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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

#71

Post by jessaustin »

User23 wrote: post #25
14 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you are right and when the public has their own sting rays, their own license plate trackers, and their own facial recognition systems it will be a crazy world indeed. As these systems grow and learn more about people they will become increasingly powerful. Imaging a world where one mistake could follow you around for ever. You take a photo while in public and your facial recognition app detects someone in the backgr…

The public is going to have their own armed flying drones too eventually. The future is going to be so incredibly cyberpunk.

Flying drones are really fragile. Drone countermeasures are what the public needs.

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

#72

Post by ENOTTY »

> Regardless of our views on the military, no one should be profiting from “increasing the lethality” of the military.

It makes no sense for these two clauses to exist together. If you do not believe that people should profit from increasing the lethality of the military, then you do not believe in the utility of having a military.

Especially when the author follows up with this sentence:

> We will not silently build technology to oppress and kill people, whether in our country or in others.

That is the whole point of having armed forces! Armed forces exist to provide achieve foreign policy goals (deterrence, coercion) through the credible threat of its lethality.

These two sentences are fundamentally pacifist, which is okay if the author claimed that mantle. But don't dress it up with a fake unifying clause like "regardless of our views on the military".

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

#73

Post by ta_egdhs »

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…

iirc the stasi employed half the population to report on the other half of the population. Thats a lot of wasted money and labor. It simply isn't a sustainable system.

Chinas social credit is a perfect example of what I mean. technology is making it more and more practical to actually enforce restrictions on civil liberties down to the granular level.

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

#74

Post by [deleted] »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #50
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.

[deleted]

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

#75

Post by SilkRoadie »

rl3 wrote: post #63

What happens when they combine this with image enhancement powered by deep learning?

Isn't this already what private companies are doing? Google and Facebook especially have the ability to create huge profiles about your life and activities. They could almost certainly make highly productive models on people's activity.

The concern about facial recognition and deep learning should be about its use in general. Perhaps I am fortunate with where I live. I am far more concerned about technologies use with private companies than I am with the local police.

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

#76

Post by insickness »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #50
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.

That keepaway strategy doesn't work for guns. There's no reason it should should work for other technologies.

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

#78

Post by ta_egdhs »

sysalphUS wrote: post #44
ta_egdhs wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

if the gov has to physically send someone with guns to someones door to enforce a law, the economic feasibility of enforcing the law has already shifted massively away from the passive data scoop of a mass surveillance system. Why hasnt the gov won the war on drugs by just busting down every door?

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

#79

Post by edoo »

I wonder if an argument could be made that this violates the 4th amendment right to be free from unseasonable search. Collecting your travel movements automatically without cause might apply. It is an interesting problem because there is no expectation of privacy in public. If you venture into public the police or anyone can stake you out and take pictures of you. Devices that do this are just an efficiency increase. The true root of the issue might be whether the government has a right to collect information about you at all. Before taxes about 100 years ago they really had no reason to.

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

#80

Post by hazz99 »

C1sc0cat wrote: post #54
hazz99 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. When the government turns bad, it is potentially an extremely dangerous scenario which pales in comparison to a corporation being unethical. A corporation cannot bomb your house.

cough Pinkertons cough

What is pinkertons?
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