Is this really a valid test anymore with 50%+ of outstanding shares being held by index funds? Who actually controls the companies when shareholders don't really exist like they used to?
What does shareholder primacy even mean anymore?
Amazon defeated Rekognition shareholder revolt by a large margin
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Re: Amazon defeated Rekognition shareholder revolt by a large margin
#12I’m not sure how I feel about facial recognition. On one hand, I think code is just information and no piece of information should be illegal to possess. I also think we need to protect our rights with math and code not laws. But I’m not sure that would help against the very real and dystopian future that seems just around the corner. Facial recognition is probably the key cornerstone of said future and I’m not sure…
Due to some recent health issues, my Dad's driver license was temporarily revoked. He can't drive again until his doctor decides it's safe. So now my step mother is doing all the driving and anytime they go somewhere, they get pulled over by the police. This is a consequence of police cameras and software I had never thought of before and I have mixed feelings about it.
I don't think there are any easy answers.
Re: Amazon defeated Rekognition shareholder revolt by a large margin
#13I’m not sure how I feel about facial recognition. On one hand, I think code is just information and no piece of information should be illegal to possess. I also think we need to protect our rights with math and code not laws. But I’m not sure that would help against the very real and dystopian future that seems just around the corner. Facial recognition is probably the key cornerstone of said future and I’m not sure…
Due to some recent health issues, my Dad's driver license was temporarily revoked. He can't drive again until his doctor decides it's safe. So now my step mother is doing all the driving and anytime they go somewhere, they get pulled over by the police. This is a consequence of police cameras and software I had never thought of before and I have mixed feelings about it. I don't think there are any easy answers.
So, working as intended, no?
Re: Amazon defeated Rekognition shareholder revolt by a large margin
#14SuperRecognizers plus facial recognition bans makes me think of Dune-style people as computers. Instead of a computer running the program we just have the guys in Room 901 do it.
Youre looking for the word "Mentat" (Dune human 'computers'. They were used after the AI war that turned computers against humans. When the humans won, they banned all forms of machine learning.)
And that's how facial recog is legal. Its legal to put people in public and write down who they are. So its legal for a computer to do it.
And I even wrote my own for a 2015 maker convention and deployed this. No GPU, no internet. CPU bound and worked very well: https://hackaday.com/2015/03/04/face-recognition-for-your-ne...
Aside lawmakers restricting law-upholders (hah), we've got a snowballs chance in hell in solving this.
FaceRec is here to stay. :(
Re: Amazon defeated Rekognition shareholder revolt by a large margin
#15> The tech firm had said it was aware of civil rights concerns but had not received any reports of law enforcement clients misusing its Rekognition tool. This really depends on their definition of "misuse", which can be molded to suit their financial goals. Eventually reports of questionable law enforcement use will come in, and I have serious doubts that any large corporation would willingly cut off sales to a large…
> I have serious doubts that any large corporation would willingly cut off sales to a large set of existing government clients.
Barret stopped selling to CA government agencies after CA banned "regular peasants" from owning Barret's flagship product.
That said, this situation is very different politically. People aren't going to stop using AWS en-masse because Amazon is helping enable the police state.
Re: Amazon defeated Rekognition shareholder revolt by a large margin
#16The solution to this is not "regulate Amazon's facial recognition". It's just "regulate all facial recognition". While that's obviously challenging, targeting Amazon specifically doesn't actually improve the status quo in a lasting way.
Agreed, but I think actions that only target Amazon can still help us get closer to that solution - by raising awareness of the issue.
Re: Amazon defeated Rekognition shareholder revolt by a large margin
#17Is this really a valid test anymore with 50%+ of outstanding shares being held by index funds? Who actually controls the companies when shareholders don't really exist like they used to? What does shareholder primacy even mean anymore?
You're right - index funds voting really hurts the process, largely because index funds don't ask their investor base how they should vote. Instead, they default to following corporate recommendations and voting down any shareholder proposals.
So really, all those shares are voted according to what corporate management wants, not to what the original retail investors want. It's distorting the power balance in a really perverse way.
It's hard to say at the moment, because the data isn't available yet, but I bet index funds voted >95% against this proposal - that's the historical average. We'll know for sure what the stats are once the fund providers disclose their voting, which happens yearly.
Re: Amazon defeated Rekognition shareholder revolt by a large margin
#18Is this really a valid test anymore with 50%+ of outstanding shares being held by index funds? Who actually controls the companies when shareholders don't really exist like they used to? What does shareholder primacy even mean anymore?
Unfortunately, what it probably means is "make as much money for shareholders as possible". At least, as determined by executives whose pay is going to ultimately be a fraction of that profit, and who thus have a vested interest in that interpretation as the sole interpretation.
Re: Amazon defeated Rekognition shareholder revolt by a large margin
#19> The tech firm had said it was aware of civil rights concerns but had not received any reports of law enforcement clients misusing its Rekognition tool. This really depends on their definition of "misuse", which can be molded to suit their financial goals. Eventually reports of questionable law enforcement use will come in, and I have serious doubts that any large corporation would willingly cut off sales to a large…
> I have serious doubts that any large corporation would willingly cut off sales to a large set of existing government clients. Barret stopped selling to CA government agencies after CA banned "regular peasants" from owning Barret's flagship product. That said, this situation is very different politically. People aren't going to stop using AWS en-masse because Amazon is helping enable the police state.
Same for New York now that we can't own them there either. Nice to have someone stand up for us at least, as opposed to all those that will still happily sell to law enforcement.
Re: Amazon defeated Rekognition shareholder revolt by a large margin
#20Even a proposal "requesting a report on the impact of government use of certain technologies" lost 94k to 239k. Source in the same SEC filing mentioned in the article.
Reasonable to me. Forcing some peon to write a report costs $.