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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

#91

Post by manigandham »

int_19h wrote: post #88
manigandham wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Slow doesn't matter if it's effective.

This current approach is rarely that, and usually amounts to nothing more than noise. The government is not deterred by a single corporation, no matter how big.

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

#92

Post by manigandham »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #67
bcheung wrote: post #44

This seems like it is approaching the problem from the wrong angle. This should be addressed at the government law level. The problem is where do you draw the line? Any technology can be used for evil. Do you next ask companies that sell cameras not to sell to the government? Then ban computers? Laws that concern themselves with targeting and surveilling people encompass any technology. Facial recognition is not a ha…

I agree with this in principle, but in the US the intelligence/police don't really seem to be accountable to the people. They regularly conduct surveillance on huge scales and no one even knows about it until we get lucky with a leak like Snowden. Who knows how many dozens of other secrets like that they still have. The CIA/FBI etc. have a history of doing this kind of thing for decades, at least since WW2. Then it g…

The intelligence and police apparatus are the people. They are not some alien overlords, you can meet these employees and see what they do, and alter their course of actions by shaping the government through direct voting.

Trying to change it via corporate proxy is not going to really work.

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

#93

Post by bigiain »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #84
bigiain wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sure. I think my (perhaps badly made) point was - There are two existing technologies already in use at borders, each of which have similar or better accuracy than facial recognition, so the additional benefits of deploying it there is likely to be small.

Unless, as pointed out by bdhess in another response to my comment, the aim is to detect people for whom border control do not have any passport/fingerprint/retinal information for, but some reason still consider to be a "person of interest" at a border. Which has it's own set of scary implications...

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

#94

Post by jiggunjer »

frozenport wrote: post #26
pests wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there something wrong with this? Email, fax, phones, telegrams, snail mail, etc. Everything was the new weird thing at one point in time.

Tweets are limited in content, unlike other forms of communication their perminance is at the leisure of one American tech company.

You mean like gmail?

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

#95

Post by bb88 »

_jal wrote: post #48
bb88 wrote: post #19

I don't think it matters. Third parties are going to be in this space anyway (Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and the foreign defense contractors) so it doesn't make a lot of sense to shut off a profitable segment. I was just thinking how much I would like an facial recognition API for my home security system. That way I can give someone's name to the police to make it easier to track someone down.

Me, I've been thinking about ALRs. If this stuff is going to be available, I think everyone should have it. So this is one of those projects I am just never going to get around to, but someone else, please do it - it shouldn't be that tough to build a cheap Raspberry-Pi-ish automatic plate reader anyone can point out their window to capture every plate going by. With a network of them, everyone can know this stuff, a…

Well, I think the hard part is done here:

http://www.openalpr.com/cloud-api.html

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

#96

Post by bigiain »

bdhess wrote: post #78
bigiain wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. I think your argument assumes that the US government has already captured either a fingerprint or retina scan of all of its persons of interest. I don't think that's a safe assumption.

True, but what's the other assumption?

That the aim is to detect people for whom border control do not have any passport/fingerprint/retinal information for, but some reason still consider to be a "person of interest" at a border?

I'm not sure if that's a valid point, or a scary overreach...

Part of me worries about using a barely 99% accurate face detection technology (perhaps trained on Facebook or YouTube jihadist videos?) on what must be at least several hundred million airport border control crossing a year is inevitably going to result in several million false positives a year - presumably mostly for bearded middle eastern males. The invasiveness of recording and storing facial data on every international traveller with the possible payoff of detecting someone genuinely "interesting" amongst the million per day or so stream of false positives seems like a poor security solution.

Another part of me acknowledges that the US (and, to be fair, every sovereign nation) can invade everybodies privacy at the border _anyway_ and what's the problem with adding just this one tiny straw to the camel's back?

As Wil Wheaton so eloquently pointed out, I'm a middle aged, white, heterosexual, cisgender man - I live life on the lowest difficulty setting. This is unlikely to affect me in any way apart from giving me a great opportunity to rant on internet forums. If you have any 15-30 year old male friends of middle eastern descent, ask them how _they_ feel about an algorithm with a well known 1%+ error rates most likely trained on "terrorist suspects" being pointed at _them_ every time they fly in or out of the US...

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

#97

Post by TangoTrotFox »

anonu wrote: post #62

This is a perfect example of social governance: stockholders feeling empowered to control how a company operates. We need to see more of this type of governance. Ultimately, shareholders should just vote with their dollars. Sell a stock you dont like or dont invest in the first place.

I agree with you, but I think we disagree. What I mean is that this article specifies 19 share holders, without mentioning their share. It's a very safe bet to assume that it's not even a significant fraction of a percent. In other words, in 'voting with their dollar' these individuals would have a literally unnoticeable impact.

When a substantial chunk of society feels something ought be changed, then I certainly agree they have the right to make such change happen. But we live in a time where headlines, such as this, are constantly driven by irrelevantly small numbers. For instance traditional fear mongering was stuff along the lines of 'video games are driving kids to kill.' What that really translates to is 'one mentally unstable kid who happened to play a lot of video games killed another kid, primarily because he was mentally unstable'.

The conflation between the views/actions of society and the views/action of the individual is counterproductive. If you polled people, proportional to share of amazon, what percent would agree with the statement 'I demand Amazon stop selling facial recognition to governments'? On that we can only speculate, but I imagine it would probably be quite small.

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

#98

Post by TangoTrotFox »

FooHentai wrote: post #69

In the past 24 hour cycle of news I have seen: - Microsoft catching heat for their deal to allow ICE to use their capabilities - Amazon catching heat for their deal to allow government to use facial recognition - A photo of Satya Nadella, Jeff Bezos and Trump sitting next to each other and shaking hands What's the play here?

Money.

- Companies making money by developing and licensing software.

- Media making money by creating sensationalistic headlines.

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

#99

Post by bigiain »

remarkEon wrote: post #77
bigiain wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>Note that it's also least necessary at border crossings. Says you. It could replace the fingerprint and retinal scan for all we know, plus you don't have to actually physically interact with the person crossing. I don't think it will, but it seems perfectly reasonable to deploy this technology at the border. I see no issue with the definition of "border areas" either. Seems reasonable to assume that if someone has r…

Sure, I'm speculating out my ass here (it's what everyone does on The Internet, right?)

Seems to me though, the most recent numbers I've heard for commercial state-of-the-art facial recognition are barely capable of 99% accuracy. I don't know the error rates of fingerprint and retinal scans, but I'd put good money of the combination of passport and fingerprint or passport and retinal scan being several orders of magnitude more accurate that face recognition we have available right now.

(And I probably should have left out the "border areas"comment as part of a different argument - my beef with that is not "how many illegal crossers might you find within 100 miles of a border", but "is it worth reducing the rights of everybody, legal as well as illegal, just because they live/work/travel within 100 miles of a border?" that includes everybody in CA west of a line thru Sacramento, Fresno and Bakersfield.)

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

#100

Post by stareatgoats »

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…

"If we don't do it, someone else will". There is probably no other argument more responsible for bringing us to the brink of nuclear holocaust than this one. This is the argument that convinced the otherwise pacifist Einstein to write to president Roosevelt, urging for the Manhattan project.

So what's evil about it? Nothing by itself, it is self-evident that we can not allow our enemies be more powerful than us. But there is a second step, which has to follow: those powers have to be used for a universal good which go beyond our selfish identity interests. If not then we become the enemy ourselves.

I believe the reason that many are protesting against corporations handing over their technology to the military is because they feel this second step is missing. Right or wrong, they feel that the state has lost its moral compass.

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