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Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

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141–150 of 210 posts

Re: Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

#141
post #133

I distinctly remember watching the Amazon conference when they demonstrated their facial recognition software. It occurred to me that if this technology was around in Mao's China or Stalin's Russia the twentieth century might have been darker and bloodier than it already was. This technology certainly has a lot of potential for improving, but it also has a huge potential for violating human rights. Kudos to the autho…

Many governments and large rich organizations already have this... so really AWS is just democratizing it. While I agree that's it's creepy af, it's not exactly new. Perhaps through this widening of access the stakes become more obvious and talked about (shining a light).

Once a thousand startups are using this in a non-secretive way, maybe voters will wake up and demand regulation?

It may be a side-effect, but Kudos to Amazon regardless if it does raise awareness.

Re: Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

#142

As long as I or you can use it to track the coming and going of your Congressman and Senators, at the same price that Amazon charges others, I guess it is okay. That nice townhouse he visited with the attractive blonde who lives there, while his wife was out of town? It's ok for me to track and then publish the info, right? We're all equal when we are in public view, right?

Politicians should have less right to privacy than us citizens.

Re: Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

#143

As long as I or you can use it to track the coming and going of your Congressman and Senators, at the same price that Amazon charges others, I guess it is okay. That nice townhouse he visited with the attractive blonde who lives there, while his wife was out of town? It's ok for me to track and then publish the info, right? We're all equal when we are in public view, right?

Imagine license plate readers all over town committing license plate numbers to a blockchain.

Add MAC addresses passing through major intersections and you've got some quality data to work with.

Re: Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

#144
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never write anything in an email/SMS/etc that you wouldn’t feel comfortable reading on the Jumbotron in Times Square. If you follow that simple rule you'll do fine.

Well we can hope we don't have to add not saying anything out loud in public or near a smart device to that list. Perhaps it's already too late for that.

Yes, it's already too late for that :(

My wife complains sometimes that I don't talk to her anymore. After quietly turning her phone off, and putting it in a distant room, I explain why ;)

Re: Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

#145

As long as I or you can use it to track the coming and going of your Congressman and Senators, at the same price that Amazon charges others, I guess it is okay. That nice townhouse he visited with the attractive blonde who lives there, while his wife was out of town? It's ok for me to track and then publish the info, right? We're all equal when we are in public view, right?

Politicians should have less right to privacy than us citizens.

Everyone with substantial power should have less privacy. Politicians should have almost none.

Re: Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 don't understand why so many tech-literate people have an issue with that. As I am sure you know, those devices only record your voice and send it to the server when they hear their hotword. The hotword detection has to be done on the device itself for technical reasons (battery and data usage). Theoretically it's possible that the companies that build those devices lie and actually record you other times. But the…

Are you unaware of the Google Home Mini hardware bug that caused it to simply send everything you said? The failure modes here are plentiful and catastrophic, and the history of the teams developing these products gives us no reason to think that they're even considering our privacy in their risk profiles.

Re: Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 don't understand why so many tech-literate people have an issue with that. As I am sure you know, those devices only record your voice and send it to the server when they hear their hotword. The hotword detection has to be done on the device itself for technical reasons (battery and data usage). Theoretically it's possible that the companies that build those devices lie and actually record you other times. But the…

Because it can easily be misused.

For example: Trump is one of those people that can change the US into something you would not imagine a year ago.

It's very easy to say that this wont happen but I also thought Trump would never become a president...

Re: Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

#148
post #70
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

GDPR applies if you are a European citizen visiting a website while on holiday in USA, for example. It doesn’t seem to me that GDPR stops when crossing a border. Which is why it has so much worldwide reach.

Re: Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

#149
post #120

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…

> 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. 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 ea…

Can we please, for once, make this not a "Trump is evil" thread ? Besides, yes, Trump is evil, but among the general US population there are far worse people than him, and despite what you probably think, together they have far, far more control over your life than Trump does. Private individuals are already implementing something worse than China's social credit score all over America. [1] Currently they're limited somewhat by technology, and I mean that in the worst possible way: they're more limited by what they think the technology can do, more so than by what is actually possible.

Building webcams that asses creditworthiness of store customers and the likelihood of returns is possible today. How long until it happens ? How long until we discover that badly dressed black people are often flagged by whatever tool comes out ?

Tracking people by their faces ? Been done, easy now (hell, opencv comes with it built in, so does YOLO). Tracking/identifying people by their movements (and I mean by how they walk, how they grab things, ...) ? Been done. Tracking people by the proportions of the limb lengths ? Been done. Taking a bad human tracker, feeding it into an LSTM and get vastly better performance when presenting it with video ? Been done.

And it gets much worse: outsmarting most of the human race ? Been done (let's be honest: humans have lost the Turing challenge. AIs are better at chatting up humans than other humans are). But no worries : humans still beat AIs at specific problems, and indeed humans still beat AIs ... well not at making AIs actually (genetic algorithms seem to beat everything else here). But humans still beat at "full system" AI architecture. For now.

And let's go further: how long until you can no longer talk to another human being ? Because that's exactly where voice recognition will lead. The 2030 version of Google Duplex : [2]

And of course, that makes the technology itself evil, not it's use by the executive branch per se. I'm sure they'll abuse it, but I guarantee they won't be the worst of your worries.

And it's MAD. Machine learning has joined the set of technologies that we must make sure we have. Otherwise, a conflict with, say, China is going to be thoroughly unpleasant (which would make them a lot more likely to start it as well). So we can't skip that.

And yet in this thread, nobody is talking about outlawing machine learning itself. And there certainly is no international effort to do that. Without that option, we might as well stop talking about measures we can take since they'll be absurdly ineffective.

You can "do no evil" but fact of the matter is since 1970 (and really since 1870) humans have been competing by robots. Humans can effectively no longer needlepoint, because they can't do so usefully, profitably, effectively, whatever you want to call it. Systematically the realm of humans is moving from everything to a niche.

Today, AI is a mostly-invisible salesperson making you purchase more stuff on Amazon.com, making you watch more advertisements on Microsoft/FB/Youtube/Google, and so on. It's literally choosing what to present to you in order to accomplish that, just like that friendly salesperson did when you walked into bed bath and beyond in 1995.

There is no solution here that is anywhere close to even being discussed.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-surprisi...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flLoSxd2nNY

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