Seriously? All the proclaimed freedom in country is built on the backs of soldiers/police. And we are worried about helping them? If we cant trust the govt then boot them. I am more worried about big companies which are accountable to small set of shareholders more than big govt accountable to najority.
Amazon employees protest sale of facial recognition tech to law enforcement
41–50 of 117 posts
Re: Amazon employees protest sale of facial recognition tech to law enforcement
#42Seeing, in the press, actual technologists' opinions on what is and isn't a good use for their technologies is extremely refreshing, and something that that many on HN have grumbled about for a long time.
Along with the similar actions at Google and Microsoft[0,1], I hope that this represents a bit more of the decision-making power of tech companies coming back towards technologists, and away from the money-men.
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/technology/google-project...
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/technology/tech-companies...
Re: Amazon employees protest sale of facial recognition tech to law enforcement
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Streamlining the criminal / judicial process would be a plus for me. Use webcam feeds to record filesharer, illegal activites passively. Capture known criminals anywhere because you have a real time facial recognition. Cross reference the evidence, and avoid long drawn out court time.
If anything this will make court time longer - you better believe lawyers are going to challenge every aspect of the face recognition software and it's validity in courtroom identification
They may, seeing as "eyewitness" testimony is pretty strong n in the face of its wild inaccuracy, I'm not so sure that protest will last too long.
Re: Amazon employees protest sale of facial recognition tech to law enforcement
#44If you don't like what Amazon is building, just wait until all those contracts start going to Raytheon and Northrop! I appreciate the moral quandary these engineers are faced with, but there is something to be said for being a responsible steward of technology. I've met quite a few MIT Ph.D.s who nonchalantly mention their roles as, what sounds like to me like "Program manager for raining fire and destruction on thir…
Exactly. I don't understand the rationale behind these kinds of "protests". It's not like the buyer can't go elsewhere to get the tech. To potentially far less scrupulous suppliers at that. The whole thing seems like virtue signaling.
Think a little harder then. There are legitimate arguments on both sides.
Re: Amazon employees protest sale of facial recognition tech to law enforcement
#45I love the sentiment, but seriously... who did you think you were building this for? It's absurd to believe you were helping anything other than the big brother character from 1984. Who else would this help? Foreign secret services? Maybe you believed it would help stream line the automation process? Thereby making humans irrelevant? I'd love to hear a legitimate - non-big brother implementation of this. And please d…
This bring up an unrelated question. Where is Las Vegas in facial recognition? Before the big players like AMZ, GOOG et al got into it, they had the best civilian systems. Have they all migrated to the GOOGs and AMZs of the world?
Given that tech earned millions of dollars vs this tech earning billions, I'm gonna guess the old tech is now underwhelming.
Re: Amazon employees protest sale of facial recognition tech to law enforcement
#46Don't they understand their own platform? AWS is self service. Anyone with a credit card can set up an account and consume Rekognition or any other service. It's not as if it has to be sold to the police by a sales person under some licensed/contract. No special software is being developed for ICE or the Orlando police.Forbes recently put together a face recognition system using AWS components under 30 dollars. WTF a…
Right.
But, as we found out with Signal[0], in addition to the UI and the law, there's a whole other world of what is and isn't possible with AWS, called policy.
Anyone with a credit card can get an AWS account, but it's against the ToS to use it to offend the DMCA, host a crawler (whoops!), run an open mail relay, or store bestiality, for the simple reason that Amazon have decided that they don't want that to happen on AWS.
Mass surveillance of the population via facial recognition is an offensive proposition to a great many million Amazon Prime members!
Re: Amazon employees protest sale of facial recognition tech to law enforcement
#47I have a feeling that one of these cloud companies is going to have a mass firing of employees that are protesting against government contracts. People underestimate just how much money the US government spends. Just DoD spending is more than 600 Billion per year. Microsoft and Google have annual revenue of 100 Billion. The $10 Billion Pentagon cloud contract immediately gives a huge boost to any cloud provider. As can be seen by most of these companies dealings with very repressive governments (China, Saudi Arabia, etc), they will talk a good game, but when serious money is on the line, they will do what they need to do to get the money.
I bet that in back rooms, high level cloud execs at Hear companies are hearing an earful about how they need to control their employees and part of getting the big contracts requires controlling your employees. Just look at how the NFL caved in when Trump accused them of not supporting soldiers. Will these companies stay the line when Trump starts saying that these companies are hurting American soldiers and police officers? I am not confident they will.
Re: Amazon employees protest sale of facial recognition tech to law enforcement
#48I love the sentiment, but seriously... who did you think you were building this for? It's absurd to believe you were helping anything other than the big brother character from 1984. Who else would this help? Foreign secret services? Maybe you believed it would help stream line the automation process? Thereby making humans irrelevant? I'd love to hear a legitimate - non-big brother implementation of this. And please d…
> Who else would this help? FaceID users. Just because something has downsides doesn’t mean it has no upsides.
This is not the same thing as Face ID. First Face ID requires special cameras. Second it only on device. Third, classifying something that is novel is much different than identifying a previously registered person. (This difference is somewhat akin to transcription versus recognizing ‘Hey Siri’)
Re: Amazon employees protest sale of facial recognition tech to law enforcement
#49How is selling to law enforcement any worse than selling facial recognition tech to companies that are also use it to invade my privacy and use the technology to try and squeeze money out of me? Where do you draw the line on ethical usage? In my mind, if you're concerned about the ethics of facial recognition tech, you shouldn't be working in that field at all. It's fundamentally anti-privacy.
> Where do you draw the line on ethical usage? One can put me in a box. The other one can’t.
>One can put me in a box. The other one can’t.
Uber put someone in a box in Phoenix recently.
Re: Amazon employees protest sale of facial recognition tech to law enforcement
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. I don't understand the rationale behind these kinds of "protests". It's not like the buyer can't go elsewhere to get the tech. To potentially far less scrupulous suppliers at that. The whole thing seems like virtue signaling.
I’ve never seen the rationale behind not going out drinking with my buddy, just because he beats his wife when he gets home. Whether I come to the bar or not, he’ll do it anyway! Those who don’t come out with us any more are clearly doing it with the same intentions as everyone else that disagree with me; the wrong ones.
Wrong. Law enforcement and abusive husbands are not the same thing.