Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by fixermark » Tue, May 22, 2018, 6:19 PM UTC

sykh wrote: post #136

fixermark wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What happens with false positives? What's the recourse? The same recourse when you're false-positived by a witness, I'd assume: get a lawyer. Personally, I'd probably place my trust in facial recognition (possibly not this system specifically, though) over human eye-witness testimony, based on my understanding of human psychology and its vulnerability to incentives. It's not as dire as it's sometimes painted. MD at…

It's not the same thing as a false positive by an eye witness. Eye witness testimony is well known to be prone to false memories. Hence there needs to be corroborating evidence. I think people are too readily willing to accept a technological identification. I can see a claim being made that the computer is wrong only once in a billion cases without proper justification. There are people today who still think lie det…

I agree about the risk. It is incumbent upon we who know better to sound a loud and long cadence about the unreliability of technology and the risk of false-positive.

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

#142

Post by kolbe » Tue, May 22, 2018, 6:20 PM UTC

alex_young wrote: post #90

chisleu wrote: post #76

They 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 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…

I honestly do not see how the 4th amendment's text obviously applies to surveillance, especially as it pertains to being identified in public. I don't even think it matters whether or not someone is a suspected criminal. It's not a search or seizure. And only in case law are there examples of the text being interpreted in favor of things like audio recordings needing a warrant. But this isn't one of those amendments whose text is clear on an issue like public facial recognition.

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

#143

Post by fixermark » Tue, May 22, 2018, 6:21 PM UTC

wafflebear wrote: post #133

fixermark wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Privacy is a means to an end. That end is peace-of-mind. People who have been damaged by random acts of crime may very well find more peace-of-mind sacrificing a bit of privacy to not have those acts repeated on their persons.

Should we install security cameras in public toilets? It would certainly reduce crimes such as assaults that occur in public toilets. There would be very little impact on our personal security. Privacy is an fundamental aspect of our quality of life. Privacy is not of secondary importance to security but exists alongside it. If that were not so, then there are plenty of places we could be putting surveillance cameras…

However, people install security cameras in their own homes all the time---some of which are even wired to cloud services or outside security monitoring agencies.

I agree that privacy exists alongside security. Where the balance-point is best placed varies from person to person. In public spaces not scoped for private activities (such as the streets of a city), the balance point has to be agreed upon by the citizenry in general and is almost certainly somewhere past both "toilet stall" and "personal residence" in terms of collective value for surveillance.

After all, we already put up security cameras on street corners.

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

#144

Post by mlthoughts2018 » Tue, May 22, 2018, 6:22 PM UTC

gscott wrote: post #109

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…

Your post makes me think of this article which pretty comprehensively reviews it https://cloudacademy.com/blog/google-vision-vs-amazon-rekogn...

The scenario-based costs table at the bottom is particularly interesting. If you need to run the detectors on all incoming images of a site ingesting, say, ~10 million images per week, you're looking at nearly $15,000/week, or close to $800K/year with AWS, and nearly $1.2MM/year with Google, and either way you'll still probably need to employ some type of backend engineering team to maintain the wrappers for calling it and manipulating the response data.

We were able to solve this in-house using only about 15 8-core servers (we used a few general GPU servers for training, but found we only needed CPU machines for runtime, and did not have the poor latency of the AWS calls) with quite a lot of redundancy for traffic spikes and a pretty easy deployment system if we needed to add or remove nodes, and it was only one of several dozen different machine learning projects going on, so whatever portion of the total cost of operation could be allocated to paying the salary of a machine learning team, it would further be amortized by work on many projects. For example, amortizing the cost of GPU machines for model training across a variety of projects.

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

#145

Post by gknoy » Tue, May 22, 2018, 6:22 PM UTC

syshum wrote: post #128

fixermark wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know the opinion will vary from person to person, but if this is a 1984 dystopia, then Orwell over-hyped the downsides to a 1984 dystopia. (... I don't actually think it's a 1984 dystopia, mind ;) ).

It is sad that people have the delusion they are really free, unable to see they are actually in a guided cage. I am sure there were many in Oceania perfectly content with their life, thinking they were free because they never butted up against the edges of their cage, they never tested the limits of their "freedom", they were "respectable" citizens doing as the government said

> I am sure there were many in Oceania perfectly content with their life, thinking they were free because they never butted up against the edges of their cage

I do not recall getting that impression when I read 1984. Rather, the majority of the proles were absolutely under the figurative boot, and kept there via fear. Even the Inner Party were aware of the edges of their cage -- either they tested them and got reconditioned, or they were all-in on the dystopia, but I don't think that counts as thinking that they were free. Rather, they traded freedom for power over others.

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

#146

Post by trumped » Tue, May 22, 2018, 6:23 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #129

This is a ridiculous article. Rekognition has been available for over a year, and I've been using it for that whole year. I've even integrated it into my own home security camera. Amazon is selling it to law enforcement, but it's not like LE get special service that no one else does. Amazon built a generic facial recognition system, and it works pretty well. Even if they weren't pushing towards the police and governm…

This is a ridiculous comment... Because it has been available doesnt make it any better...

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

#147

Post by sebringj » Tue, May 22, 2018, 6:24 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #138

sebringj wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I follow because your home security system, correct me, is only near your home, not connected to millions of people collectively that are mechanical turked unwillingly. Them apples aren't oranges.

I'm just saying that this technology is available for everyone, even in a security context. It's not like they build this just for LE.

Right valid true. Its just that it's scary if someone has tons of money and users and AI etc etc that has this capability and misuses it on a massive scale kind of how big data only works when its big. No one cares that my localhost website has root access to my machine for example but maybe that's a silly point but I think you get what I'm saying, kind of like the tree falling in the forest... take your pick of metaphors.

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

#148

Post by npongratz » Tue, May 22, 2018, 6:26 PM UTC

mfringel wrote: post #50

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…

I suspect that total involuntary surveillance is not something the majority of the (United States) populace signed up for. The legal Expectation of Privacy[0] continues to be important, even if there are people who think that it was a legal handwave that only existed due to lack of adequate technology. ---- [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectation_of_privacy

> I suspect that total involuntary surveillance is not something the majority of the (United States) populace signed up for.

I certainly agree, but just wait until They/Them/Those start telling us this is part of some sacrosanct "social contract," and those who don't like it can simply leave.

Edit: small changes for clarity.

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

#149

Post by jedberg » Tue, May 22, 2018, 6:32 PM UTC

trumped wrote: post #146

jedberg wrote: post #129

This is a ridiculous article. Rekognition has been available for over a year, and I've been using it for that whole year. I've even integrated it into my own home security camera. Amazon is selling it to law enforcement, but it's not like LE get special service that no one else does. Amazon built a generic facial recognition system, and it works pretty well. Even if they weren't pushing towards the police and governm…

This is a ridiculous comment... Because it has been available doesnt make it any better...

Except that the article is paining it as if it's this crazy new thing and the government and Amazon must be stopped in their collaboration to turn America into a police state.

When in reality it's just a service that's been around for a while that offers a technology that other people have, and was available to law enforcement long before Amazon started selling it to them.

What is the news here? That Amazon sells their products to the government?

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

#150

Post by scarecrowbob » Tue, May 22, 2018, 6:33 PM UTC

fixermark wrote: post #123

syshum wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel we are already in a 1984 Style Surveillance state they are just better at hiding it then the book's government So no I do not think it is "slippery slope" at all, we have already slide down the slope; arriving at the bottom. We long ago surpassed the level of government surveillance I believe is ethical, constitutional, or proper for government if the government having a database filled with everyone Bio metri…

I know the opinion will vary from person to person, but if this is a 1984 dystopia, then Orwell over-hyped the downsides to a 1984 dystopia. (... I don't actually think it's a 1984 dystopia, mind ;) ).

The boring observation that I can make is that the folks living in that dystopia were very good at thinking that it was a dystopia. I know that's a circular epistemic wormhole to get into, but simply liking the authoritarian surveillance you live in doesn't remove the features that make it authoritarian and intimately surveilling you.