Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#101

Post by oil25 » Thu, May 23, 2019, 12:17 AM UTC

joombaga wrote: post #95

ahelwer wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are very, very few moral applications of facial recognition. Logging into your phone/laptop or assisting people with prosopagnosia, I guess. Everything else basically enables mass surveillance. It is frankly astonishing, and an exemplar of technologist naivete, that so much effort was (and continues to be) dumped into developing this technology.

I googled it. pros·o·pag·no·sia /ˌpräsəpaɡˈnōZH(ē)ə/ noun PSYCHIATRY a neurological condition characterized by the inability to recognize the faces of familiar people.

"The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" by neurologist Oliver Sacks is a fascinating story about visual agnosia - it was also my first introduction to artificial intelligence.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#102

Post by andrepd » Thu, May 23, 2019, 12:23 AM UTC

It amazes me still how much power in our "democratic" system is help completely outside of the control of the public. How some people, by virtue of owning capital, are vested with such powers that can make or break the lives of millions. Theirs are the decisions that can kill thousands or cause suffering to millions.

Democracy is not a boolean. It's a continuum. To me, it means "power held by the people whom it concerns". That's it! But even in our best democracies, only some portion of power is held democratically. Other decisions, often no less impactful or critical or harmful (think polluting factories, advertisers that insidiously manipulate people's psyches, governance of enterprises bigger than many nations, etc), are done by undemocratic, unelectable, unaccountable elites.

This needs fixing.

PS: this is bad even if the capital "well earned", for some definition of "well earned", but it is especially aggravating when we're talking about the Saudi royals or the Waltons of this world...

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#103

Post by manigandham » Thu, May 23, 2019, 12:25 AM UTC

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!

Governments are fictive structures created, in part, so that they can enforce moral and ethical concerns against profit-making. That's where attention should be focused instead.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#104

Post by andrepd » Thu, May 23, 2019, 12:25 AM 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…

It's always good to remind: lawful != moral/ethical. Sometimes the law is twisted and wrong, and it needs to change.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#105

Post by kalleboo » Thu, May 23, 2019, 12:26 AM UTC

egd wrote: post #87

rifung wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 repro…

How does the GDPR apply in this case? If they take a photo of you in public and manage to associate it with your profile, I assume that instantly becomes PII that you have a right to have deleted, right?

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#106

Post by IOT_Apprentice » Thu, May 23, 2019, 12:27 AM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #96

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?

I’ll respond too, since I agree with the guy you’re responding to. By and large, I distrust American cops. I’ve had some bad experiences with them (though never catastrophic) but I’m well-aware that some people have had it far worse. I don’t have a problem with facial recognition software being used by police. I have concerns about equipping police with MRAP vehicles, flashbangs, tasers, body armor, rifles, tear gas,…

So it is ok that China is using Facial Recognition and active surveillance to oppress, as long as it is not in your backyard?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/world/asia/china-surveill...

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#107

Post by manigandham » Thu, May 23, 2019, 12:28 AM UTC

llamataboot wrote: post #48

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

All positive. Any negative experiences were in court, not the frontline police patrols. There are many layers to enforcement and it might be surprising where exactly the biggest problems are.

Adding increasing automation when the foundations aren't great is a bad idea though. There are more stories everyday about people finding trouble with the law because of some software system with no human oversight.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#108

Post by mc32 » Thu, May 23, 2019, 12:30 AM UTC

andrepd wrote: post #104

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…

It's always good to remind: lawful != moral/ethical. Sometimes the law is twisted and wrong, and it needs to change.

Very true. And ethics change over time. Laws change over time. But people want immediate reconciliation with their beliefs —which can be at odds with that of others. So we have to rely on the law.

Prohibition is a great example of what laws can do, good and bad. After lots of bloodletting we realized it wasn’t good and we were not benefitting from it so it was reversed.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#109

Post by mindfulhack » Thu, May 23, 2019, 12:33 AM UTC

andrepd wrote: post #102

It amazes me still how much power in our "democratic" system is help completely outside of the control of the public. How some people, by virtue of owning capital, are vested with such powers that can make or break the lives of millions. Theirs are the decisions that can kill thousands or cause suffering to millions. Democracy is not a boolean. It's a continuum. To me, it means "power held by the people whom it conce…

Uncanny. I watched the documentary "The Corporation" the other day (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/corporation) and it opened my mind to this issue completely.

It is well worth the watch.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#110

Post by andrepd » Thu, May 23, 2019, 12:34 AM UTC

clairity wrote: post #57

llamataboot wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always funny to see the upvote/downvote swings on comments like these. I try to keep them more substantive overall, but what else can be said about this. Clearly there are still major ethical concerns with access to these facial recognition black boxes and clearly amazon shareholders are far more concerned with expanding into any legal market as quick as possible. Amazon is /the/ poster child of late capitalism…

> "Amazon is [...] ruthlessly efficient..." this part is capitalism working as intended and (mostly) as desired. the challenge of course is that it has also led to highly undesirable power structures (corporations, oligopolies, cabals, cartels, etc.) that increasingly eclipses the individual as principal agent. that's a failure (by omission) of capitalism. while governments, communities and other social structures ca…

>> "Amazon is [...] ruthlessly efficient..."

>this part is capitalism working as intended and (mostly) as desired.

I think we need to be careful to define what we mean by "efficient". Do we frame efficient as "churns out the highest revenue / spending ratio" (ironically evaluating capitalism by a metric created by capitalism)? Then yes, that may well be true. But what about the overworked and abused workers? What about the stifled competition? What about the 40% increase in fuel and emissions to reduce shipping from 3 to 2 days? Is it all worth it, to get your consumerist crap a few hours earlier in the post? This are not just rhetorical questions, these are actual questions we need to pose ourselves (e.g. is it worth an excess X million tons of CO2 per year to get prime deliveries Y hours faster).

Would that fit into a definition like "increases overall quality of life the most"? Food for thought, in my opinion.

>for instance, contracts (like EULA's) shouldn't be one-sided ultimatums inflicted on the indivudual, but the beginning of a negotiation between two equal parties.

Isn't this one of the classical critiques of capitalist (e.g. Marx), that it is impossible to have a negotiation between two equal parties when the two parties are so... well, unequal.