentives to invest in making the scale of accurate surveillance larger. Why would they when they’ll make more money yanking an engineer off of a material project like that and slotting them to work on some braindead TED talk sort of demoware that gets them the next big contract?

I worry about the spread of these surveillance contracts more as a taxpayer seeing government money wasted that could help people through much simpler means than I do as a concerned citizen who sees the danger in Orwellian surveillance.

Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk

#26

Post by pnathan »

draugadrotten wrote: post #14

Police 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.

Yes, the laws should move at the pace of technical capabilities. That's the big takeaway here. Not asking the cops to live in the '70s technologically, which is often the (effective) ask from privacy groups.

Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk

#27

Post by SubiculumCode »

Spooky23 wrote: post #12

Why? 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…

When all they probably needed was a real drug rehab program.

Edit: Just saying because almost all petty thievery is committed to get goods to trade for drugs.

Edit 2: Also, I'm not saying that this wasn't a good use of home surveillance, or to whatever parent's comment referred, although (s)he is probably wrong that they won't be back next week. I have acquaintances that having got hooked on meth, began stealing cars. Once caught, I thought she'd be put in prison or a drug rehab program. No. She basically served no time because the judge and everyone else know she was just a junky and there was no funding for rehab, and little room in prison.

Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk

#28

Post by pnathan »

sykh wrote: post #5

At 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…

Yes, we need some substantial acts of congress including and up to a Constitutional amendment to properly handle technology.

I still shake my head that "wiretap" laws are what are being used (last I knew a few years ago) - why not have a clean law to address modern communication capabilities and proper privacy & court interests? :-/

Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk

#29

Post by lainga »

ProAm wrote: post #24
teachrdan wrote: post #20

Key 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…

Is it me or has Amazon ever cared about customers, always marketshare and profit margin. I've never felt Amazon was a pro-consumer company, merely a side-effect that they need consumers.

On the contrary as far as Amazon-the-online-store goes: they are notoriously pro-customer to the detriment of small retailers.

Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk

#30

Post by bsenftner »

thisisit wrote: post #17

Does anyone know how good Amazon Rekognition actually is? If the technology is not good then it might post more problems than it solves.

I write facial recognition software. If those example facial images and their match scores are any indication of their systems accuracy, it is on the poor side.
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