Why is today the day for backlash? They showcased this at re:Invent for all to see, and the obvious use was for law enforcement and surveillance. Yet another surveillance issue we're up in arms about today and won't care about tomorrow.
Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
101–110 of 256 posts
Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
#102They are NOT selling a service that identifies people from data sets other than the police's supplied data sets. It is not inappropriate for police to be able to determine who they are interacting with if that person is a known criminal. The cat is out of the bag and is already something the police could do themselves. The real fear is when they are able to source commercially available information from linked in, fa…
the issue isn't that the police should not know about specific criminals, but when police overstep their authority and defy their own rules/laws in order to profile (sometimes racially) community members who have not been charged of crimes.
for a specific case, I can point to Portland's own suspected gang member list: http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2017/09/portlan...
thankfully, it was required to be purged 2 years ago.
unfortunately, that didn't stop them, and an audit found that the same department was ignoring the rules and laws, and keeping an additional secret list to profile community members: http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2018/03/police_...
these are not necessarily criminals, and it is inappropriate for police to be using automated surveillance to track or monitor them.
Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
But I do see danger. Both in the misapplication of this unproven tech, and in the opportunity cost of wasting public funds on it.
then why work on it when it's bound for abuse either way?
How many technologies can we name where this question does not apply?
The answer is always the same: "Because the potential for benefit outweighs the potential for abuse."
Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Whatever means you want" just has to not include matching to a database of suspicious people that are not currently under investigation for a real crime. Or to something with a floating definition like "terrorist". Which it won't. Just because Washington County says it's not currently being used for mass surveillance doesn't mean it won't be in the future or for other departments.
I know it’s cliche to bring up in these examples but there was an unintended negative outcome to Germany requiring people to register and pay some of their taxes to their church before ww2. The Nazis used that information to collect up and brand Jewish people and ultimately kill them. It is hard to imagine this tech will solely be used for good forever.
Los Angeles police already use gang databases to fault people for being in the "wrong" part of the city based on their database entry. This stuff is gonna turn into some kinda crazy 21st century internet apartheid.
Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is not inappropriate for police to be able to determine who they are interacting with if that person is a known criminal. Everyone is a criminal. You commit multiple crimes a day if you're like most people. There absolutely should be a clear delineation between what is possible and what is allowed when considering state surveillance. The 4th amendment: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, hous…
Reasonable people can disagree on the definition of "unreasonable," however. Is it "unreasonable" for the Amber Alert system to co-opt the eyes and attention of ten thousand citizens around a kidnapped child? Hard to say. Most people seem to think 'no.' If that system could co-opt camera feeds instead of human attention, we could get most (all?) of the benefits of the existing Amber Alert without having to burn civil…
And why stop at Amber alerts once the resources to perform the search no longer complain or question oddities about the alert?
Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
#106I 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.
Sidebar: I've never heard of teams measured in terms of "pizza count," and now I can't un-think it. Good metric. :)
Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that it's going to happen with or without Amazon but I'd rather not support this system.
It's possible that in the short term, Amazon could be changing the economics of mass surveillance, making it more feasible for police departments that could not afford such tech before. But at this point, I think a change of dynamic is important, and that we actually _need_ an 800 pound gorilla to frighten us, before people wake up and start demanding action at the state and federal level. It's already been half a de…
Speaking of which: how have things gone with the UK's experiment?
Maybe I'm not plugged into the right channels, but I haven't heard any news about "London falsely jails thousands of people due to false-positives on the camera surveillance network" or "the Crown finds and jails protesters by the thousands."
Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
#108They are NOT selling a service that identifies people from data sets other than the police's supplied data sets. It is not inappropriate for police to be able to determine who they are interacting with if that person is a known criminal. The cat is out of the bag and is already something the police could do themselves. The real fear is when they are able to source commercially available information from linked in, fa…
It feels equivalent to auto-identifying license plates.
... which is done as a matter of course in many countries. Hell, the Netherlands does this for all cars, always, "to send speeding tickets". They are scanning and identifying all cars, whether or not they have reason to suspect anything.
This will be a constant in the future. It has everything government wants : a gross grab of power, vast potential for abuse, and it saves a little bit of money ! What more could you want ?
Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
#109I 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…
Your post makes me think of this article which pretty comprehensively reviews it
https://cloudacademy.com/blog/google-vision-vs-amazon-rekogn...
Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
#110Police 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.
Privacy groups and the NRA. The system for tracking gun sales is kept on paper records by law; too much fear that digitizing the dataset would be tantamount to a "national registry of gun owners," which is in the set of irrational American fears alongside "National ID cards."