Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 289 posts

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

#251

Post by trolleyhacker »

kadendogthing wrote: post #230
alexanderwept wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. But where do we draw a bright line? Sure, maybe we want religious people baking cakes for gay weddings. But should Muslim bakers be forced to draw likenesses of the Prophet Muhammad if a cus…

>But where do we draw a bright line? It's an evolving conversation. There is no line to be drawn. We learn, we codify, we move on. Let's stick to applicable conversations, shall we?

> we codify

That is a line.

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

#252

Post by Paul-ish »

sys_64738 wrote: post #117
edoo wrote: post #79

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.…

This is no different than a spotter LEO or witness recognizing you from a mugshot or from video surveillance. It's just that it's done with EVERYBODY now.

The US supreme court ruled that putting a GPS device on a car constituted a search [1]. People at the time were making the same argument you were.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones

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

#253

Post by anticensor »

logfromblammo wrote: post #196
ENOTTY wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless the staff operating the public service receive no compensation at all, then there is profit involved.

You may be confusing the legal terms "nonprofit" and "not-for-profit". In a "nonprofit", the paid staff cannot be paid contingent on the fundraising efforts of the organization. The nonprofit organization has a separate legal existence from the totality of its membership. A "not-for-profit" is identical to the totality of its membership, and may pay its staff or members out of general funds. Nonprofits are 501(c)(3)…

Trade organisations and political parties are not-for-profit too, they just have different financing rules than member societies.

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

#254

Post by dsfyu404ed »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #186
dsfyu404ed wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Software doesn't run oppressive surveillance states. People run oppressive surveillance states.

Thus absolving the people who are building the surveillance state, some nice self serving logic.

The technology that makes up the surveillance state can be used for good and evil.

Your bank can profile you in order to detect someone who isn't you trying to commit fraud by pretending to be you or the ATF can kick down your door and shoot your dog because you made the mistake of buying fertilizer in bulk and renting a truck to go pick it up.

I used to work on tech that could be very useful for someone trying to drop bombs. Our implementation was part of a package that was used defensively, mostly to give the guys on the ground a heads up if someone was speeding toward their checkpoint (go watch some ISIS VBIED videos if you think a few seconds heads up isn't a huge help).

I can shoot someone who breaks into my home (or better yet, nobody breaks into my home when it's common knowledge that most people have the ability to shoot back) or I can shoot someone for illegally dumping a mattress in my alley.

How you use technology really does matter a lot more than the tech itself.

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

#255

Post by sdenton4 »

gaius wrote: post #240
Frondo wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being in the country without authorization is a civil infraction, not a criminal one, and people aren't sent to prison for civil infractions. You're also allowed to be here if you're seeking asylum. But, at the end of the day, if your basis for the family border separation policy is to defend it with "well, criminals also have their families broken up," then I'm not sure how to convince you it's right to care about a…

if your basis for the family border separation policy is to defend it with "well, criminals also have their families broken up," Not at all. I just find it curious that this one particular application of what is actually a common policy has suddenly become protest-worthy. By all means protest it in its entirety (if you think it’s appropriate for children to serve sentences alongside their parents in the same cells) b…

a) It's a new policy. Separating migrants from their kids started under Trump.

b) The effects are actually even worse than they are in the jail/prison situation. The kids themselves are incarcerated, as they don't have family that they can be placed with. We know that there are many migrants who have been deported after being separated from their children, who are now still in custody.

"At the moment, the government’s rolls include hundreds of children in shelters and temporary foster care programs who were taken from an adult at the border, whether a parent, grandparent or some other companion. About 13,000 children who came to the United States on their own were being held in federally contracted shelters this month, more than five times the number in May 2017." https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/us/migrant-children-famil...

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

#257

Post by jhabdas »

losteric wrote: post #165
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…

For what it's worth, those 450 "signatures" were just members of an email list. That email list was founded to discuss ethical issues and draft a letter of complain, but discussion quickly fizzled without consensus on issues or solutions. Then, a month later, this was published out of the blue. No prior communication, no broader input, not even the opportunity to opt-out. Pretty unethical. As someone who was on that…

There's nothing unethical about being a hero. You should try it sometime.

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

#258

Post by anticensor »

sys_64738 wrote: post #189
PurpleBoxDragon wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But scale is an important difference in legality and morality. Consider the following example. Calling someone to ask them on a date is normal acceptable behavior. Doing it 20 times an hour, 3 hours a day, every day, quickly becomes immoral and illegal.

At some point it has to change from legal to illegal. That is, with n calls then you're still legal but that n+1th call makes you a felon. What is n? What is n for facial rekognition?

k (number of takes) does not matter. r (number of uses) does.

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

#259

Post by unbroken »

> in the United States, a lack of public accountability already results in outsized impacts and over-policing of communities of color, immigrants, and people exercising their First Amendment rights.

... in the United States, a lack of public accountability already results in outsized impacts and over-policing of [progressive ingroup], [progressive ingroup], and [progressive ingroup].

> We follow in the steps of the Googlers who spoke out against the Maven contract and Microsoft employees who are speaking out against the JEDI contract. Regardless of our views on the military, no one should be profiting from “increasing the lethality” of the military. We will not silently build technology to oppress and kill people, whether in our country or in others.

Mentions the Maven contract but not Dragonfly, at least not directly.

The worst part is that I don't even disagree with the letter, but I doubt the author has principles as much as he has tribal allegiances. I suspect he would be all-in on this tech if it came with some sort of guarantee it would only be used on "Nazis".

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

#260

Post by smallnamespace »

kadendogthing wrote: post #230
alexanderwept wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. But where do we draw a bright line? Sure, maybe we want religious people baking cakes for gay weddings. But should Muslim bakers be forced to draw likenesses of the Prophet Muhammad if a cus…

>But where do we draw a bright line? It's an evolving conversation. There is no line to be drawn. We learn, we codify, we move on. Let's stick to applicable conversations, shall we?

> Let's stick to applicable conversations, shall we?

Unless you a have a principle that everyone agrees on over what is 'applicable' and what isn't, that veers pretty close to begging the question - conversations that support your point are declared 'applicable', while ones that bring up difficult questions to your point of view get dismissed as off-topic.

Getting back to the original topic, if you're saying that "employees' political views should be taken into account in company decisions", the difficult question is "what about employees whose political views are repugnant to you?" The example of the cake bakery is easy to dismiss because it seems covered by existing law, but what about other cases?

E.g. if a medical device company's employees are religious, should they force it to not sell to abortion providers? Should Trump supporters agitate to only manufacture in the US?

Post reply on HN