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Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

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Re: Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

#2
> Amazon’s facial recognition service, Rekognition, is designed to identify and track people going about their daily business. This isn’t hyperbole - a Rekognition spokesperson explicitly mentioned real-time tracking and identification at an Amazon Web Services summit earlier this year. The same spokesperson went on to call Orlando a “smart city,” with cameras everywhere that allow authorities to track persons of interest in real time.

Truly creepy.

Re: Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

#4
Kind of confused why Rekognition continues to be made into the 'bad guy' here. Even if stronger protections are rolled out for this it's become far too easy to make these types of systems to do a great job of keeping them at bay at this point. Most people with programming experience could roll out a reasonably accurate facial comparison/recognition model like Rekognition and deploy it to a Raspberry Pi without expelling too much effort. There are many open datasets for it

EDIT: fixed a spelling error

Re: Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

#6
post #5

Rekognition is a public service and not specific to law enforcement use[1]. [1]: https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/ Disclaimer: I work for AWS.

>Rekognition is a public service

When this is used to track/recognize my face in a crowd what service is it that I'm receiving?

Re: Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

#7

Kind of confused why Rekognition continues to be made into the 'bad guy' here. Even if stronger protections are rolled out for this it's become far too easy to make these types of systems to do a great job of keeping them at bay at this point. Most people with programming experience could roll out a reasonably accurate facial comparison/recognition model like Rekognition and deploy it to a Raspberry Pi without expell…

The scale at which Amazon operates is obviously different from a weekend hackathon project. The potential for misuse is much higher.

Re: Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

#8
post #5

Rekognition is a public service and not specific to law enforcement use[1]. [1]: https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/ Disclaimer: I work for AWS.

>Rekognition is a public service When this is used to track/recognize my face in a crowd what service is it that I'm receiving?

Targeted Social Engineering Services :)

Re: Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

#9
post #5

Rekognition is a public service and not specific to law enforcement use[1]. [1]: https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/ Disclaimer: I work for AWS.

>Rekognition is a public service When this is used to track/recognize my face in a crowd what service is it that I'm receiving?

If you are a celebrity:

“Celebrity recognition

You can quickly identify well known people in your video and image libraries to catalog footage and photos for marketing, advertising, and media industry use cases.”

It’s even named with a 1984esque style.

Re: Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

#10

Kind of confused why Rekognition continues to be made into the 'bad guy' here. Even if stronger protections are rolled out for this it's become far too easy to make these types of systems to do a great job of keeping them at bay at this point. Most people with programming experience could roll out a reasonably accurate facial comparison/recognition model like Rekognition and deploy it to a Raspberry Pi without expell…

Companies do it at scale, though. And motivated by profits, not regard for 'good guy' or 'bad guy' status.
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