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

Amazon shareholders demand it stop selling facial recognition to governments

independent.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 128 posts

Re: Amazon shareholders demand it stop selling facial recognition to governments

#31

Post by newscracker »

After Facebook, Amazon is the other company I wouldn't trust to not do evil. Even if many more shareholders join in on this, I don't see Jess Bezos caring about these things. The Amazon stock won't suffer even if he publicly says he won't listen to such shareholders. On the contrary, the stock may just shoot up.

The larger question on this topic is, "If the big technology companies do not sell the technology to the governments, won't somebody else do?" Of course, the governments would find some domestic or foreign companies to buy such technology from (or even spend money on developing it). I think that's inevitable over the course of time. But such pressure on companies could possibly help shape policy too (added several adjectives to indicate how difficult this would be).

Re: Amazon shareholders demand it stop selling facial recognition to governments

#32

Post by tomc1985 »

jonknee wrote: post #21
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #3

A much more accurate title would be "19 Amazon shareholders demand it stop selling facial recognition to governments." They even wrote a sternly worded letter!

A much more accurate title than that would be "Shareholders representing X% of Amazon demand it to stop selling facial recognition". I mean Jeff Bezos and myself are both shareholders, but his stake is worth mentioning. Activist funds are able to shake things up with a lot less than 19 shareholders, so the count isn't important at all unless it's giant.

Yeah but 19 is a much larger number, visually, than 0.25% or whatever

Re: Amazon shareholders demand it stop selling facial recognition to governments

#33

Post by turdnagel »

I understand this is a practical reaction to what most of us would agree is an egregious use of the tech, but wouldn't it make more sense to stop the problem at its root? I'm talking about surveillance. Why aren't we complaining about camera companies selling surveillance equipment?

The gov't already has the data and Amazon's APIs just make this a little bit easier. But they can go direct to EC2 and get a couple hundred GPU-optimized instances and do it themselves.

Re: Amazon shareholders demand it stop selling facial recognition to governments

#35

Post by jopsen »

_jal wrote: post #30
manigandham wrote: post #27

Governments are just people, led by politicians. It would be far better if efforts were spent on recognizing and electing qualified and capable people to run the government as wanted instead of this silly run-around with commercial companies.

> Governments are just people, led by politicians ... empowered to do things we lock up, tase, beat, sick dogs on, and/or kill other people for doing. Kind of an important distinction to make. If you have reason to think exhorting your peer-proles to 'pick qualified and capable people' will lead to better outcomes now than it has in the past, certainly, please continue. Some of us, however, don't see that happening a…

Big corporations can also make your life miserable...

And they aren't exactly as accountable as our governments.

Re: Amazon shareholders demand it stop selling facial recognition to governments

#36

Post by somethingwitty1 »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #28
Spivak wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really the tool that's unethical or the argument here just about depriving governments they don't like tools in general? "Twenty shareholders from Ford demand they stop selling cars to local law enforcement."

> Is it really the tool that's unethical Amazon runs the tool on AWS servers they control, so they can (and should) be responsible for having policies that forbid its unethical use. Here is AWS's Acceptable Use Policy: https://aws.amazon.com/aup/ I don't see anything there about ethics.

I don't know about this argument though. If Amazon bans a book based on their ethics, people freak out about censorship and how one company has so much power and shouldn't be doing that. If their AUP stated what they deemed ethical, how many potential startups or corporations wouldn't be able to start? Take a "simple" example: A business that counsels families on abortion. Is that ethical? Who gets to decide that? I think this is one of those cases where we have to be very careful what we are asking for.

Re: Amazon shareholders demand it stop selling facial recognition to governments

#37

Post by confounded »

mankash666 wrote: post #34

The only effective way to achieve this is getting a majority of the board to vote for this. Everything else is mere virtue signalling without effect.

> Everything else is mere virtue signalling without effect.

By that definition, isn’t almost every form of non-decisive influence “virtue signaling”? Virtue itself? Marching against a war? Voting for a candidate you like the policies of, but who doesn’t have good media coverage? Declining to purchase unethical goods?

Re: Amazon shareholders demand it stop selling facial recognition to governments

#39

Post by confounded »

brew-hacker wrote: post #29
Spivak wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really the tool that's unethical or the argument here just about depriving governments they don't like tools in general? "Twenty shareholders from Ford demand they stop selling cars to local law enforcement."

I completely agree -- wouldn't you rather help law enforcement and our military protect our well-being?

Be a true patriot; set all passwords to ‘password’.

Re: Amazon shareholders demand it stop selling facial recognition to governments

#40

Post by jopsen »

kakarot wrote: post #23
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #12

I think this kind of “don’t sell technology x to governments” is kind of misguided for the following reasons. 1) You are saying that you are from be with private entities having access to this technology, but not public entities? Private individuals and companies should be able to use facial recognition, but not governments? Throughout history, governments have typically been the first ones to acquire tech. Of note i…

A giant corporation might be evil, but where I live the government pretty much has a mandate to systematically erode the last 200 years of advancement in civil rights. The sooner facial recognition data is integrated en masse, this mandate will be exponentially easier to carry out. A corporation aiding the government in this process is essentially an extension of Corpgov and is not to be trusted with facial recogniti…

Trump won't end civil rights in the US, not unless you let him.

I'm not American so it's not my responsibility, but probably you should throw work into politics and reforms of the political system.

Post reply on HN