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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

#201

Post by LoonyBalloony »

godelski wrote: post #195
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…

Is it right to track the all online dealings of people that may be connected to terrorist organizations? Pretty reasonable people seem to think yes (Patriot Act). Is it right for the government to track all the online dealings of an average citizen? Most people think no. You may see a discrepancy here. That is why there is the saying "First they came for the fascists...". It is why when we talk about breaking encrypt…

> Pretty reasonable people seem to think yes (Patriot Act).

Sure

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

#202

Post by donarb »

gowld wrote: post #135
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…

Amber Alerts are opt-out, not mandatory.

They should be opt-in. When the feature was implemented on my phone I was not informed, the checkbox was already selected.

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

#203

Post by forapurpose »

zizek23 wrote: post #194

Silicon Valley and its offshoots are going to become surveillance central. The HQ of a surveillance economy courted by despots at home and abroad. The people working here are going to be the most hated people in the world. A new narrative about benefits other than totalitarian surveillance is going to be crafted and circulated to provide some sort of ethical fig leaf for employees but everyone involved will know the…

> Silicon Valley and its offshoots are going to become surveillance central. The HQ of a surveillance economy courted by despots at home and abroad. The people working here are going to be the most hated people in the world.

That is already becoming SV's reputation abroad:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/05/14/tech-companies-are-ruin...

While Hollywood’s influence has waned, America’s leading internet companies ... have spread from Silicon Valley to all corners of the globe, even some untouched by American movies and TV shows.

It’s time for Americans to recognize that they have a new major cultural export, alongside movies and television: the set of modern communications platforms created in the United States that have since overtaken the world. The question then becomes: If the world looks at America and sees Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter as its profile picture, what does the world think?

Americans should be concerned. We’ve reviewed how America’s new major cultural export has been characterized in the international media and other public discourse lately, and based on that we’ve identified three key features that have become associated with it in the eyes of the global audience.

They go on to discuss that SV has a growing reputation as the engine of 1) the spread of "hate and harmful ideas, 2) "foreign intervention in domestic politics", and 3) "the general surrender of privacy". Well worth reading.

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

#204

Post by confounded »

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…

> The cat is out of the bag and is already something the police could do themselves

Yes. But what’s striking is that by offering this product and heavily marketing its law enforcement use, Amazon are clearly endorsing total surveillance as their preferred model of society.

I don’t imagine this will be incredibly lucrative relative to other AWS products. There’s very few potential customers. Law enforcement access to data is extremely broad, data-osmosis/‘fusion’ with the private sector is rife, and the whole area is pretty much unregulated. The potential for abuse is large.

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

#205

Post by LoonyBalloony »

anigbrowl wrote: post #180
HashThis wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fourth amendment does not matter anymore and nobody gives a shit. It does matter. Citizens do care. Just because they haven't taken action yet doesn't mean that they don't care or won't.

(Lack of) actions speak louder than words.

Better to do nothing then the wrong something.

There is a non violent solution to this, I'm just not smart enough to know what that is.

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

#206

Post by syshum »

candiodari wrote: post #115
mrobot wrote: post #41

Earlier 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.

You don't get the full extent of the damage. You are making the assumption that the government and police departments are the only ones that will do mass-surveillance. You could not be more wrong. Everyone will do mass-surveillance. Everyone. The police is worst, because they will legally use violence against (true AND false) matches, with limited to no recourse for their victims. But the cats' out of the bag. Legal…

the ACLU really needs to update https://www.aclu.org/ordering-pizza

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

#207

Post by bsenftner »

bitL wrote: post #38
bsenftner wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I write facial recognition software. If those example facial images and their match scores are any indication of their systems accuracy, it is on the poor side.

The point is that they made it available to customers as a full, scalable pipeline. They can (and will) improve their accuracy continuously. Any kiddo can take some bleeding-edge wide resnet variation and get better results than they have right now, but can't make it available at scale to anyone.

"but can't make it available at scale to anyone." =- I guess that's the popular misconception. Their system scales awful, rendering it's expense of operation on the high end side, for a weak product. They are simply exploiting their name.

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

#208

Post by pyrale »

fixermark wrote: post #95
alex_young wrote: post #90

Earlier 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…

> Wouldn't that be a strict improvement over the current system?

No, that would be an implementation of a panopticon. You'll find a lot of interesting criticism of that concept, and of Bentham for trying to solve societal problems in an inhumane fashion.

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

#209

Post by brownbat »

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…

> The cat is out of the bag...

Vigilant Solutions has been running this for years. Not just cops but tow trucks, bounty hunters, all kinds of private enterprising individuals have been building a collaborative commercially accessible database on all our locations, it was already robust technology based on plates alone.

Vigilant is so well placed, I wonder if Amazon will even have a market impact...

The last useful moment to get freaked out was probably when Vigilant hired facial recognition expert Roger Rodriguez back in 2016.

The cat's long gone, fat on mice, and we don't even remember where we left the bag.

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

#210

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

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…

As it get customers, it will likely get more and more resources thrown at it and get better and better.

Even if the tech may not be useful right now, it probably will be in 5 years, and unless something is done now, another large slice of the little bit of privacy that remains will be gone.

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