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Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

reuters.com

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Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#6
post #2

Shouldn't this technology be outlawed outside law enforcement? It sounds like it can be used like a powerful tool.

Why should private analysis of photos legally acquired be illegal?

If computers are legal and software is legal and photography is legal, it seems to me that running your own software on your own computers over your own photos should be legal.

I don’t like the implication either, but I think perhaps the thing we should be looking at is why it is legal for companies to take photos of us for commercial purposes without our explicit consent. I also feel it would be much more practical to regulate and enforce than regulating what algorithms they get to use on already-captured imagery.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#7
Regulating this technology seems like regulating encryption. Futile. You can never put the tech genie back in the bottle. Especially since presumably many of the foundation layers of this technology are open source with wide scale applications. Will they outlaw machine learning? TensorFlow?

Obviously whatever Amazon is doing is more complicated than throwing a ton of face images at TensorFlow but as technology progresses, the advances will bubble up to the application layer.

The thought that you could even regulate facial recognition just shows how out to lunch lawmakers and the media are when it comes to technology, how it's developed and how it's deployed.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#8

Love that the article says people can use the AWS support system to report issues with the technology. That's a black hole of no return if you are a paying customer much less someone random off the internet.

Let me just make a distinction that if you are a support paying customer, you get very fast and somewhat (depends who you get) helpful support, including real time webchat or through the phone.

It's arguable this should be included at all levels but I guess AWS wants to keep their support top notch for the larger pocket users.

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