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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

#21

Post by bsenftner »

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.

...and it is an extremely late patent. Patents for this type of innovation first appeared 25+ years ago when IP video was first happening. In fact, the lateness of this filing smells like it is purely for the creation of outrage articles such as what we are discussing.

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

#22

Post by bsenftner »

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…

This is exactly how FR is designed to operate (author of an FR system here). The FR system's gallery is loaded with persons of interest, and then video acquired from various sourced is analyzed. When a person of interest is identified, that "identification" is in the form of "here is person N with a probability of X% accuracy". That "notification" is then presented to a human, who then makes the human decision "yes, that is our person or no, that is not our person" and then whatever organic response that person's presence triggers occurs.

FR is like having a human lookout who is really good with faces.

Beyond that, it is all humans using this capability for good or bad purposes.

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

#23

Post by cronix »

SCHiM wrote: post #20
ep103 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> New York City Police Department documents obtained by The Verge show that police camera teams were deployed to hundreds of Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street protests from 2011–2013 and 2016. Originally acquired through a Freedom of Information Law request by New York attorney David Thompson of Stecklow & Thompson, the records are job reports from the NYPD’s Technical Assistance Response Unit (TARU) that document over 400 instances in which the unit’s video team attended, and sometimes filmed, demonstrations. More important than the records the NYPD turned over, however, are those that it claims it cannot find: namely, any documents demonstrating that legal reviews and authorizations of these surveillance operations took place.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/22/15016984/nypd-video-surve...

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

#24

Post by PavlovsCat »

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…

> Well it’s very simple what happened. Everybody in America was convinced they literally lived in a police state, that if you go out to the streets and demand change, even if you non-violently sit in a park, RoboCops will come and beat you up. And for a moment, when we did this thing in Zucotti Park, that didn’t happen! Everybody was like: ‘What? You mean this actually is a free country? We can actually protest?’ And so they came. And then, in about two months, the cops said ‘no this is not a free society’ and they beat them up again.

> It’s not that Occupy dissolved, but you can only create a movement for direct democracy if you can get everybody out in some kind of public place. They have to be safe enough to go there. So if going to an Occupy march means risking getting beaten up with stick, or being thrown into prison, then people with children, old people, they’re just not going come. And then only the hardcore activists come. It’s that simple.

https://www.eurozine.com/anarchism-work-and-bureaucracy/

And then the society that lets that happen picks out the worst examples of misbehavior by hardcore activists, calls itself noble in comparison, and goes back to sleep.

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

#25

Post by PavlovsCat »

SCHiM wrote: post #20
ep103 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Department of Homeland Security documents released in April prove a "systematic effort" by the agency "to surveil and disrupt peaceful demonstrations" linked to Occupy Wall Street, according to the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF).

> Similarly, FBI documents confirmed "a strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the private sector" designed to produce intelligence on behalf of "the corporate security community." A PCJF spokesperson remarked that the documents show "federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America."

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/j...

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

#26

Post by LinuxBender »

Has anyone trolled Amazon yet with video loops of bad things happening? i.e. webm's from 4chan and such. I'm sure it would violate their ToS. Would it break any laws?

I could imagine selling a service that multiplexes video cameras and only sends Amazon devices live video when there is really motion and not just when they say there is motion. Meaning, put the security control back on the home owner.

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

#27

Post by jbigelow76 »

Likewise, homeowners can also add photos of “suspicious” people into the system and then the doorbell’s facial recognition program will scan anyone passing their home.

This has to be the worst part of it, if you've ever been part of a suburban neighborhood that uses NextDoor as a community tool you'll know that Ring doorbell videos of "others" crank the pearl-clutching paranoia of bored homeowners up to 11. The comment sections will go from "Did you get a license plate?" to "Hurry, add his face to the database before he comes back to rob and murder us all!"

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

#28

Post by PavlovsCat »

bsenftner wrote: post #21
empath75 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

...and it is an extremely late patent. Patents for this type of innovation first appeared 25+ years ago when IP video was first happening. In fact, the lateness of this filing smells like it is purely for the creation of outrage articles such as what we are discussing.

> In fact, the lateness of this filing smells like it is purely for the creation of outrage articles such as what we are discussing.

Amazon filed this patent now, instead of earlier, purely for the creation of "outrage articles"? Can you walk me through the logic here?

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

#29

Post by helloworld2212 »

I'm quite surprised here to not have seen anyone point out the way these patent games typically work inside of a big company.

Often a company is motivated to increase their IP portfolio. In turn they motivate their engineers by offering lucrative bonuses for each patent filed. At my last company we played this game and it was roughly $3k per patent. In general, out of the huge number of patents that get filed in a big company, very few---if any---have any hope of ever seeing the light of day as an actual invention.

While I agree that the technology itself is somewhat alarming and I personally disagree with the idea of anyone building it, let's maybe save the outrage until they announce that they are actually going to build this thing and deploy it in the real world?

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

#30

Post by SubiculumCode »

jbigelow76 wrote: post #27

Likewise, homeowners can also add photos of “suspicious” people into the system and then the doorbell’s facial recognition program will scan anyone passing their home. This has to be the worst part of it, if you've ever been part of a suburban neighborhood that uses NextDoor as a community tool you'll know that Ring doorbell videos of "others" crank the pearl-clutching paranoia of bored homeowners up to 11. The comme…

I kept arguing with others on the Nextdoor app to keep a lid on their paranoia so much that I ended up leaving. The story that led me to leaving that community? A van drove down a cul de sac and turned around. A homeowner thought that was suspicious and so jumped in their car and followed. They followed for a long time, then suddenly the van dips into another neighborhood, goes down a street, turns at the last moment, and goes down another street. This was even more suspicious! Except, what would you expect a driver to do when someone is following you through the entire city like a crazy person?
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