121–130 of 210 posts
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What do you mean by "committing license plate numbers to a blockchain"?
Probably that the records are preserved in some way that they can't be redacted or removed later.
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Companies do it at scale, though. And motivated by profits, not regard for 'good guy' or 'bad guy' status.
I've never understood why I care who does it, honestly. Companies? The government? A person stalking my wife? The negatives are obvious, do I really care who is doing it? These discussions often feel like tax law debate to me. We're debating whether or not X person is bad for legally avoiding tax, instead of talking about restricting tax laws. Likewise, we're sitting here focused on Amazon for implementing facial rec…
Tech like this is designed and deployed in such a way as to discourage people from thinking it's a problem that needs a fundamental solution. If people realize it's a problem at all they assume it will be solved with just a few laws or a company protest.
If there was a public website you could go to where anyone without authentication could monitor every street in your town, maybe that would spark more citizen-controlled solutions, in the same way that browser extensions intercepting Facebook logins at coffee shops sparked https adoption.
The problem of democratizing surveillance is that many laws prevent neutral actors from building these systems (what's your state's 2-party consent law for audio and video in public spaces?) As a result, the only people doing widescale recording are exempt institutions and companies that people are trained to think aren't a problem, or criminals that people think are rare or limited because their results aren't widely broadcast.
It's like social security numbers. If a company started just publicly releasing them en mass via its Twitter account, we would quickly figure out an alternative way to authenticate that prevented them from doing that. But if instead a company just leaks them to the black market, well that's just a security breach and the system doesn't need to change - even though the practical effects are very similar.
It's trivial to secretly monitor people via facial recognition. It's not trivial to publicize or demonstrate how easy it is in a dramatic way that will spark public attention.
> When most people think of the tech giant Amazon, they think of an innovative, consumer-friendly company responsible for affordable deliveries. This is one of those instances where I say to myself, "I wish I had listened to Richard Stallman X years ago": https://stallman.org/amazon.html
Like Stallman, I'm so uncomfortable installing a listening device in my home like OK Google, Alexa, Siri, etc.
It creeps me out on a visceral level unlike any other kind of snooping.
This is a terribly clickbait-y title for HN. Amazon is not tracking people, AWS has a service offered to anyone who wants it which would be useful for large scale surveillance. Facial recognition services are incredibly close to neutral technologies in my opinion. If we truly want to stop abuse of them, it should be done with legislation. Getting mad and ranty at one of the many offerings (which also includes open so…
You're entitled to that opinion. But it's just your opinion.
What I like to ask myself is: given that we know we had a corrupt individual in the highest office of the US government in the last 50 years (i.e. Nixon), how might that have turned out with each new technology that's exclusively under the executive branch's control?
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> You can do positive things with Rekognition. [Citation needed]
I’ve recently worked on an app that uses it for an entirely harmless image classification feature. This thread seems to be following the general logic that because Amazon is a big company that uses AI/ML, they must be using it for evil. I’ve never seen a thread on HN that accuses OpenCV of facilitating dystopia, or compares the project to selling guns to a serial killer.
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Probably that the records are preserved in some way that they can't be redacted or removed later.
What records? I don't understand what this is supposed to describe. Just writing every plate number some device has seen to the append-only DB? Is that it? What's value in that?
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Amazon is still facilitating it. If you’re selling guns to someone you know is a a serial killer, “someone else would have sold them a gun” is not a defense. Edit: especially if you run ads about how effective your guns are for serial killing.
There’s a big difference between committing a crime and engaging in lawful commerce. By your standard, HN is on the same level as Amazon, as there have been many articles here over the years describing technical details on how to implement such a system available to anyone. A serial killer may be using a raspberry pi based facial recognition system that he learned about here, right now to stalk a victim. That’s an un…
Amazon's product takes care of all that nitty-gritty, thanks to the work of their many bright employees.
> When most people think of the tech giant Amazon, they think of an innovative, consumer-friendly company responsible for affordable deliveries. This is one of those instances where I say to myself, "I wish I had listened to Richard Stallman X years ago": https://stallman.org/amazon.html
> Emo Phillips once made this joke: The other day a woman came up to me and said, "Didn't I see you on television?" I said, "I don't know. You can't see out the other way." Evidently Amazon has made that joke obsolete. Like Stallman, I'm so uncomfortable installing a listening device in my home like OK Google, Alexa, Siri, etc. It creeps me out on a visceral level unlike any other kind of snooping.
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> Emo Phillips once made this joke: The other day a woman came up to me and said, "Didn't I see you on television?" I said, "I don't know. You can't see out the other way." Evidently Amazon has made that joke obsolete. Like Stallman, I'm so uncomfortable installing a listening device in my home like OK Google, Alexa, Siri, etc. It creeps me out on a visceral level unlike any other kind of snooping.
I am honestly very surprised at how comfortable people are with them. I think the smartphone paved the way and normalized it. I remember friends and family being terrified that their SMS messages were being read. Now people often don't give it a second thought.