Does Amazon's Rekognition TOS allow them to keep your uploaded images as training data?
If so, there is some serious moral hazard around using this service - you are making anyone in your dataset more identifiable in the future.
Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
151–160 of 256 posts
Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
#152Earlier 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 ;) ).
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.
Right, but doesn't it remove the notion that the authoritarian, intimate-surveillance features are necessarily bad things?
To stay in dystopian sci-fi: The computers on the Enterprise (TNG at least) were aware of crewmember's positions and health situation at all times as long as they were aboard ship. Do we imagine they felt spied upon? It seems instead being born into a world where surveillance is ubiquitous and benign-to-benevolent, they were fine with it.
Maybe we can build that world instead of assuming the end-result is 1984 every time.
Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I definitely feel like we're missing positive opportunities for mass surveillance. Things like being able to recognize someone in cardiac arrest, or who is at risk for a stroke. Someday mass surveillance will help as much as it hurts society.
Many prisons have blanket surveillance systems. I suggest you ask the prisoners how beneficial they find it, and extrapolate.
Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
I definitely feel like we're missing positive opportunities for mass surveillance. Things like being able to recognize someone in cardiac arrest, or who is at risk for a stroke. Someday mass surveillance will help as much as it hurts society.
Many prisons have blanket surveillance systems. I suggest you ask the prisoners how beneficial they find it, and extrapolate.
"Prison has X, therefore X is bad" isn't a very compelling argument.
Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I definitely feel like we're missing positive opportunities for mass surveillance. Things like being able to recognize someone in cardiac arrest, or who is at risk for a stroke. Someday mass surveillance will help as much as it hurts society.
> Things like being able to recognize someone in cardiac arrest, or who is at risk for a stroke.
Can those things actually be done with a vanishingly low false-positive rate? If I'm walking down the sidewalk and a camera sees me suddenly grimace because a rock got into my shoe, I don't want paramedics rushing to the scene to offer me assistance for a heart attack.
Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
I definitely feel like we're missing positive opportunities for mass surveillance. Things like being able to recognize someone in cardiac arrest, or who is at risk for a stroke. Someday mass surveillance will help as much as it hurts society.
Many prisons have blanket surveillance systems. I suggest you ask the prisoners how beneficial they find it, and extrapolate.
Extrapolating is not always useful... See relevant xkcd: https://www.xkcd.com/605/
Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
#157At 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…
Agreed that is the bottom line.
This isn't a technology problem, it's a legal problem.
The technology isn't going away no matter who provides it and as long as it's legal someone will.
Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many prisons have blanket surveillance systems. I suggest you ask the prisoners how beneficial they find it, and extrapolate.
"Prison has X, therefore X is bad" isn't a very compelling argument.
Its exactly analagous. The government agencies want to implement this technology for the same reasons they do it in prisons - not for your benefit.
Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
#159Is it okay to sell face recognition services to everyone except law enforcement? Are other customers somehow more trustworthy? Maybe it shouldn't be sold at all?
(And how about open source?)
Re: Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
how will you feel when they start arresting serial jaywalkers?
They already wrongly ticket people at stop lights, it's a racket. They could just mail you a ticket for very small petty "crimes," like not throwing something in the right bin, jay walking, etc. Do people really think police will only use this to solve crime? Solving crimes doesn't pay the bills. Ticketing people does. Then they could also use the facial recognition to get everyone that's at a protest of the governme…
>I'm a bit perturbed that people on this board aren't more concerned about the many bad ways that this can be used for, especially since police oversight is notoriously bad, in virtually every country, including the west.
On the contrary, I share the concern, but I don't share the conclusion that police should be relegated to crunching data with nothing more complicated than an abacus (obvious hyperbole) because of abuse concerns.
I also believe in a level of consistency that states no, you do not have a right to privacy in public. Any such abuses should be dealt with on a case-by-case, abuse-by-abuse basis, rather than unreasonable blanket bans. And any such cases must be ruled based on existing law, rather than what amounts to bench legislation.