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Amazon’s Disturbing Plan to Add Face Surveillance to Your Front Door

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Re: Amazon’s Disturbing Plan to Add Face Surveillance to Your Front Door

#11

Post by bilbo0s »

Santosh83 wrote: post #2

It is not the technology that is dangerous but the scale and manner of its deployment. Patented, opaque, closed source, championed by mega-corporations closely allied with powerful governments, entirely beyond the analysis or oversight of the vast majority of citizens, completely connected realtime to various other systems, automated, eternally slurping up data for indefinite storage... these are the real concerning…

>society will get sharply stratified into the 'watched' and the 'watchers' and the latter will get access to nearly limitless data and power...

Don't kid yourself, even the 'watchers' will be 'watched'. The people bringing all these systems together will not be your local yocal Barney Fifes. They will be professional and highly intelligent technical teams whose members have likely studied little other than security and intelligence gathering for their entire professional lives. These are not the type of teams that carelessly leave obvious security holes like that laying around.

Taken as a whole, the technologies coming out today will enable surveillance regimes the likes of which even the UK and China never previously would have dared to dream up.

Re: Amazon’s Disturbing Plan to Add Face Surveillance to Your Front Door

#12

Post by makotech222 »

bilbo0s wrote: post #11
Santosh83 wrote: post #2

It is not the technology that is dangerous but the scale and manner of its deployment. Patented, opaque, closed source, championed by mega-corporations closely allied with powerful governments, entirely beyond the analysis or oversight of the vast majority of citizens, completely connected realtime to various other systems, automated, eternally slurping up data for indefinite storage... these are the real concerning…

> society will get sharply stratified into the 'watched' and the 'watchers' and the latter will get access to nearly limitless data and power... Don't kid yourself, even the 'watchers' will be 'watched'. The people bringing all these systems together will not be your local yocal Barney Fifes. They will be professional and highly intelligent technical teams whose members have likely studied little other than security…

Yeah, because the CEOs, Politicians, etc... are definitely the people walking around in public spaces or delivering packages or buying stuff from stores.

Re: Amazon’s Disturbing Plan to Add Face Surveillance to Your Front Door

#13

Post by bluetidepro »

"Amazon’s Disturbing Plan..."? Come on. I agree this is scary and "disturbing", but doorbell cameras have been around for awhile. It's not like Amazon is the first to do this. Phrasing like that always makes me immediately distrust the article's intent, even if at face value what they are saying is something I agree about. Just because they are openly saying it in a patent, doesn't mean the other companies weren't already doing it in some other sketchy way.

With all that said, what did you think would happen when people openly started allowing listening/video devices on the inside/outside of their homes? Of course people (law or others) are eventually going to want a way to utilize that data if it's useful to them. The same way that I'm sure Facebook/Twitter/etc. work with law enforcement with their data.

Re: Amazon’s Disturbing Plan to Add Face Surveillance to Your Front Door

#14

Post by empath75 »

bluetidepro wrote: post #13

"Amazon’s Disturbing Plan..."? Come on. I agree this is scary and "disturbing", but doorbell cameras have been around for awhile. It's not like Amazon is the first to do this. Phrasing like that always makes me immediately distrust the article's intent, even if at face value what they are saying is something I agree about. Just because they are openly saying it in a patent, doesn't mean the other companies weren't al…

Did you even read the article. It’s a patent for sending facial and biometric recognition results to law enforcement.

Re: Amazon’s Disturbing Plan to Add Face Surveillance to Your Front Door

#15

Post by bluetidepro »

empath75 wrote: post #14
bluetidepro wrote: post #13

"Amazon’s Disturbing Plan..."? Come on. I agree this is scary and "disturbing", but doorbell cameras have been around for awhile. It's not like Amazon is the first to do this. Phrasing like that always makes me immediately distrust the article's intent, even if at face value what they are saying is something I agree about. Just because they are openly saying it in a patent, doesn't mean the other companies weren't al…

Did you even read the article. It’s a patent for sending facial and biometric recognition results to law enforcement.

I did. The first part is just commenting about the title at more of a face value, I followed up the second part about the actual contents of the article.

Re: Amazon’s Disturbing Plan to Add Face Surveillance to Your Front Door

#16

Post by bilbo0s »

CalRobert wrote: post #9
mosselman wrote: post #3

News messages such as these are increasingly scary and alarming. They paint a picture of a very nearby dystopian society that, until now, was the stuff of fiction. The news is successful in scaring us, but what can we do against this type of thing? What can I as an individual do? I can install ad-blockers, etc on my PC, but how can I prevent the technology described in the article from impacting my life or that of my…

Well, you can: * Push your politicians to support GDPR-style legislation * Donate to your politicians so they actually listen * Run for office * Try some weird tech solution like dazzle clothing (this won't work most likely) * Take inspiration from Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, and emigrate to a place with governance that more closely reflects your own values. A place covered by the GDPR would be a good start. _Presumabl…

>Probably a lost cause, though...

I don't know? I think idea number 2 from your list would likely be extremely effective if you had a large enough amount of money so that you could give large amounts to a large number of politicians.

But, yeah, not many people out there with that kind of resource. For the majority of us, resisting these sorts of technologies and tracking is a lost cause.

Re: Amazon’s Disturbing Plan to Add Face Surveillance to Your Front Door

#17

Post by bsenftner »

bilbo0s wrote: post #11
Santosh83 wrote: post #2

It is not the technology that is dangerous but the scale and manner of its deployment. Patented, opaque, closed source, championed by mega-corporations closely allied with powerful governments, entirely beyond the analysis or oversight of the vast majority of citizens, completely connected realtime to various other systems, automated, eternally slurping up data for indefinite storage... these are the real concerning…

> society will get sharply stratified into the 'watched' and the 'watchers' and the latter will get access to nearly limitless data and power... Don't kid yourself, even the 'watchers' will be 'watched'. The people bringing all these systems together will not be your local yocal Barney Fifes. They will be professional and highly intelligent technical teams whose members have likely studied little other than security…

Yeah, except it's not like that. It is much closer to the random collection of anybodies found at any company, just with a tech bent. The idea of these uber specialist is myth. I work in security, at high levels. It's just normal people.

Re: Amazon’s Disturbing Plan to Add Face Surveillance to Your Front Door

#18

Post by jolmg »

bilbo0s wrote: post #11
Santosh83 wrote: post #2

It is not the technology that is dangerous but the scale and manner of its deployment. Patented, opaque, closed source, championed by mega-corporations closely allied with powerful governments, entirely beyond the analysis or oversight of the vast majority of citizens, completely connected realtime to various other systems, automated, eternally slurping up data for indefinite storage... these are the real concerning…

> society will get sharply stratified into the 'watched' and the 'watchers' and the latter will get access to nearly limitless data and power... Don't kid yourself, even the 'watchers' will be 'watched'. The people bringing all these systems together will not be your local yocal Barney Fifes. They will be professional and highly intelligent technical teams whose members have likely studied little other than security…

I think you misunderstood who the watchers are supposed to be. Santosh83 is probably referring to the high risk of the establishment of a police state.

Re: Amazon’s Disturbing Plan to Add Face Surveillance to Your Front Door

#20

Post by SCHiM »

ep103 wrote: post #7
nonamechicken wrote: post #4

In my state Kerala in India, police seems to have started using face recognition. There was a huge protest recently in a famous temple called Sabarimala. Police had installed 12 cameras in the temple compound. If I understood correctly, the system compares live video feed against a database and alerts the police if anyone in the database was caught in the camera. Quoted from the below link: >"The cameras are equipped…

NYPD was using this during Occupy. Everyone complained that Occupy lacked organization. But what was happening on the ground was that the NYPD was identifying who potential leaders were by using face recognition technology and (we believed) cell phone tracking to identify people who consistently showed up to different meetings. They would then use the same face identification technology to pick these people out of cr…

I have never heard of this, do you have references to this?

If this is true, and even if you (or someone) made it up but it is a practical possibility, then it has truly horrific consequences for social organization and the peaceful transition of power (democracy).

I've written about that before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15110645

This is bad.

If you take away more and more ways to (relatively) peacefully protest something (for example by arresting the leaders as you say). Then the frustration will just continue, and grow and grow until the only way is violence, say what Marx had in mind.

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