Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 256 posts

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

#161

Post by hetspookjee »

candiodari wrote: post #108
fixermark wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not necessarily. The cameras the roadmanager (rijkswaterstaat) use to view the busyness of traffic are still out of reach for law enforcement. They could use those cameras for a whole lot of more money if they were allowed.

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

#163

Post by TeMPOraL »

doorbumper wrote: post #127
blitmap wrote: post #116

Earlier 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.

What's interesting is that anyone implementing mass surveillance could care less about your proposed benefits.

Or exactly the opposite - it may be their primary motivation, with the negatives ending up being caused by others co-opting the system.

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

#164

Post by eanzenberg »

zaksoup wrote: post #122
fixermark wrote: post #95

Earlier 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…

This is such a fascinating and interesting question. I highly recommend reading the book 'Automating Inequality'[0] if you haven't already. My initial reaction to this question was 'I certainly would prefer groups of humans making collective decisions over an opaque, proprietary, algorithm'. But then I also think back to the latest internet firestorm of the woman calling the police on black barbecuers over charcoal (…

This is a case of "system worked as intended." Humans are fairly audit-able, can be seen, and public discourse can have its moment. Imagine if instead one of the thousands of street-cams was used to phone in the call to police. There would be no public discourse because of the invisibility of the actions.

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

#165

Post by FireBeyond »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #40
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.

Ha! I would support any tax that pays for real drug rehabs...much cheaper than prison and better chance to fix the real problem.

Unfortunately, knowing our luck it will barely be more than an AA/NA meeting, perhaps with random UA testing, that some contractor charges the government Passages Malibu rates for...

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

#166

Post by confounded »

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…

> Everyone is a criminal. You commit multiple crimes a day if you're like most people.

More importantly, pretty much everyone has a driver’s license or other government issued ID, and in most states, the police have access to your mugshot from that.

The criminality can be figured out later. The problem is real time surveillance of the entire population.

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

#167

Post by mLuby »

candiodari wrote: post #126
matwood wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Laws cannot stop a technology that is easily availabe, like number plate scanning or face recognition. Nothing can stop it. You might just as well outlaw knives (they are in fact illegal in many European countries, which has done nothing about their easy availability, and software will be far easier to acquire than knives)

Face recognition and plate scanning are orders of magnitude more complex than knives, which have been around for ~1,400,000 years. Kids can (and do) make knives with random material they find. Effectively 0% of adults can make face recognition or plate scanning systems.

Also laws do work in these scenarios: look at the difference between US and Israeli security practices and you'll see dramatically different laws in effect.

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

#168

Post by mLuby »

matwood wrote: post #62
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.

Politics can be more effective at state and local levels. https://twitter.com/EFF/status/991734791081869312

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

#169

Post by zipwitch »

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…

Because the advancement of technology changes the impact of certain classes of surveillance and tracking. Existing law is based on a balance that no longer exists. Bruce Schneier has a nice essay on this and license plates:

https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2007/01/on_police_s...

In short, having a unique id and database of car owners may be okay when the police need to manually look up information. But when they can have every plate in the city regularly scanned by robots and the data fed to an AI to look for patterns, that's not even close to the same thing.

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

#170

Post by chiefalchemist »

re: "“Amazon Rekognition is primed for abuse in the hands of governments,”"

Govs? Big Incs? Deep Pockets? Can any of them be trusted?

What used to be known as "local law enforcement" is now a heavily armed para-military organization that dreams technology wet dreams. Its vendors dream of drowning in cash.

The din of fear is taking its toll. The expectation of unlawfulness is becoming self-fulfilling. The kids are not alright, as the normalization of school shootings shows.

I'm not going to defend the NRA, but they are the least of my worry at this point.

Post reply on HN