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

Amazon employees protest sale of facial recognition tech to law enforcement

thehill.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 117 posts

Re: Amazon employees protest sale of facial recognition tech to law enforcement

#31

Post by ggg9990 »

makewavesnotwar wrote: post #6

I love the sentiment, but seriously... who did you think you were building this for? It's absurd to believe you were helping anything other than the big brother character from 1984. Who else would this help? Foreign secret services? Maybe you believed it would help stream line the automation process? Thereby making humans irrelevant? I'd love to hear a legitimate - non-big brother implementation of this. And please d…

There are myriad positive applications of facial recognition. My iPhone uses it to categorize people by faces and can make me a video just of my daughter. An app I have can actually make a time lapse where all the photos have been registered to the center of her face so I can get a video of her growing up.

Re: Amazon employees protest sale of facial recognition tech to law enforcement

#32

Post by malchow »

replicatorblog wrote: post #15

If you don't like what Amazon is building, just wait until all those contracts start going to Raytheon and Northrop! I appreciate the moral quandary these engineers are faced with, but there is something to be said for being a responsible steward of technology. I've met quite a few MIT Ph.D.s who nonchalantly mention their roles as, what sounds like to me like "Program manager for raining fire and destruction on thir…

You guys understand that Amazon and Google do not necessarily get access to these DOD projects, right? As in: if these protests keep recurring, these companies will simply not be invited to participate –– the classic defense contractors will. The large tech companies don't have as much agency as some of us seem to be assuming.

Re: Amazon employees protest sale of facial recognition tech to law enforcement

#33

Post by mc32 »

us0r wrote: post #30

Amazon is about to effectively receive a sole source DOD contract for 10 billion for "cloud services". They have been supplying AWS to intelligence agencies for years. Why outrage over this and not that?

Because politics. It’s an election year and people are manoeuvering for position. Obama had children in these detention camps, Feinstein and just about any democrat in government more than ten years has had tough stances on illegal immigration, but, now of course with Trump it’s different.

Snowden, Assange both shed light on massive surveillance and the outrage lasted a week. Now Assange and Snowden are seen in a less positive light as well by the same people who hailed them as defenders of freedom and transparency.

People are fickle.

Re: Amazon employees protest sale of facial recognition tech to law enforcement

#34

Post by confounded »

maroonblazer wrote: post #29
replicatorblog wrote: post #15

If you don't like what Amazon is building, just wait until all those contracts start going to Raytheon and Northrop! I appreciate the moral quandary these engineers are faced with, but there is something to be said for being a responsible steward of technology. I've met quite a few MIT Ph.D.s who nonchalantly mention their roles as, what sounds like to me like "Program manager for raining fire and destruction on thir…

Exactly. I don't understand the rationale behind these kinds of "protests". It's not like the buyer can't go elsewhere to get the tech. To potentially far less scrupulous suppliers at that. The whole thing seems like virtue signaling.

I’ve never seen the rationale behind not going out drinking with my buddy, just because he beats his wife when he gets home. Whether I come to the bar or not, he’ll do it anyway!

Those who don’t come out with us any more are clearly doing it with the same intentions as everyone else that disagree with me; the wrong ones.

Re: Amazon employees protest sale of facial recognition tech to law enforcement

#35

Post by pravinva »

Don't they understand their own platform? AWS is self service. Anyone with a credit card can set up an account and consume Rekognition or any other service. It's not as if it has to be sold to the police by a sales person under some licensed/contract. No special software is being developed for ICE or the Orlando police.Forbes recently put together a face recognition system using AWS components under 30 dollars. WTF are these employees on about. Anyone is free to build on AWS. What's next? Ban police from purchasing stuff on Amazon retail? If you disagree with your govt, go tell your congressman instead of irritating everyone at work

Re: Amazon employees protest sale of facial recognition tech to law enforcement

#36

Post by tanilama »

I really don't think the DRPA needs Amazon/Google to militarize AI.

It already happened, years ago it is a random forests/SVM, now it is a neural network. Weapons are machines, should we just go and ban research machine learning as a whole?

Re: Amazon employees protest sale of facial recognition tech to law enforcement

#37

Post by varactor »

keeptrying wrote: post #4

I am seriously liking how S/W engineers are controlling the conversation here.

It would be more correct to say "a small but vocal subset of software engineers" are controlling the conversation. That is, if they do manage to "control" it in Amazon's case, which I highly doubt. This is completely politically motivated knee jerk.

If you do not like surveillance and would like to have less of it, the proper way to deal with the problem is to get your lawmaker to ban it at the federal level, not to shift the implementation to some other company just because you don't like Trump.

But that's not the issue here, is it? "Resistance" is. Time and time again it is uncovered that the Obama administration did the same exact things the Trump administration is being panned for, and everyone just nodded in agreement. If someone's moral compass turns opposite depending on whether their candidate wins or loses, that's not a "moral compass" at all, that's just a political dog whistle.

Re: Amazon employees protest sale of facial recognition tech to law enforcement

#39

Post by alfredallan1 »

freedomben wrote: post #18
replicatorblog wrote: post #15

If you don't like what Amazon is building, just wait until all those contracts start going to Raytheon and Northrop! I appreciate the moral quandary these engineers are faced with, but there is something to be said for being a responsible steward of technology. I've met quite a few MIT Ph.D.s who nonchalantly mention their roles as, what sounds like to me like "Program manager for raining fire and destruction on thir…

This really aligns with my thoughts too. I was sad to see Google pull out, because I know that with the ideology of many of the people there, the whistle is far more likely to be blown when things go too far. Having worked for big defense contractors, that whistle is not likely to get used there. I get nervous as hell thinking about AI and ML in the hands of governments, but it's gonna happen anyway . I'd rather it b…

>I'd rather it be Google than Northrop.

So would many of us here, but not Google itself. It is just terrible PR for any company that wants a decent public image. It is one thing to get grilled by senators, but entirely another for your average user to start believing you’re part of a war-machine, and thus something to be avoided. And the bulk of Google/Amazon’s profits come (directly/indirectly) from B2C markets, which makes their image/brand-value a significant intangible asset that cannot be compromised. Contractors don’t have this quandary.

Post reply on HN