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Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

reuters.com

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Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#81

Post by JohnFen »

testvox wrote: post #20
jokoon wrote: post #2

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

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.

> Amazon doesn't have the ability to kill me or lock me in a cage for 50 years.

I wouldn't be so certain about that. History is filled with examples of corporations doing exactly that sort of thing, usually (but not always) by having a government act as their proxy.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#82

Post by matz1 »

awakeasleep wrote: post #69
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 ethic…

Yes, same thing with all of that.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#83

Post by matz1 »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #77
awakeasleep wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ethic…

I will accept your metaphor as valid if you can present to me a moral use of land mines. I agree with you about autonomous drones. They have many moral uses. Weaponized ones, not so much.

That depends on your mortality. I see it morally right to use it on my enemy.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#84

Post by fooblitzky »

"The proposals faced an uphill battle. Amazon’s board recommended against them" - for those not aware, the way shareholder voting works for Amazon, is that shares that aren't voted are assumed to vote the same way the board recommends. This means to get any proposal different to the board's recommendation, you need to get more active voters for the proposal, than those opposed + not voting.

There was a shareholder proposal recently to make the default for non-voters abstain instead of "whatever the board wants", but the board recommended against it and it was defeated.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#85

Post by mattbeckman »

linuxftw wrote: post #56
vasco wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The one time I raised a ticket on a corp AWS account, it was handled swiftly and competently. I'm sure it depends much on what your issue is.

Every ticket I've ever created on the paid Developer support plan was within the "24 hour" and "12 hour" windows for guidance and system impaired issues. However, always always always at the far end of those windows.

Meaning if I had something I really needed help with, it was going to be a conversation for the following day.

I'm not really mad, we're just pre-release, and the number crunching to go from Developer adding 3% to cost vs. Business adding 10% to cost is too damn high. Our infra is about $10K/mo right now (pre-release), so we're talking $1000/mo for live chat and a shorter window vs. $250-300/mo we're paying right now.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#86

Post by Zarath »

malvosenior wrote: post #43
xvector wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IMO it isn't that it strips people of human rights per se, it is that it removes opportunity to disrupt the status quo. Whether you believe this is a good thing is up to you. Terrorists are trying to disrupt the status quo, but so are protestors, people who write to their Senator, etc. By the ubiquity of facial recognition, you are essentially making it harder to disrupt the status quo by non-legal means. This all has the effect of increasing cohesiveness of the existing system. When people talk of "dystopia", that doesn't necessarily mean it is a bad place to live, at least in principal. Brave New World was tyrannical and oppressive, but not necessarily a miserable existence (you always have SOMA). What distinguishes this as a "dystopia" is the inability for the system to change itself. So while it doesn't strip human rights, per se, it certainly strips people of the ability to affect change on their environment. If knowledge is power, then the more knowledge they have about you, the more power they have over you.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#87

Post by egd »

rifung wrote: post #71
deathanatos wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-enh…

> 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, si…

> Even if it weren't his property, if you were in the public aren't people legally allowed to take photos of you and upload it wherever they want? If it weren't legal there wouldn't be paparazzi I would think.

This is probably one of the areas where the law's not quite caught up to reality.

50 years ago, the probable life story of a picture of you taken by someone in public was that it would be developed, maybe reproduced once or twice, possibly sold to a magazine or displayed somewhere, and then it would spend the next half century in a drawer somewhere.

In 2019, the life story of a picture of you taken by someone with an Android phone is that it is uploaded to Google's servers, where it's analyzed, tagged via facial recognition, combined with location data, associated with your profile, and used to build a better understanding of who you are, who you know, and who you associate with, so Google can package that data and use it to target better ads at you (and Google's one of the "better" players in this space, in that the worst they're likely to do is advertise to you).

I don't think it's quite caught up to people that the average amount of processing being applied to any given picture of them in 2019 is about on par with what the CIA would've dedicated to a picture of the Russian ambassador back in 1969.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#88

Post by buildzr »

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.

There's undeniably a freedom tradeoff here as facial recognition systems expand and many corporations and governments gain access to millions of capable sensors sending this data.

I can't think of a single use case where doing this in the cloud is a worthwhile tradeoff. If you want to do this locally, sure, I can see many silly use cases for it, but as soon as you start shipping that data off to say... Amazon, things get pretty sketchy pretty fast in my book. So while I agree there are good use cases for facial recognition, I feel these should never be implemented on centralized services.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#89

Post by cge »

richthegeek wrote: post #80
WorkingClassSWE wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working class might've been a better term

SE are not working class. At best they are at the top end of the middle range, and generally above 100k is considered 'upper middle'.

The idea of SE as working class is from categorization based on labor relations, not on income.

In a Marxist-theoretic framework, for example, SE are clearly working class.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#90

Post by hutzlibu »

awakeasleep wrote: post #69
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 ethic…

A land mine can only be a landmine.

A hammer can build and destroy.

So it makes sense to ban mines completely, as there is no humane use case.

But for facial recognition, I do see valid use cases. So yes, I do agree with OP and rather have the bad use cases banned/regulated.

And your metric: "If everyone used this technology would we live in a desirable world?"

Totally depends on how it is used. I do see a potential world with facial recognition software and not be a dystopia. I mean, is all Sci-Fi now considered Dystopia?

How can for example robots really interact with humans without that technology?

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