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Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

reuters.com

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Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#31

Post by singron »

coss wrote: post #26
jcims wrote: post #12

What was the point of taking this to shareholders? On what planet would anyone expect them to vote any other way?

Almost all blue collar employees (software engineers) are shareholders at Amazon.

Software engineers are white collar workers[0]. As far as I know, hourly employees no longer get equity[1], and I would guess they comprise most of Amazon's blue collar workforce.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-collar_worker

1: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/03/amazon-hourly-workers-lose-m...

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#32

Post by xvector »

malvosenior wrote: post #25
llamataboot wrote: post #11

Ah, the public corporation! Fictive structures created so that profit-making shall never be interfered with by moral or ethical concerns! Just creating shareholder value, what else can you expect us to do!

Why do you deem all use of facial recognition to be immoral? Is it more moral to only allow the governments access to this tech? Are there really no consumer friendly applications of facial recognition? I'm sure there are and the only way we can explore these benefits is to allow the population access to the technology.

RTFA:

> The first proposal would have made the company stop offering facial recognition to governments unless its board determined sales did not violate civil liberties. A second would have requested a study by September of the extent to which Amazon’s service harmed rights and privacy.

There is no world in which you are not disgustingly greedy, unempathetic, and immoral to reject sales of facial recognition technology to abusive governments.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#35

Post by xvector »

malvosenior wrote: post #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 progre…

Actively producing and selling the tools to strip human rights is far worse than standing by while someone uses said tools.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#36

Post by msla »

xmprt wrote: post #29
testvox wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I don't care much about what Amazon does with it, at least compared to the police. Amazon doesn't have the ability to kill me or lock me in a cage for 50 years.

A really good definition of government that I've heard is "an organization that has a monopoly on force." There's probably more that I'm forgetting but I think that definition is important because it's something that people often forget or choose to ignore.

> A really good definition of government that I've heard is "an organization that has a monopoly on force." There's probably more that I'm forgetting but I think that definition is important because it's something that people often forget or choose to ignore.

Max Weber, although his definition is a bit more nuanced:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber

> Weber defined the state as an entity that successfully claims a "monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory".

"Legitimate" is a tarpit, but in practical terms it's pretty much what others recognize as legitimate. That's the difference between a warlord and a dictator: One controls an armed gang, the other controls a military.

This poses some problems for people claiming that anarchism can work: If a region declares itself anarchist, but the majority can and will enforce its rules by force, is it anarchist or majoritarian? Is there any practical difference?

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#37

Post by malvosenior »

xvector wrote: post #32
malvosenior wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you deem all use of facial recognition to be immoral? Is it more moral to only allow the governments access to this tech? Are there really no consumer friendly applications of facial recognition? I'm sure there are and the only way we can explore these benefits is to allow the population access to the technology.

RTFA: > The first proposal would have made the company stop offering facial recognition to governments unless its board determined sales did not violate civil liberties. A second would have requested a study by September of the extent to which Amazon’s service harmed rights and privacy. There is no world in which you are not disgustingly greedy, unempathetic, and immoral to reject sales of facial recognition technolo…

Whether a governement is abusive or not is greatly in the eye of the beholder so yes, there are plenty of worldviews where such a thing wouldn't be "disgustingly greedy, unempathetic, and immoral".

Besides, there's a lot more going on in this space (and article) than the vote itself. There are calls to regulate facial recognition, which I think is an immoral option (and futile) as it only allows governments access to a powerful technology.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#38

Post by xvector »

sneak wrote: post #6
jokoon wrote: 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…

> Why should private analysis of photos legally acquired be illegal?

For the same reason most horrifyingly destructive items created out of perfectly legal items are illegal?

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#40

Post by lettergram »

malvosenior wrote: post #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 progre…

> 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.

You’d be surprised...

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