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Rekognition is a public service and not specific to law enforcement use[1]. [1]: https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/ Disclaimer: I work for AWS.
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It may be available to be licensed for use in the private sector, but it is hardly a "public service." Without exaggeration, I think it would be closer to the truth to call it a "public menace".
That’s a little dramatic, don’t you think? With the exception of public figures, they aren’t sharing facial recognition datasets. This is a service that a moderately skilled team could implement with off the shelf and free software or an individual could do with a raspberry pi. Law enforcement has been doing this for a long time in many areas. If there’s an ethical issue here, it’s with machine learning and camera su…
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Imagine license plate readers all over town committing license plate numbers to a blockchain.
What do you mean by "committing license plate numbers to a blockchain"?
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Any image recognition API is likely to heavily rely on them. You can do positive things with Rekognition. You can do dystopian things with it, too. Get AWS to stop doing it and folks will just use GCP and Azure's similar offerings. This is a problem that fundamentally needs government regulation to be successfully addressed.
> You can do positive things with Rekognition. [Citation needed]
This thread seems to be following the general logic that because Amazon is a big company that uses AI/ML, they must be using it for evil. I’ve never seen a thread on HN that accuses OpenCV of facilitating dystopia, or compares the project to selling guns to a serial killer.
This is one of those instances where I say to myself, "I wish I had listened to Richard Stallman X years ago": https://stallman.org/amazon.html
Rekognition is a public service and not specific to law enforcement use[1]. [1]: https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/ Disclaimer: I work for AWS.
It may be available to be licensed for use in the private sector, but it is hardly a "public service." Without exaggeration, I think it would be closer to the truth to call it a "public menace".
"Amazon is providing police departments in Orlando, Fla., and Washington County, Ore., with powerful facial recognition technology."
Rekognition is SaaS (software as a service). Anyone can pay for running Rekoginition on their data sets (within Amazon ToS). Rekognition was not created directly for the police departments in FL or OR.
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I disagree that freedom of speech can be so neatly boxed into such a narrow definition, but that isn't really the point I was trying to make. Ignoring broader social issues and focusing purely on the government, citizen monitoring can be (and often is) utilized by governments to curtail free speech. People joke about the NSA monitoring them, but that absolutely has an impact on free speech - people are less likely to…
> Ignoring broader social issues and focusing purely on the government, citizen monitoring can be (and often is) utilized by governments to curtail free speech. People joke about the NSA monitoring them, but that absolutely has an impact on free speech It has an impact on speech . It does not have an impact on freedom to speak. The fact that a social architecture changes behavior does not mean that it restricts it. T…
Anonymity is a tool to shield people from otherwise unpreventable consequences. Separating them is like saying, "you have a right to privacy, not a right to encryption." One of these things allows you to get the other thing.
Think about why voting is usually anonymous. Most countries recognize that even with the general restrictions on government retaliating against speech, it is fundamentally impossible for us to block all of the many avenues it has to punish citizens. The only way to block that is to not allow it to know who specifically to target.
As a more modern example, America's current administration was willing to prosecute a bunch of inauguration protesters. If they had the ability to identify every single person at those protests, that would be a major deterrent to people attending them in the future. The government wouldn't even need to prosecute future participants; they'd just need to make sure that people kept in the back of their mind, "we could put you through a year-long legal battle if we wanted to."
Intimidation, targeting, and threatening is a form of suppression. We're not talking about marking a form opt-in or opt-out, we're talking about government interference into people's lives with the explicit goal of discouraging speech. It's not about whether or not people's speaking habits happen to change, it's about why they change - because they're frightened of government power to punish them for searching or expressing unpopular opinions.
People aren't conflating anonymity with free speech because it makes the argument stronger, or because they're trying to sneak it in on the side. I couldn't care less about anonymity, in except that it is the only strategy that anyone has ever come up with that allows me to have a large number of other fundamental rights that I do care about.
As long as I or you can use it to track the coming and going of your Congressman and Senators, at the same price that Amazon charges others, I guess it is okay. That nice townhouse he visited with the attractive blonde who lives there, while his wife was out of town? It's ok for me to track and then publish the info, right? We're all equal when we are in public view, right?
But why do you care ?
Facial recognition services are incredibly close to neutral technologies in my opinion. If we truly want to stop abuse of them, it should be done with legislation. Getting mad and ranty at one of the many offerings (which also includes open source software) because it feels good to beat up a tech giant will have no useful impact.