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Amazon shareholders demand it stop selling facial recognition to governments

independent.co.uk

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

#81

Post by whack »

It's weird that we have so many people directing their protests towards the tech companies, and not the government itself. The whole premise of capitalism is that profit-motivated-corporations will inevitably succumb to evil temptations. That it's the government's job to regulate corporations, and police their moral behavior.

Instead, we have the complete opposite. Americans expect the government/military to engage in morally unacceptable behavior, and are looking to corporations to "enforce" morality instead, by denying the government specific services.

Not that there is anything wrong with tech companies and workers doing their part. But when we see corporations as the best catalyst for pro-social outcomes, and not the government itself, there's something very wrong with our political system.

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

#82

Post by what_ever »

tomc1985 wrote: post #32
jonknee wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't care about larger which is a relative scale vs percentage which is absolute scale.

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

#83

Post by what_ever »

kbsletten wrote: post #46
twinkletwinkle wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tweets have the side effect of being public. Sometimes that becomes the main effect. Emails and the rest of your examples don't have that property.

You've clearly never had somebody forward your email on you. All digital communication is effectively public by virtue of fast, easy copying.

There is a difference between public nature of tweet where anyone can go and read it vs public nature of email where you would need to forward it to everyone (or one of them would have to tweet it which is back to what GP said).

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

#84

Post by sonnyblarney »

bigiain wrote: post #71
sonnyblarney wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"it is good to have as many software developers as possible steering away from unethical work." Is it unethical to track down violent activists? Is it unethical to check for people crossing the border illegally? And this thing about the tech being used to single out 'people of colour' I think we can dismiss that out of hand - the tech won't be used for that ... though the application of the tech may disproportionatel…

> At border crossings, I can see this could be very reasonable. Note that it's also least necessary at border crossings. As a non-US citizen I'm already required to give my fingerprints and retinal scan to border control agents. Like you say it's the "walking down the street" problem - for me at least perhaps more accurately described as the "done at many orders of magnitude more scale, in circumstances where you hav…

" As a non-US citizen I'm already required to give my fingerprints and retinal scan to border control agents"

Well that's my point - we already do stuff on par with ID recognition - so while it's uncomfortable and debatable, it seems 'within bounds' in our current state of affairs.

And yes, the 'all seeing eye' part is hugely contestable.

My point is that it's grey.

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

#85

Post by manigandham »

_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…

Yes, it's called authority. The point of the comment is that we should pick the proper people to give that authority to, instead of fighting against them through some strange corporate proxy.

If you want an alternative, why don't you become the qualified and capable person to join the government to shape it the way you want?

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

#86

Post by craftyguy »

salawat wrote: post #53
newscracker wrote: post #31

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 g…

The problem comes down to the engineers and researchers involved. As an INDUSTRY, we have some very important decisions to make, one of which is, "will we work on this type of system knowing full well what it will be used for?" Yes, everyone has their price, but the fact remains that the tools are nigh useless without the expertise of the knowledgeable people to integrate and fine tune the final product. If there is…

> As an INDUSTRY, we have some very important decisions to make, one of which is, "will we work on this type of system knowing full well what it will be used for?"

Can't this easily be defeated by breaking the project up such that different teams are involved in different parts, and none of the parts know the whole thing? E.g. they could all believe they're all involved in some new super secret product development, but not know enough about the final customer or the other parts to know it's the US government.

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

#87

Post by panic »

jiggliemon wrote: post #61
salawat wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem comes down to the engineers and researchers involved. As an INDUSTRY, we have some very important decisions to make, one of which is, "will we work on this type of system knowing full well what it will be used for?" Yes, everyone has their price, but the fact remains that the tools are nigh useless without the expertise of the knowledgeable people to integrate and fine tune the final product. If there is…

In a lot of these scientific do or don’t debates - people tend to disqualify that there’s a consequence to not building the technology. In the H-Bomb example, what would happen if Oppenheimer didn’t help develop the bomb? Russia most certainly still would have. And the world would be a different place today. China, Russia, shit - North Korea are all working on super shady projects that you not I would want any part o…

This kind of argument can be used to justify working on all sorts of terrible things, but the premise just isn't true.

Most projects fail, and the people who work on super shady projects aren't some kind of evil supergeniuses. "Good" people are often better at working together. They tend to have more access to outside research and researchers.

It's also hard to know how far along these projects are. It's in these countries' best interests for you to think they're as far along as possible. The reality may be that you're building destructive technology to pre-empt something that doesn't even exist or will never work.

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

#88

Post by int_19h »

manigandham wrote: post #85
_jal wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Yes, it's called authority. The point of the comment is that we should pick the proper people to give that authority to, instead of fighting against them through some strange corporate proxy. If you want an alternative, why don't you become the qualified and capable person to join the government to shape it the way you want?

And we're working on that, too. But it's a slow process, and meanwhile there's damage to mitigate.

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

#89

Post by int_19h »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #50
FartyMcFarter wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. But let's be clear - it is good to have as many software developers as possible steering away from unethical work.

"it is good to have as many software developers as possible steering away from unethical work." Is it unethical to track down violent activists? Is it unethical to check for people crossing the border illegally? And this thing about the tech being used to single out 'people of colour' I think we can dismiss that out of hand - the tech won't be used for that ... though the application of the tech may disproportionatel…

There's a lot of grey area around immigration.

Where it stops being grey is when the authorities start setting up concentration camps for forcibly separated children. At that point, yeah, it's unethical as hell, and so is aiding and abetting it in any way (which may include some of the activities that you've listed). Context matters.

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

#90

Post by int_19h »

merlincorey wrote: post #15
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…

> 3) International relationships really are a competition. I am sure Chinese AI companies are working hand in glove with the government to make sure their government is able to deploy the latest AI tech. If AI is the gamechanger people say it is, you have given an incredible leg up to China vs the West. I think this is a really important point, here. I think the paranoid line of thinking is helpful in this instance:…

Your analysis ignores an important point: the only thing that the US government would need to gain such access, would be to stop doing the things it is being called out for. It's not that government having such tools that's inherently the problem, but the way they're going to be used here and now.
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