Live data from Hacker News

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

medium.com

281–289 of 289 posts

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

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US military is not really "winning" in Afghanistan but I don't think it's for lack of lethality, so clearly you can improve the military without changing its lethality. Wouldn't a perfect war (or "action") result in all your political objectives being achieved with zero deaths in either side?

Indeed. The goal of the military is to apply force with as much precision as possible, to preserve the perception of legitimacy for audiences at home and abroad as much as possible. Being lethal isn’t necessary to apply force; effectively applying non-lethal force is just much harder, so current military doctrine emphasizes lethality against combatants. But against irregular opponents, whose goal is often to sow hatr…

even with the internet today we don't see. maybe vr will give us a key to end the suffering.

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

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Thanks for responding kindly to a not so kind comment - sorry.

Your point does make a lot of sense. It sucks we live in this world where we have to operate as if our own government is an adversary. Technologically its very sound to operate in this way, but at best that means citizens in an arms race vs. an all-powerful government with infinite money and resources. In the long run, we will lose that race. For example:

Use masks/patches to circumvent facial recognition? Govt. outlaws those, builds better tech.

Use cryptocurrency? Govt heavily monitors crypto exchanges, ties them back to your identity (this is already happening! - coinbase requires SSN and identity verification), defeating the point.

The only way to really win then is to demand our government, which is supposed to have its citizens interest at heart, actually does. No amount of tech can beat the govt because the govt eventually gets access to that tech & talent too, plus a police force and authority to make laws. The only solution is to have them on OUR side.

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

#283
Funny how activist employees don't trust governments and other authority figures, but gladly violate the trust of the hand that feeds them by leaking stories when they don't get their way at work. Happens at AWS, Google, MSFT, ...

AWS is an infrastructure company. AWS' employees suggesting service denial to people with opposing political viewpoints is like asking AT&T to deny phone service to someone based on their politics. Please, take an orientation course on political tolerance, instead of making preposterous & unprofessional demands at work.

No company can rely on AWS if they're at risk of service denial based on politics. Today, AWS might be left leaning, but tomorrow things may change to the other side. Politics is best left out of business

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

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you’re not describing a double sided blade (that “cuts both ways”), you’re saying that sword making is cool.

How is it not a double sided blade. Better surveillance would catch and/or possibly stop car thieves, bike thieves, muggers, vandals, robberies, some rapes, life threatening drivers, hit and run drivers, bad cops. I get that there's no magic wand to make sure the tech is only used for good but that's true of pretty much everything. Knives can be used to cut food or to stab people.

To follow up on this, I actually had a philosophical debate with myself about the following statement: "Anything that can be used for good, can be used for evil."

The point I'm trying to make is that by inventing something "good", you can always use it for "evil" by witholding it from someone. You invent a new medicine to cure cancer? Give it to the highest bidder and leave those who can't pay for it to die, this could be seen as "evil" in my eyes.

I haven't studied philosophy so I'd love some pointers to authors who touch upon this subject or whatever its called.

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

#285
post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just a byproduct of protesting against tighter migration control. God forbid law enforcement stops "undocumented".

I does not, you can agree to tight migration enforcement while treating people who are caught by that enforcement humanly.

Why nobody protests when kids are separated if parents are incarcerated in-country?

What would be humane treatment? Hold kids together with parents? Same people will be outraged by putting kids behind (hypotethical) bars.

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

#286
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This mechanism reinforces the societal norms that created it, like many others. If the Irish didn't intensely oppose police brutality, more brutes would enter the police force, leading to higher incentives for brutes to join the force. It looks like a self-amplifying loop but it works towards society's demands.

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

#287

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…

Your argument sounds a lot like an argument that excludes the middle. It is perfectly reasonable to work for a government or a company while at the same time demanding that decision-takers within that organization do not completely disregard morals, or the general well-being of society.

This sort of thing is not a matter of binary choices.

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

#288

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…

I really find it odd that all of a sudden tech employees are resistant to supporting their own government. Nothing sudden about it. If anything, this trend is a return to normalcy. Hackers have traditionally been fairly opposed to authoritarianism, including - but not limited to - that expressed through the mechanism of governments and nation-states.

Exactly. There's a reason the average Berkeley-Unix/MIT-Lisp programmer is depicted as having a long beard: the creators of much of the foundations of our modern software ecosystem were a bunch of hippies, who hated the idea of their code being used to make money, let alone to power weapons. They saw code as a more direct manifestation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower_power: something you can create and promulgate that, in so doing, resists top-down authoritarian control and promotes bottom-up communication and organization.

This fact is subtext to a lot of the flamewars that occurred between these "greybeard hackers" and mainframe programmers on the one hand, and Windows PC programmers on the other hand. In both cases, the greybeards saw their counterparts working at IBM or Microsoft, or working at other companies developing software for z/OS or Windows, as people who were willing to "sell out" and work for "the man." (Not "the man" as in Microsoft/IBM; "the man" as in the government's various three-letter agencies.)

This was also the original subtext of Microsoft and Apple's fight over personal-computer market mindshare. Bill Gates and Paul Allen came from money, met at a private prep school, and shared a vision of selling their software to companies like IBM, who would drop thousands of copies top-down into enterprise partners' offices. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were introduced because of a shared interest in illegal pursuits like phone phreaking and LSD use, and wanted—sort of like the One Laptop Per Child project—to empower individuals by putting computers in their hands. (Consider: they were probably envisioning use-cases exactly like "being able to share copies of the Anarchist's Cookbook over the Internet.")

Apple and Microsoft today are more alike than different, but they started off with diametrically-opposed cultures and corporate visions; and which ecosystem you bought into (at least back when) could tell people a lot about who you were as a person. There was a reason Apple found its first beach-head in schools: the schoolteachers of the 1970s shared pretty much the same countercultural ideals.

Read through the Jargon File, or the fortune(1) database, and you'll quickly get a sense of what "hackers" as a culture were like. A modern Stanford-MBA-alum YC applicant, who fancies themselves a "hacker", might be a bit shocked :)

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

#289
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make up your mind, will the solution work if IBM makes it? If so, then it's not really low tech. If not, then Amazon staying out of the game did exactly the right thing because all of the capable people abstained.

I mean, it can work but not perfectly. For face recognition tech, accuracy matters and my hypothesis is that Amazon could do better vs. IBM. And Amazon doing it could be much cheaper and better. The taxpayers money will be spent regardless and in one case it would be more efficient.

If it's inaccurate it's a failure or it won't be widely deployed. It's idiotic to make a perfect surveillance machine using the excuse that, if you don't, someone will make a crappy one.

This is about it being an unethical thing to make, not wasting taxpayer money. The optimal outcome is that it is a complete failure and the government learns not to do it again.

Post reply on HN