Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#61

Post by scythe » Wed, May 22, 2019, 11:24 PM UTC

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…

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

You need to re-word this sentence. I agree with what (I think) you're going for, but your words say something else.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#62

Post by munk-a » Wed, May 22, 2019, 11:25 PM UTC

SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #53

mc32 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah but everyone on this site will tell you that laws and regulations are horrid evil things. So if we can't expect anything from the corporations because we should be looking to laws, and if we can't pass laws because they are evil hindrances to corporations, then what should we do?

I mean, not everyone... in fact I've always sort of assumed that those that push hard against regulations are the silicon valley crowd of folks - and you folks are fine folks, but that part of the world is just weird.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#63

Post by xfitm3 » Wed, May 22, 2019, 11:26 PM UTC

munk-a wrote: post #60

xfitm3 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprisingly difficult. Winding down from Amazon personally has taken months, but thats futile. At work I spend 8 figures a year on AWS.

AWS definitely has competitors you can switch to pretty easily, I think Amazon's retail side is the harder portion to jettison.

Do you use AWS? It's extremely difficult to move away if you use services like RDS, ElasticSearch, ElastiCache, Lambda, KMS, parameter store, etc. It will cost a couple years of ops time to reliably migrate to a competitor like GCP + change work patterns. Not to mention that Google products like Functions are still alpha and unreliable.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#64

Post by JohnFen » Wed, May 22, 2019, 11:31 PM UTC

SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #53

mc32 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah but everyone on this site will tell you that laws and regulations are horrid evil things. So if we can't expect anything from the corporations because we should be looking to laws, and if we can't pass laws because they are evil hindrances to corporations, then what should we do?

Not everyone. I happen to think that laws and regulations can be wonderful things.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#65

Post by llamataboot » Wed, May 22, 2019, 11:31 PM UTC

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #51

llamataboot wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There are obviously serious problems with law enforcement in the united states. Although I think that these mostly manifest in face to face encounters with the poor, people of color, and the mentally ill. I can't think of many recent cases where local law enforcement's application of information technology resulted in gross injustice.

The idealistic argument would be that moving to IT and algorithms reduces the gross amount of human bias that currently enters into the system.

The reality may be far different as the algorithms themselved make the biases even less seen and less able to be contested.We're not in full minority report territory, but I think the worry is that added the ability to do near permanent surveillance to an already militarized police force that thinks they are fighting a war is not...going to turn out well for some of us.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#66

Post by clairity » Wed, May 22, 2019, 11:31 PM UTC

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #49

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…

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.…

you're argument is wholly misplaced.

if it were a decision like "should we put this bin over on that shef?", then yes, it's reasonable to delegate to a rank-and-file employee.

"should we develop technology that can lead to a surveillance state?" is not one of those decisions.

that's a strategic decision entirely negotiated between the shareholders (via the board) and the management team, for which they should all be held accountable.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#67

Post by JohnFen » Wed, May 22, 2019, 11:32 PM UTC

rednixion wrote: post #28

throwaway2048 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Queue the torrent of HN comments that conflate "is technically legal" and "Is morally responsible", after all the highest form of morality is making money.

Should also add that maximizing shareholder value isn't a hard legal requirement since those laws are often misquoted to imply the opposite for some reason and that the board had "no choice" to pursue a particular controversial revenue stream, source: https://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/academics/clarke_business_...

Yes. If maximizing shareholder value was the end-all and be-all, then every corporation would be in the sex, drugs, and gambling businesses.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#68

Post by llamataboot » Wed, May 22, 2019, 11:34 PM UTC

mc32 wrote: post #47

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…

I would agree with you entirely and I think that the history of both capitalism and communism have demonstrated that we are not at a level yet where we can design a socio-economic system to make it not matter whether we are good to each other and in fact, they are both likely, in different ways, to sometimes distort and amplify some of the worst parts of our animal natures.

I have found it a certainty on HN that at some point, in any discussion of these things, that someone will step in and say "but this is legal, and the corporation must maximize its profits for the shareholders, so if you really want a change, change the laws, the company itself is utterly amoral and working as designed"

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#69

Post by awakeasleep » Wed, May 22, 2019, 11:35 PM UTC

plandis wrote: post #52

In my mind selling facial recognition seems no different than selling a hammer. It’s amoral, it can be used for good or bad. Id much rather see laws to limit when and how the technology can be applied.

same thing with land mines? What about an autonomous drone?

Hell, even a bottle of aspirin filled with poison tablets secretly placed on a store shelf could kill a future serial killer.

I believe your judgement mechanism is meaningless. Even the most evil stuff can be used for good, and everything is a tool.

A better metric would apply one of the standard ethical frameworks, like utilitarianism or deontological ethics. (Is this technology going to provide a net benefit? / If everyone used this technology would we live in a desirable world?)

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#70

Post by llamataboot » Wed, May 22, 2019, 11:35 PM UTC

JohnFen wrote: post #67

rednixion wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should also add that maximizing shareholder value isn't a hard legal requirement since those laws are often misquoted to imply the opposite for some reason and that the board had "no choice" to pursue a particular controversial revenue stream, source: https://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/academics/clarke_business_...

Yes. If maximizing shareholder value was the end-all and be-all, then every corporation would be in the sex, drugs, and gambling businesses.

I mean, the gambling business may be profitable, but are the profits really left on the table at this point? You don't just have to build a casino, you have to build a /better casino/.

Profitability has little to do with the overall margins of the market you are in, but in whether you can find places to optimize ROI that your competitors have not.