Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#171

Post by baroffoos » Thu, May 23, 2019, 3:10 AM UTC

spunker540 wrote: post #158

I feel like there are clearly ways in which facial recognition can improve a lot of systems -- ticketing (think airports, sporting events, concerts etc); automated stores (like the amazon cashierless stores); payment (imagine not needing a wallet because the combination of your face, gait, and voice is enough to verify you); security (home/building/car entry, detecting suspicious individuals, known terrorists, past o…

> security (home/building/car entry, detecting suspicious individuals, known terrorists, past offenders, restraining orders)

So now we literally destroy the lives of anyone who has ever committed a crime in the past. Imagine a world where every single store refuses you entry because you stole something years ago.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#172

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 23, 2019, 3:14 AM UTC

chunkstuntman wrote: post #162

tedunangst wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the possibility that a bad person uses the hammer to build a sarin gas bomb, uses it to destabilize the government, seizes control, and then executes entire races and gene pools? It's all about the consequences, not the probability, so doesn't that make selling a hammer just as wicked?

The US government routinely monitors purchase and search histories to prevent the active ingredients of something destructive like that from falling into nefarious hands, and you're posing a wholly disingenuous argument

[deleted]

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#173

Post by baroffoos » Thu, May 23, 2019, 3:15 AM UTC

kalleboo wrote: post #105

egd wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

First you have to even know that your data was taken and which company it was uploaded to.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#174

Post by philwelch » Thu, May 23, 2019, 3:18 AM UTC

Christian_Baker wrote: post #154

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.

No. PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE http://fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf The issue is not whether it is amoral or not to do something. The issue is in the inherent asymmetry in making an error. If i knowingly sell a hammer to a particularly wicked individual, perhaps a dozen or so innocent people will perish due to my actions. However, if i sell facial recognition to the wrong individual, I may have wiped out an entire gene…

If you were going to commit ethnic genocide, how much help would facial recognition software be? Even birth certificates would be more helpful, if the problem was identifying your victims in the first place.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#175

Post by philwelch » Thu, May 23, 2019, 3:19 AM UTC

tedunangst wrote: post #156

Christian_Baker wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE http://fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf The issue is not whether it is amoral or not to do something. The issue is in the inherent asymmetry in making an error. If i knowingly sell a hammer to a particularly wicked individual, perhaps a dozen or so innocent people will perish due to my actions. However, if i sell facial recognition to the wrong individual, I may have wiped out an entire gene…

What about the possibility that a bad person uses the hammer to build a sarin gas bomb, uses it to destabilize the government, seizes control, and then executes entire races and gene pools? It's all about the consequences, not the probability, so doesn't that make selling a hammer just as wicked?

In that case, I would definitely like to see some facial recognition technology so its easier to catch that guy.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#176

Post by Jaepa » Thu, May 23, 2019, 3:19 AM UTC

joemag wrote: post #132

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.

Flagging “America’s most wanted” in public places like train stations or airports. Looking for missing children. Having home automation react differently to different family members. Those are all usages I am personally totally ok with.

Those are the 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝘀𝘁 possible uses for this.

To illustrate lets imagine a really really good system that had a 0% false negative rate¹ , and a 0.000001%² false positive rate. If we were to sample the entire country looking the the FBI's most wanted we would end up with ~3290 matches, 3280 of which are going to be other people³.

Considering high value of the individual the chances of harassment or wrongful arrest (or worst) is pretty high.

1: In reality the false negative and false positive rate are going to be directly inversely related. The more you decrease the false positive rate the higher your false negative rate is.

2: That is 1 in 1 million

3: In this ideal situation it is assuming there is an even distribution. At this point computer vision is significantly worst for false positives for people of color.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#177

Post by AtHeartEngineer » Thu, May 23, 2019, 3:33 AM UTC

spunker540 wrote: post #158

I feel like there are clearly ways in which facial recognition can improve a lot of systems -- ticketing (think airports, sporting events, concerts etc); automated stores (like the amazon cashierless stores); payment (imagine not needing a wallet because the combination of your face, gait, and voice is enough to verify you); security (home/building/car entry, detecting suspicious individuals, known terrorists, past o…

If you haven't already, I'd highly recommend reading 1984. I'm sure you read it in high school or whatever, but actually read it as an adult.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#178

Post by madrox » Thu, May 23, 2019, 3:35 AM UTC

m3kw9 wrote: post #78

If there is a ban, it should be country law, not just one company. How is this gonna achieve anything if another company goes ahead anyways?

You've basically described the prisoner's dilemma. However, there are stable strategies where cooperation benefit all parties.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#179

Post by onion2k » Thu, May 23, 2019, 3:41 AM UTC

m3kw9 wrote: post #78

If there is a ban, it should be country law, not just one company. How is this gonna achieve anything if another company goes ahead anyways?

The point is that if enough ethically-minded people who believe facial recognition is bad see Amazon doing things like facial recognition the company will lose customers and staff. The people proposing a ban presumably feel there enough of those people now (and in the future) that Amazon's bottom line is under threat and it needs protecting from itself.

The idea of outsourcing your company's ethics to the government seems very shortsighted to me. Facial recognition may never be banned, yet privacy tech could become a strong factor in where developers want to work. Consequently Amazon are right to consider this sort of thing long before the government steps in.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#180

Post by DangitBobby » Thu, May 23, 2019, 3:43 AM UTC

JamesBarney wrote: post #155

tw04 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Flagging “America’s most wanted” in public places And what happens if we descend into military rule or a dictatorship? With "America's most wanted" fliers, the general public can just refuse to participate. With facial recognition, anyone deemed an "enemy of the state" can easily be tracked and eliminated. Always assume the worst and work your way back to the good when doing the cost-benefit analysis.

Will the dictator obey the rule about facial recognition?

If the technology doesn't exist or at least isn't already installed, it's significantly more difficult for them to abuse it by just ignoring rules.