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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

#211

Post by [deleted] »

burger_moon wrote: post #153
zdragnar wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a difference between speaking up internally and bad-mouthing your employer in public (especially to the press). I can't think of any company that would let that slide.

You would consider this article bad mouthing amazon? The way I interpret 'bad mouthing' is saying things which are false, or misrepresenting what Amazon is does. I don't think the author made any misrepresentations of what Amazon is doing with their involvement but rather bringing to light that employees do not agree with their policies, that to me anyways is in a different category than bad mouthing.

[deleted]

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

#212

Post by hodgesrm »

allthecybers wrote: post #139

This argument conflates a number of issues and frankly loses steam on that basis. The running list of demands so far: Don’t sell facial recognition, don’t work with the government, kick a paying customer off of your system because of who they provide services to and while we are at it you shouldn’t be working with anyone I don’t like. Is that it? For now, but check back with me cause I might want to add greedy invest…

Bezos had a reasonable response as reported by the WSJ, though it was somewhat hidden beneath a clickbait headline.

[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/bezos-bucks-the-bullies-1539818...

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

#213

Post by hodgesrm »

hodgesrm wrote: post #212
allthecybers wrote: post #139

This argument conflates a number of issues and frankly loses steam on that basis. The running list of demands so far: Don’t sell facial recognition, don’t work with the government, kick a paying customer off of your system because of who they provide services to and while we are at it you shouldn’t be working with anyone I don’t like. Is that it? For now, but check back with me cause I might want to add greedy invest…

Bezos had a reasonable response as reported by the WSJ, though it was somewhat hidden beneath a clickbait headline. [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/bezos-bucks-the-bullies-1539818...

p.s., The topic he was addressing was slightly different but the comment is still relevant here.

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

#214

Post by rayvy »

TelmoMenezes wrote: post #87
ENOTTY wrote: post #72

> 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…

> 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. That doesn't follow. One can believe in the utility of the military while at the same time holding that it must operate purely as a public service, so that no incentives are created for a state of permanent war. Famously, an American president expressed this ver…

> 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.

A clearly and incredibly flawed statement, and dare I say a successful attempt at trolling. Nice to know this is what takes up the first 50% of the thread /sc

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

#215

Post by jedberg »

This effort is wasted. If Amazon doesn’t sell it someone else will (most likely on top of AWS).

If they actually want to see change, they should be asking Amazon to use their clout to lobby the government for strict regulations around facial recognition. Then all agencies would have the same rules and you won’t just have them going to another vendor.

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

#216

Post by mynameisvlad »

andun wrote: post #201
sdenton4 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So people have been separated from their children should just wait for the American people to maaaaaaybe kick out the jackboots in two to four years? Naw, dawg, when things get ugly, you have to resist where you can. I'm guessing you can't agree, but there's a fair number of people who think we're in a Germany 1937 situation. We have a president who in all likelihood enlisted Russian interference in the election, who…

Those people were caught committing a crime. And it's not the kind of crime one could commit by mistake, they were entering a country illegally.

It's not as black and white as you make it seem. Being in the country unlawfully is not a crime, it's a civil infraction. Entering unlawfully (through something other than a border) is a crime, when it happens, but the subsequent stay is once again a civil infraction.

Most unlawful residents did not enter unlawfully, they overstayed on visas or in some other way went from a legal stay to an unlawful one. These people would not be committing a crime.

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

#217

Post by bsenftner »

Pfhreak wrote: post #169
bsenftner wrote: post #121

Click bait journalism. Pointless article. Bad journalism tricking you for ad dollars with nonsense. I am a lead software scientist in the Facial Recognition industry. Amazon's ‘Rekognition’ service is a sad, expensive joke. No body takes that software serious. It is poor quality. It is expensive. It is marketed to the consumer public for Amazon's stock, not for actual serious FR use. It is not appropriate for any ser…

You have a lot of experience in the industry, and are able to make your own evaluations of a product based on (I'm guessing) years and years of daily interaction with that domain. Do you think police departmant purchasers are as well informed as you are?Able to make the same thorough analysis? What happens when a facial recognition product that you believe performs poorly is used and everyone thinks it performs well?…

Also, if the FR system performs poorly, it will be offering false positives (the wrong person) and false negatives (it missed the guy) and that just causes the organization using it to disregard it, then abandon using it, and discontinue the contract. It's an expensive waste of time.

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

#218

Post by r00fus »

dragontamer wrote: post #107
kodablah wrote: post #96

> Amazon, where I work, is currently allowing police departments around the country to purchase its facial recognition product, Rekognition, and I and other employees demand that we stop immediately. Ok, nod, nod... > The letter also contained demands to kick Palantir, the software firm that powers much of ICE's deportation and tracking program, off Amazon Web Services and to institute employee oversight for ethical…

The real issue is that the leader of ICE / Military / etc. etc. change power roughly... every 4 years. Police is a local issue, and may change closer to every 2 years (although local municipalities may have a Sheriff, or a Commission, or may rely upon a Mayor to make those decisions). We already have a mechanism for choosing the leader of these various institutions. And whatever powers we give to these institutions,…

Changing the putative elected "leader" of a large organization isn't guaranteed to change the organization. Often the new elected public servant finds she/he is powerless without kowtowing to those in the organization (or externally who pull the strings).

I also disagree that we should limit this discussion to political. Companies (esp the size of Amazon) are hardly affected by politics, they are often judged more harshly by the court of public opinion.

Folks who want to prevent what they see as disaster should use all the legal mechanisms possible to enable discourse and change the course of events.

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

#219

Post by closeparen »

mindcrime wrote: post #171
ENOTTY wrote: post #72

> 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…

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. WTF? No, just no. The only foreign policy goal the armed forces exist to serve is defense of the homeland. Everything else is a misuses of the military. Just because it's commonplace in this day and age doesn't mean it's OK or that anyone shoul…

For better or worse, defense of the homeland is not accomplished by literally standing at the US border waiting for someone to step over the line, but by working to neutralize threats and prevent their emergence abroad.

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

#220

Post by kadendogthing »

tomnipotent wrote: post #206
kadendogthing wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Second, you risk AWS being seen as non-neutral based on the whims of employees' feelings about a company God forbid workers have say in how their work is used, instead of just being robots. Smart enough to build the technology, but apparently not qualified enough to have input on limiting its nefarious and anti-social uses at the hand of an executive branch the employees probably don't favor.

Should a conservative bakery be allowed to refuse service based on religious beliefs?

We codify against pointless discrimination against protected classes of people for a reason. Some things are no longer worth debating and serve no purpose but to actively harm people. So no, they shouldn't be allowed to do that.

Can you explain how discriminating against minority members of society is somehow logically relatable to selling a technological product that immediately expands the governments surface area of an easily abusable power? Because I don't know where bakeries not selling doughnuts to gay people, purely based on personal perspectives, really comes into play with not selling a technological platform that enables governments and its officials to more easily abuse and greatly expand the power they currently have.

From the article:

>On stage, he acknowledged that big tech’s products might be misused, even exploited, by autocrats. But rather than meaningfully explain how Amazon will act to prevent the bad uses of its own technology, Bezos suggested we wait for society’s “immune response.”

>Law enforcement has already started using facial recognition with virtually no public oversight or debate or restrictions on use from Amazon.

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