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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

#61

Post by dbliss »

Madmallard wrote: post #46
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…

Can you expand on "literally everyone is worse off", and I'll assume you meant literally in the colloquial sense, as an emphasis.

OP gave an example where he was better off. Do you mean that the trade-off is not worth risk/down side?

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

#62

Post by matwood »

mLuby wrote: post #11

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.

I agree it's a legal matter, but completely illegal is not realistic. What's needed is a legal/privacy framework that addresses these new technologies. Unfortunately, I have zero faith in the law makers to understand the technology enough to really do anything meaningful. Instead, we will probably have to wait for a SCOTUS case at some point in the future to define the legal side.

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

#63

Post by TuringNYC »

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…

Why? is already there.

Just because something is out there does not mean you want more of it.

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

#64

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

whoopdedo wrote: post #57
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

These surveillance theater and immature or improperly applied technologies do more than just waste tax dollars. For decades the courts allowed flawed hair analysis to be used as evidence. When it could result in innocent people being sent to prison, a fuss must be made that's stronger than just worrying about what it will cost.

That’s a fair point, which makes me feel even more convinced that we should be more focused on whether the technology actually works than whether it’s Orwellian.

Using Rekognition for this would be like hiring a fraudster construction company to build a local bridge. The bridge could collapse, nobody did publicly verifiable due diligence, and nobody would be held accountable. This could be the automated surveillance equivalent.

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

#65

Post by sebringj »

Being an app developer and producer this seems outrageous what you can do. If anyone takes a video or image, you can track other people's faces in the scene that may or may not be your users, can gather graph info about how they are related and essentially have a wrapped up motive/alibi etc about how a potential crime could have taken place using AI and auto deliver to authorities. All this from a non-opt-in mechanical turk approach where no user is compensated or willingly testifies. What the hell do you call that? A police state?

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

#66

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

cryoshon wrote: post #56
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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. you've never heard of the chinese police state's facial surveillance which they're using to throw countless uighurs in jail for stuff like jaywalking, i suppose? >as a concerned citizen who sees t…

But I do see danger. Both in the misapplication of this unproven tech, and in the opportunity cost of wasting public funds on it.

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

#67

Post by SubiculumCode »

coenhyde wrote: post #58
kchronic8 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me increase your rent so we can pay for said rehab program. If you say no, then you have no right to say anything.

Are you aware of how much money it costs society to send someone to prison? A LOT more than a rehab program. - You have direct cost of imprisonment ~$60k a year - The costs of prosecution (no idea what this costs though) - Once someone has been to prison they are much more likely to be involved in crime again, and become a repeat customer of the industrial prison complex - We loose a tax payer - The perp will have no…

Many people, unfortunately, want blood and 'justice', not helping hands and forgiveness for thieves. Perhaps if we highlight just how much 'torture' addicts feel as they go off drugs in a rehab hardliners might be convinced to support drub rehab as a fully funded public policy.

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

#68

Post by TuringNYC »

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…

Unfortunately the "cost" of poor performance is sometimes pushed to the public, or worse, subsets of the public. Consider the million-name-long restricted fly list of the last decade -- they were nice juicy profitable projects for corporations but the cost was borne by a subset of mostly innocent people sometimes lost all ability to fly. If the costs are compartmentalized enough, sometimes the general public doesnt care (see: NYC's Stop and Frisk policy.)

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

#69

Post by seanp2k2 »

amzn-throw wrote: post #42
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…

> backed by a team surely comprised of at least hundreds of top Amazon engineers, was so slow and inaccurate. You'd be surprised. Many many AWS services are launched by a single 2-pizza team (8-10 developers). It's in Amazon's DNA to act like a startup, ship something quickly, collect feedback, then iterate, and scale. Rekognition will get much better in time.

Also, from what I’ve been able to deduce, the AWS services are all just built on top of EC2 [un]modified open-source software until they reach a level of complexity where they roll their own, which leads to lots of issues that can take years to fix. Some things are telling, like banning two consecutive hyphens because something somewhere in that pipeline is shelling out.

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

#70

Post by mtgx »

Amazon has always been a pro-law enforcement company. Remember how they shut down Wikileak's site with a single call from Joe Lieberman? (not even an official law enforcement request)

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-webs...

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