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Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police

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Re: Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police

#41

Post by zaptheimpaler »

ta_egdhs wrote: post #10

constitutional rights (and a culture that enshrines them as sacred) is just one layer of protection for civil liberties. The other, Often overlooked layer is the fact that running a dystopian state is uneconomical. For better or worse this is the logic used by gun advocates, but it should also apply to other areas. technology can make it feasible to scale repression like never before. facial recognition, big data, ce…

"at the end of the day if amazon doesn't do this someone else will"

"If Amazon doesn't fuck over people someone else will, so who cares" is a shit argument.

Re: Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police

#42

Post by nemo846 »

ta_egdhs wrote: post #10

constitutional rights (and a culture that enshrines them as sacred) is just one layer of protection for civil liberties. The other, Often overlooked layer is the fact that running a dystopian state is uneconomical. For better or worse this is the logic used by gun advocates, but it should also apply to other areas. technology can make it feasible to scale repression like never before. facial recognition, big data, ce…

> The other, Often overlooked layer is the fact that running a dystopian state is uneconomical.

How so?

Only example I can think of is China’s Social Credit system denying loans and traveling permissions to people with a low score - where said score is dependent on your compliance with the whims of the CCP; instead of being dependent on the credit worthiness of the person.

Said person won’t be able to grow his/her business as effectively, reducing his/her company’s competitiveness.

Re: Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police

#43

Post by Ensorceled »

nemo846 wrote: post #42
ta_egdhs wrote: post #10

constitutional rights (and a culture that enshrines them as sacred) is just one layer of protection for civil liberties. The other, Often overlooked layer is the fact that running a dystopian state is uneconomical. For better or worse this is the logic used by gun advocates, but it should also apply to other areas. technology can make it feasible to scale repression like never before. facial recognition, big data, ce…

> The other, Often overlooked layer is the fact that running a dystopian state is uneconomical. How so? Only example I can think of is China’s Social Credit system denying loans and traveling permissions to people with a low score - where said score is dependent on your compliance with the whims of the CCP; instead of being dependent on the credit worthiness of the person. Said person won’t be able to grow his/her bu…

Has been uneconomical? Again, it takes a large, sophisticated computer network to track a person's Social Credit.

Re: Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police

#44

Post by sysalphUS »

ta_egdhs wrote: post #18
tolien wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument I think you’re alluding to is that rather than employees petitioning Amazon not to sell the government facial recognition technology, they should petition for Amazon (among others) to lobby government to restrict its use (data retention limits would be a start, I guess). If nothing else, that would probably be more effective.

what I'm saying is we should assume that whatever mass surveillance mechanisms the government is trying to buy, it will eventually buy and whatever legal safeguards there are to protect us will eventually fail. what I'm calling for is the individual to be "armed" with adversarial patches or whatever other tool it is that confounds facial recognition sytems. the only thing which is long term effective is a population…

All well and good until you get visited by men with guns for breaking the law.

Re: Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police

#45

Post by yAnonymous »

I'm decidedly against government surveillance, but it feels like our government are deliberately inviting crime to further the needs and arguments for complete surveillance.

Now that violent attacks against the police and emergency services, stabbings, rape, murder and generally a complete refusal to accept the law become more common, I'm at the point where unsolved crime bothers me more than protecting people's privacy, so it evidently works.

It's ironic how the people who want open borders are creating their own dystopian future, but are too short-sighted to realize how they're being used.

In the end, the borders will be closed and we'll end up with not only a lot more problems and surveillance that none of us wanted, but the net result of people being better/worse off will also be negative.

Re: Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police

#46

Post by Rainymood »

Hopefully my opinion is not controversial but the tech behind this is really cool. It is equally easy to imagine a future where this tech is helpful and beneficial for all society. It is also equally easy to imagine a dystopian future where this tech is used by evil authoritarian governments. I am personally very conflicted on this issue because the tech is really cool (actual big data machine learning/CV) but can be used extremely unethically at the same time. It's like a razor sharp double-sided blade.

Re: Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police

#49

Post by planb »

yAnonymous wrote: post #45

I'm decidedly against government surveillance, but it feels like our government are deliberately inviting crime to further the needs and arguments for complete surveillance. Now that violent attacks against the police and emergency services, stabbings, rape, murder and generally a complete refusal to accept the law become more common, I'm at the point where unsolved crime bothers me more than protecting people's priv…

> Now that violent attacks against the police and emergency services, stabbings, rape, murder and generally a complete refusal to accept the law become more common [...]

Citation needed.

Re: Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police

#50

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

throw2016 wrote: post #35

This is where the free market system falls apart. It has no opinion on ethics, only profits. Companies are put together to produce, market and sell surveillance tech to schools, corporates, communities, the police and even nation states. Individual ethics are meaningless beyond signalling against a system. Individual components may have ethical concerns but the system is incentivized to grow and it has. Imagine walki…

> This is where the free market system falls apart. It has no opinion on ethics, only profits.

"We won't sell this technology to anyone who wants to use it to oppress people even though we could make a huge amount of money doing so" seems to suggest otherwise.

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