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Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

reuters.com

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Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#41

Post by deathanatos »

danielovichdk wrote: post #9

Dont buy from Amazon. How hard can it be

For example, my friend has a doorbell with a camera. The doorbell has software that runs facial recognition on me, and it often correctly identifies me, regardless of whether I look into the camera or not. (Nowadays I do, since I know it already knows me, I just make silly faces since I know it goes to his phone.)

Now, IDK how I feel about this doorbell. But it's also his property; am I to say he can't have an AI-enhanced doorbell on his house? But that doorbell also likely uploads my image, and data about me, to centralized servers somewhere, largely without my consent. (Aside from perhaps my implied consent of entering his property, but even then, I don't think I noticed it the first time I visited. Now I'm aware of it, since he told me, and has demoed the tech to me in various ways.)

(IDK if this particular thing is an Amazon product or not, and in fact, I highly suspect it isn't, but I want to pose it as an example of just because I might voluntarily choose to not use the tech, that choice only goes so far, and there are still privacy implications for me despite it.)

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#42

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

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!

There are many people who don't think there's anything immoral about facial recognition, or even its lawful use by law enforcement. I am among them. Such individuals probably comprise a higher fraction of Amazon's voting shareholders than the population at large. Especially if you count by votes, since if Bezos thought there was anything wrong with it the program wouldn't exist.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#43

Post by malvosenior »

xvector wrote: post #35
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.

Not all uses of facial recognition strip people of human rights. Would it strip you of your rights if an airport used this tech to discover known terrorists in a crowd? Or how about recognizing you at the DMV and pulling up your records automatically? I'm sure there are millions of non-human rights violating usages (even by the government) of facial recognition.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#44

Post by dv_dt »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #3

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.

Can one report an AWS issue from a TSA inspection room?

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#45

Post by malandrew »

Vordax wrote: post #39

What I really wanted was facial recognition in Google Glasses. I hate it when I am in the store and someone comes up and says Hi hows the wife and kids, and I am like "who is this....". Would be great to say "Hey Bob, doing good" :)

I'm sitting here imagining a very distant future where the part of the brain that recognizes faces eventually becomes vestigial and we end up relying on technology to recognize the people in our lives.

Basically acquired prosopagnosia.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#46

Post by AmericanChopper »

malvosenior wrote: post #37
xvector wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think it’s entirely misguided to place the responsibility to ensure that customers are not using products to violate civil liberties on to corporate boards. Legislature should define them, and courts should uphold them. To say that these responsibilities should be shifted to the board room is alarming and undemocratic.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#47

Post by mc32 »

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!

Public corporations, private corporations, state-owned, party-controlled corporations. It doesn’t matter. At least public corporations are known to bow to pressure.

I think ownership is irrelevant. What matters is lawfulness and what remains lawful after pressure or indifference from the constituencies.

Hand in hand with this is the rule of law. Some countries on paper have great liberties and rights for their people, but in practice it’s up to the party to interpret and enforce (as in the great purges, etc,)

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#48

Post by llamataboot »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #42
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!

There are many people who don't think there's anything immoral about facial recognition, or even its lawful use by law enforcement. I am among them. Such individuals probably comprise a higher fraction of Amazon's voting shareholders than the population at large. Especially if you count by votes, since if Bezos thought there was anything wrong with it the program wouldn't exist.

Just out of curiosity -

How have your interactions been with law enforcement during your life? Largely positive? Largely negative? Or non-existent? Do you, overall, feel that the US in largely a place where law-abiding citizens are free to go about their days?

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#49

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

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…

That's not what the rejection of this proposition indicates. The shareholders are not saying, "Amazon, sell to anyone no matter how bad." They are saying, "Amazon, continue using whatever processes you are already using to determine who to restrict from using this product."

It is very common for people who have a particular issue that they care about to attempt to require the board of a company to handle that issue. But if big companies acquiesced to all such requests, the board would take on a large workload, making sometimes detailed decisions where they have no expertise.

Company owners delegate much of their authority to boards. Boards delegate much of their authority to employees. I am sure there will be entities to which Amazon would not offer facial recognition services. But that decision does not need to be made at the level of the board. BTW, this is why management almost always fights such propositions: it ties the hands of the company to use an inefficient decision process, for no provable gain on any worthwhile metric.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#50

Post by sunsetMurk »

malandrew wrote: post #45
Vordax wrote: post #39

What I really wanted was facial recognition in Google Glasses. I hate it when I am in the store and someone comes up and says Hi hows the wife and kids, and I am like "who is this....". Would be great to say "Hey Bob, doing good" :)

I'm sitting here imagining a very distant future where the part of the brain that recognizes faces eventually becomes vestigial and we end up relying on technology to recognize the people in our lives. Basically acquired prosopagnosia.

Almost feel like that's not so distant. Imagine how fewer people we would recognize if we weren't regularly pinged with an update about them or their picture scrolled passed on a device.
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