Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#271

Post by ALittleLight » Thu, May 23, 2019, 2:02 PM UTC

oarsinsync wrote: post #230

ALittleLight wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely a problem if you use the face recognition as your only criteria - but if it alerted security to pay more attention to someone or to double check their documents? Even with the false positive rate it's much more likely an individual identified by the system is a target than a random individual.

> > 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. > It's definitely a problem if you use the face recognition as your only criteria - but if it alerted security to pay more attentio…

If a system identified individual has a 0.4% chance of being on the FBI most wanted, then that is 'much more likely' than an individual picked at random who has a likelihood of 1 in 30 million.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#272

Post by ahelwer » Thu, May 23, 2019, 2:24 PM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #217

ahelwer wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CCTV cameras monitored by humans are COMPLETELY different from a facial recognition system recording the identities and movements of all people. There is no comparison. There absolutely is an expectation of privacy in public. Being seen in public by a series of uncoordinated people is massively different from a PI tailing you and recording your actions. This form of privacy is generally termed "obscurity".

> Being seen in public by a series of uncoordinated people is massively different from a PI tailing you and recording your actions. That is actually completely legal to do in all circumstances, precisely because there is no expectation of privacy in public. > CCTV cameras monitored by humans are COMPLETELY different from a facial recognition system recording the identities and movements of all people. There is no com…

It is legal for a PI to tail you not because of the lack of expectation of privacy in public, but because it is impractical to have PIs tail everyone all the time in public. People are generally okay with targeted surveillance. Mass surveillance is the issue. Quantity has a quality all of its own, as they say. There has been a court case which addresses this issue[0].

Any technology which searches for fugitives will necessarily scan everyone. There is no such thing as targeted facial recognition, it can only work by mass surveillance.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/opinion/data-privacy.html

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#273

Post by malvosenior » Thu, May 23, 2019, 2:35 PM UTC

Zarath wrote: post #86

malvosenior wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

Technology empowerment cuts both ways though. If you regulate technology so only the government has it, then the scenario you lay out will still happen. If you leave access to technology available to everyone, those same protesters could deploy their own version to locate government moles in their midst (for instance).

Technology has the ability to power everyone, individuals, groups and governments. It's best to leave the access open to all.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#274

Post by malvosenior » Thu, May 23, 2019, 2:38 PM UTC

munk-a wrote: post #55

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…

> Regulating this technology seems like regulating encryption. Futile. You can never put the tech genie back in the bottle. We've (effectively) put chemical warfare back in the bottle, regulations can be quite effective in shifting the public perception - but I won't argue that it's hard to do.

Chemical weapons have no consumer applications and are very difficult to create. This is more like trying to put DeCSS back in the bottle:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#275

Post by m-p-3 » Thu, May 23, 2019, 2:42 PM UTC

Looks like Amazon is incapable of policing itself then.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#276

Post by roymurdock » Thu, May 23, 2019, 2:55 PM 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…

Cars are a device of personal freedom that you can own and operate yourself

Facial recognition tech is a device of surveillance owned by governments and large corporations that do not enable greater individual freedom, at best a few convenience benefits at worst total restriction

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#277

Post by didibus » Thu, May 23, 2019, 3:44 PM UTC

mindgam3 wrote: post #215

didibus wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure Microsoft sells facial recognition to government and military. They have opposed some bills which imposed too strict restrictions on its use as well if I reckon. And Amazon has similarly suggested that there should be regulation put in place. Here's the thing, regulation is good in this case, as long as it doesn't prevent Microsoft or Amazon from still selling the tech. That's why Microsoft opposed ce…

Do you have a source? I’m aware of Microsoft military contracts ie HoloLens, but have no knowledge of facial recognition contracts. Also source for amazon suggesting regulation?

For Amazon, I think that's what I'm thinking of: https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-joins-microsofts-call-rul...

For Microsoft, I can't seem to find what I had read anymore, all Google result seem overshadowed by articles of them "calling for regulation".

I did find these:

https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-wants-rules-facial-rec...

https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-cruel-to-stop-gove...

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/microsoft-china-muslim-cr...

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#278

Post by zxcmx » Thu, May 23, 2019, 3:44 PM UTC

junipertea wrote: post #248

oarsinsync wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > 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. > It's definitely a problem if you use the face recognition as your only criteria - but if it alerted security to pay more attentio…

Wouldn't it be the same as a police officer having a board of wanted people on his desk and (mistakenly) thought a person in a mall to be one of those? He'd check their papers (sorry, I'm European) due to his hunch and decide? I believe there is no better way to identify wanted criminals at scale, do we want to comb the streets with policemen and "harass" 10x more people in hoes of finding them? It's not a death pena…

The reality is that police mostly catch “wanted” criminals during traffic stops or at their homes, or at the homes of known associates. Or when they get arrested for other crimes. People have a way of turning up.

How would this face camera thing even work? Like, a camera identifies so-and-so and a police car rushes out immediately? That’s not really how police do stuff.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#279

Post by kittiepryde » Thu, May 23, 2019, 3:57 PM UTC

dzhiurgis wrote: post #249

Jaepa wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your (USA) police forces are crooked. They swat people on a first signal they've received. Instead they should attempt to verify first and try to approach people in civilised manner, not shoot their pets...

That's a minority of police forces. There are a lot of police that truly care about doing the right things. The media covers corrupt police commonly and caring police rarely.

Re: Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban

#280

Post by philwelch » Thu, May 23, 2019, 5:02 PM UTC

ahelwer wrote: post #272

philwelch wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Being seen in public by a series of uncoordinated people is massively different from a PI tailing you and recording your actions. That is actually completely legal to do in all circumstances, precisely because there is no expectation of privacy in public. > CCTV cameras monitored by humans are COMPLETELY different from a facial recognition system recording the identities and movements of all people. There is no com…

It is legal for a PI to tail you not because of the lack of expectation of privacy in public, but because it is impractical to have PIs tail everyone all the time in public. People are generally okay with targeted surveillance. Mass surveillance is the issue. Quantity has a quality all of its own, as they say. There has been a court case which addresses this issue[0]. Any technology which searches for fugitives will…

You're assuming facial recognition would necessarily be the moral equivalent of "[having] PIs tail everyone all the time in public.". But for that to be the case, facial recognition would have to scan every face it sees, store that face, and then cross-reference every other face it sees against every face it has ever stored.

I'm suggesting a far simpler use case: It scans your face and if you don't match any of the fugitives it's looking for, it forgets about you. I think this use case is far more likely because it's a lot simpler and cheaper to pull off. And that's a big difference.