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Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

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Re: Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

#61

Post by Zarath »

deleted_account wrote: post #47
justboxing wrote: post #2

> Amazon’s facial recognition service, Rekognition, is designed to identify and track people going about their daily business. This isn’t hyperbole - a Rekognition spokesperson explicitly mentioned real-time tracking and identification at an Amazon Web Services summit earlier this year. The same spokesperson went on to call Orlando a “smart city,” with cameras everywhere that allow authorities to track persons of int…

Are people surprised that real-time image analysis has been commodified or that local governments are already applying this technology ahead of policy discussions? Clarifying edit: I'm not being disingenuous. I may be too close to the technology to grok why this thread is a down-vote minefield. Running OpenCV on an Arduino board is years-old proof-of-concept stuff and now I have an AWS DeepLens sitting on my desk tha…

No, but I'm sure many of the people working on it will continue to deny that they are simply building tools of control. That, or they don't care, or think it's a good thing.

Re: Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

#62

Post by eeZah7Ux »

frgtpsswrdlame wrote: post #6
hakejam wrote: post #5

Rekognition is a public service and not specific to law enforcement use[1]. [1]: https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/ Disclaimer: I work for AWS.

>Rekognition is a public service When this is used to track/recognize my face in a crowd what service is it that I'm receiving?

> When this is used to track/recognize my face in a crowd what service is it that I'm?

Fixed that for you.

Re: Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

#63

Post by danShumway »

darawk wrote: post #25
tajen wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The public safety of no people having different political opinion, of no people who would want to raise awareness on the problem of Amazon for this instance, because they could cause unsafe words being told to your ears.

Whoa whoa, there. Who said that? Facial recognition is a tool. You seem to be extrapolating some dystopian fantasy from this. The fact that your face can be tracked does not mean your speech will be curtailed, those two things are fairly unrelated. Now, there are real privacy implications to facial recognition and tracking. Serious ones. There are also benefits for law enforcement. Personally, I come down on the side…

> The fact that your face can be tracked does not mean your speech will be curtailed, those two things are fairly unrelated.

Anonymity is one of the most effective tools for preserving free speech. If you can't speak anonymously, you're more likely to self censor what you say. If you can't consume information anonymously, you're unlikely to seek out or research unpopular views or ideas.

Barring massive social changes that are realistically never going to happen, a world where your identity and actions are always visible is a world without free speech.

Re: Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

#64

Post by njarboe »

paxys wrote: post #54
hbosch wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry sir, we can’t let you through customs until you Accept the U.S. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

Sounds funny, but this could actually happen. By entering the country you agree to give up your EU rights, or turn around and get back on the plane.

Yes, this is what happens. National sovereignty still exists. Maybe, since Europeans have a supra-national entity above their countries, they don't quite grok that everywhere else a country is the top giver of the law.

Re: Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

#65

Post by callahad »

greenail wrote: post #58
callahad wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sarcasm aside, Intel actually does / did sell a facial analytics platform that's embedded in many, many vending machines, digital signage, etc: https://aimsuite.intel.com/

this is the classic argument around blaming the tool or the user. The gun debate runs along the same lines. Saying "Amazon is Tracking People" is like saying Smith and Wesson is shooting people.

Well, it's not like people go out facial-recognizing for sport or recreation...

Re: Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

#66

Post by hudon »

deleted_account wrote: post #47
justboxing wrote: post #2

> Amazon’s facial recognition service, Rekognition, is designed to identify and track people going about their daily business. This isn’t hyperbole - a Rekognition spokesperson explicitly mentioned real-time tracking and identification at an Amazon Web Services summit earlier this year. The same spokesperson went on to call Orlando a “smart city,” with cameras everywhere that allow authorities to track persons of int…

Are people surprised that real-time image analysis has been commodified or that local governments are already applying this technology ahead of policy discussions? Clarifying edit: I'm not being disingenuous. I may be too close to the technology to grok why this thread is a down-vote minefield. Running OpenCV on an Arduino board is years-old proof-of-concept stuff and now I have an AWS DeepLens sitting on my desk tha…

I believe it's the latter, given the last two paragraphs of TFA:

> In order to protect civil liberties without hampering innovation, lawmakers should require public input before surveillance tools are deployed and ensure that facial recognition databases are purged of data related to law-abiding people.

> lawmakers should ensure that real-time facial recognition capability is not merged with police cameras, whether they are dash cams, CCTV cameras, or body cameras. Facial recognition may well be a valuable investigatory tool, but outfitting police with real-time facial recognition capability will only increase the likelihood of needlessly contentious and violent confrontations between police officers and members of communities across the country.

Re: Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

#67

Post by danShumway »

wonder_bread wrote: post #4

Kind of confused why Rekognition continues to be made into the 'bad guy' here. Even if stronger protections are rolled out for this it's become far too easy to make these types of systems to do a great job of keeping them at bay at this point. Most people with programming experience could roll out a reasonably accurate facial comparison/recognition model like Rekognition and deploy it to a Raspberry Pi without expell…

Agree that it's a problem that needs to be fixed in more permanent ways, but debatably protesting and slowing down companies like Amazon gives us more time to find a solution.

It's a band-aid, but band-aids are an extremely useful medical tool. They only become problematic if used as an excuse to avoid stitching the wound.

Re: Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

#68

Post by darawk »

danShumway wrote: post #63
darawk wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoa whoa, there. Who said that? Facial recognition is a tool. You seem to be extrapolating some dystopian fantasy from this. The fact that your face can be tracked does not mean your speech will be curtailed, those two things are fairly unrelated. Now, there are real privacy implications to facial recognition and tracking. Serious ones. There are also benefits for law enforcement. Personally, I come down on the side…

> The fact that your face can be tracked does not mean your speech will be curtailed, those two things are fairly unrelated. Anonymity is one of the most effective tools for preserving free speech. If you can't speak anonymously, you're more likely to self censor what you say. If you can't consume information anonymously, you're unlikely to seek out or research unpopular views or ideas. Barring massive social changes…

I agree with some of the principles you're articulating here, but I think the general class of position you're taking here is a bad one. Free speech has an actual meaning. It means the government does not restrict speech. Tracking people does not restrict speech. It may impose a social cost on you for speaking, but it does not prevent you from doing so. Nowhere in the constitution of the United States, nor any constitution that i'm aware of, does it say that you are to be insulated from the social consequences of speaking your mind. Nor do any guarantee the right to anonymity in public spaces.

Now, will this have a chilling effect on certain kinds of speech? Most likely, yes. Should we be concerned about that? Probably. But please, do not conflate 'free speech' with 'freedom from social consequences'.

Re: Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

#69

Post by donarb »

jolux wrote: post #55
darawk wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't really matter. You can do it at scale too, just spin up your NN on any of the cloud platforms available. Instant scale. The fact that amazon offers this recognition lowers the barrier hardly at all.

>just spin up your NN on any of the cloud platforms available "just"... Amazon marketed it to police explicitly, I'm pretty sure the open source team working on TensorFlow isn't going around suggesting you plop a model on Linode and use it to catch criminals. This isn't something that police departments have the ability or skill to discover and implement on their own, setting the menial bits up for them and suggestin…

Police departments have started to get smart about technology.

The Seattle Police Department now has a division focusing on data analysis. This came out of a consent decree with the Justice Department to study compliance for use-of-force incidents, but is now being used for other things to quantify how well the police are using resources in different neighborhoods. Recently they sponsored a hackathon sprint for local developers to come up with ways to quickly anonymize police body cam footage so that citizens who were not the subject of an investigation could not be identified, but still provide requested footage in a timely manner.

https://statescoop.com/seattle-police-department-launches-da...

Re: Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

#70

Post by eli »

tajen wrote: post #18
pjc50 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what the GDPR implications of this are.

If a European goes there, he’ll have to sign a GDPR agreement? but if the city grew tired of that, they could forbid access to Europeans altogether. Which I’m not surprised would happen one day, perhaps not under this form, but becausr of our overprotected status.

Doesn’t apply if you aren’t standing in the EU
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