Yeah, better waste public $$$ by forcing government to create in-house solution
But, it will be open-source, which is good.
Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police
61–70 of 289 posts
Re: Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
HN is a forum for startup founders and entrepreneurs.
I thought it was for "hackers" not MBA's
It's owned by a Silicon Valley startup accelerator, so even if HN is for "hackers" (for some arbitrary definition of the same) it will also never not be for MBAs.
Re: Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police
#63What happens when they combine this with image enhancement powered by deep learning?
Re: Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police
#64"If we want to lead, we need to make a choice between people and profits." As an AMZN shareholder, I pick profits. Well, growth actually.
How do you justify this ethically?
Re: Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police
#65constitutional 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.
Man, this argument is so dumb indeed...
Even dumber than the "Hey, why should we care about the environment since a few countries can decide not to"
Re: Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police
#66I applaud the authors of this letter. It's an open question whether an open, democratic society can exist in the world of computational media. If it can, we'll either need a well-educated citizenry or a benevolent oligarchy of people who are skilled, knowledgeable, and wise in the use of computers. We have done a lousy job of ethical political leadership so far, preoccupying ourselves with profitably dismantling what…
When I picture a person in tech successfully running for office, I imagine precisely someone who has excelled at "profitably dismantling what's left of the old paradigm". Unfortunately, technical ability, business savvy, ability to understand social, political and bureaucratic systems in motion and strong, reasonable ethical convictions are all mostly orthogonal and rare qualities.
Re: Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police
#67constitutional 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…
It's simply not inevitable. I'm so tired of this rhetoric. "it's going to happen anyway, so give up". No, it's not going to happen if you actively oppose it. For example, cops in Europe cannot execute crawling, begging, unarmed people. And if they try, they won't be getting away with it. Guns exist, cops exist, and guess what, cops shooting people doesn't exist. Why? Because society is an active thing, and if a socie…
I think there's more to it than actively opposing - in Ireland deaths at the hands of the cops are rare, and there's a huge fuss when one happens ... but that's more a manifestation of the norms of Irish society than anything to do with active opposition to police brutality. It's more - if police brutality is rare then there's not much point in becoming a cop if you're a brute
Re: Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police
#68I guess Bezos sees this as a strategic play to leapfrog Facebook on knowing who everyone is.
This is FUD - AWS, as opposed to Amazon the e-commerce company, has pretty strict walls between itself and the data of its customers. In these cases the data is owned by the police department and AWS or Amazon won’t be allowed to use or profit from it. Unless there’s some kind of special agreement in exchange for a discount, which I doubt very much.
Re: Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police
#69constitutional 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.
"if amazon doesn't fuck people over someone else will"
yeah i said that.
"so who cares"
no i didn't say that.
I said the best defense isnt the benevolence of corporations willing to say no to gov contracts on principal. the best defense is a populace able to subvert these technological systems of oppression. For facial recognition this means adversarial patches. for Internet censorship this means VPNs. in other cases it means encryption and cryptocurrency.
Re: Amazon Employee: We Shouldn’t Sell Facial Recognition Tech to Police
#70constitutional 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.
Personally, I see it as the opposite side of the same argument people use about drugs - that simply banning things doesn't work, motivated people will find another way to obtain them. There is no one more motivated and persistent than the US Government... Even if all the US tech firms join together and refuse to sell to them, the US is not the only country on Earth with tech companies making innovations in this area.
So in that sense, yes, they'll keep looking and someone else absolutely will. As someone pointed out below, the real solution is to have them lobby the US Government to give up their pursuit, anything else is just a delaying tactic.