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Amazon employees protest sale of facial recognition tech to law enforcement

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

#51

Post by pravinva »

confounded wrote: post #46
pravinva wrote: post #35

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 a…

Right. But, as we found out with Signal[0], in addition to the UI and the law, there's a whole other world of what is and isn't possible with AWS, called policy. Anyone with a credit card can get an AWS account, but it's against the ToS to use it to offend the DMCA, host a crawler (whoops!), run an open mail relay, or store bestiality, for the simple reason that Amazon have decided that they don't want that to happen…

Er, explain how the law enforcement is violating any terms and conditions. Domain fronting is illegal. Mass surveillance is what the NSA does for a living. If it is offensive to prime members, they have found the wrong tree to bark up

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

#52

Post by odbol »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #3

How is selling to law enforcement any worse than selling facial recognition tech to companies that are also use it to invade my privacy and use the technology to try and squeeze money out of me? Where do you draw the line on ethical usage? In my mind, if you're concerned about the ethics of facial recognition tech, you shouldn't be working in that field at all. It's fundamentally anti-privacy.

Companies don't have guns and prisons. Invading your privacy is a little different than being shot or thrown in jail.

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

#53

Post by hackerpacker »

alfredallan1 wrote: post #39
freedomben wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, whi…

>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

Tides can and do change though. And anyone working on anything that can be weaponized (see also self driving cars) and has heard of Alfred Nobel is just fooling themselves if they think they can control their creations.

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

#54

Post by gasull »

I'm dismayed at the comments here of "if Amazon/Microsoft/Google don't work for ICE, someone else will". That argument doesn't fly. If you stop helping ICE, they will have to get worse software from likely more expensive vendors (less market competition for the contract). Which will make ICE less efficient in its goal to criminalize, separate and deport immigrants.

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

#55

Post by confounded »

pravinva wrote: post #51
confounded wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. But, as we found out with Signal[0], in addition to the UI and the law, there's a whole other world of what is and isn't possible with AWS, called policy. Anyone with a credit card can get an AWS account, but it's against the ToS to use it to offend the DMCA, host a crawler (whoops!), run an open mail relay, or store bestiality, for the simple reason that Amazon have decided that they don't want that to happen…

Er, explain how the law enforcement is violating any terms and conditions. Domain fronting is illegal. Mass surveillance is what the NSA does for a living. If it is offensive to prime members, they have found the wrong tree to bark up

> ... explain how the law enforcement is violating any terms and conditions

I’m not saying that they are, just that Amazon are within their right to stipulate that there are certain uses of their technology which they just don’t like, as they see fit.

> Domain fronting is illegal.

First I’ve heard. Where? Why?

> ...NSA... If it is offensive to prime members, they have found the wrong tree to bark up

This story is not about the NSA. The Rekognition controversy arose regarding local police departments, who are very much not tasked with mass surveillance. Amazon used local police departments as example deployments, and for marketing copy as an idealized use-case.

I would personally stop shopping at a local store, if by supporting them I was supporting their objectionable side-business. Consumer boycotts are pretty common, as are changes to corporate policy due to the bad press boycotts generate.

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

#56

Post by confounded »

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…

> ... the whistle is far more likely to be blown when things go too far

In your admiration for a Google employees, you’re projecting your own beleifs and norms.

The whistle was blown; Project Maven is too far.

> I get nervous as hell thinking about AI and ML in the hands of governments

Me too, but a cleaner way to deal with it might be to demand better transparency and accountability from the government. Beleif that large corporations will act in your unstated best-interests (and not their own) seems pretty noisy.

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

#57

Post by forapurpose »

crb002 wrote: post #24

Amazon built it to recognize staff as they walk in and customers at their physical stores so they wouldn't have to carry a wallet. It's like GPS. Many legitimate civilian uses, but also very useful to use in orchestrating government force.

> customers at their physical stores so they wouldn't have to carry a wallet. It's like GPS. Many legitimate civilian uses

It's not like GPS, because GPS doesn't invade my privacy. I'm not sure that being identified everywhere I go is "legitimate", though it is common.

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

#58

Post by blub »

varactor wrote: post #37
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…

As long as protesting is still legal in the US, it's part of the proper way to deal with the problem.

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

#59

Post by confounded »

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 a data center for the DOD is largely invisible.

The suggestion that facial recognition cameras are pointed in the faces of ordinary Americans, just in case they do something the cops don’t like, is a pretty extraordinary proposition for a US consumer company to make.

The Rekognition pitch is encouraging the use of a specific controversial practice, rather than abstractly aiding the general compute capabilities of a large (if controversial to some) government department.

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

#60

Post by bb88 »

gasull wrote: post #54

I'm dismayed at the comments here of "if Amazon/Microsoft/Google don't work for ICE, someone else will". That argument doesn't fly. If you stop helping ICE, they will have to get worse software from likely more expensive vendors (less market competition for the contract). Which will make ICE less efficient in its goal to criminalize, separate and deport immigrants.

Your anger is misdirected.

The fight isn't whether or not ICE should have facial recognition software. The fight is to make ICE act in accordance with our values. Some agency (ICE or whatever replaces it) will still need to protect the borders, and that protection will require facial recognition software.

If you hate ICE, you should also probably hate defense contractors more, because they have very little moral qualms about accepting contracts from the government, even ones that may violate human rights. And that's where that money is going to go now.

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