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Amazon Rekognition updates face detection, analysis and recognition capabilities

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Re: Amazon Rekognition updates face detection, analysis and recognition capabilities

#41
post #2

Woo, better facial recognition for all kinds of nefarious purposes! Edit: Dead serious, how will Rekognition positively affect the common person? All I see is a myriad of possible ways government, corporations and individuals have abused camera footage today, and emboldened with better technology these problems are likely to get much worse.

Identifying victims of kidnapping/human trafficking or persons of interest in large crowds/checkpoints.

I remember that in China they deployed such technology in a region to track social activists and dissidents, or to monitor entire ethnic groups.

Yep, found a link pretty fast: https://www.theepochtimes.com/dissident-in-china-facial-reco...

Re: Amazon Rekognition updates face detection, analysis and recognition capabilities

#42
post #37

I wonder why would anyone pay for the cloud services when they can build it locally? Is it more economical?

Is this something that is considered easy to build locally? When I last looked at the open source options a few years ago it was basically all researchware grade stuff. Amazon is offering this is a production service with SLAs.

I've never built any such system, but I've done some image recognition work, and my intuition is that if you're the kind of organization that needs this service building it yourself will not be a technological challenge.

Re: Amazon Rekognition updates face detection, analysis and recognition capabilities

#43
post #28
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what copyright is for.

http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/using-name-or-likeness-anoth...

Not sure if you meant to refute the parent, but the linked article describes two means of protecting the use of a name or likeness which are not related to copyright.

Re: Amazon Rekognition updates face detection, analysis and recognition capabilities

#44
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this something that is considered easy to build locally? When I last looked at the open source options a few years ago it was basically all researchware grade stuff. Amazon is offering this is a production service with SLAs.

I've never built any such system, but I've done some image recognition work, and my intuition is that if you're the kind of organization that needs this service building it yourself will not be a technological challenge.

I was able to use Rekognition to build a custom family photo album for a wealthy family. It allowed them to upload event photos and automatically tag them with the names of relevant family members as well as keywords related to objects in the photo for easy searching. It was mostly a database for building slideshows and selecting publicity photos. Very wealthy family but not such that they would have funded building the technology from scratch. The service made it just about an 80 hour consulting project and most of that was just UI and image gathering.

Re: Amazon Rekognition updates face detection, analysis and recognition capabilities

#45
post #21

I went to a concert the other night, and they where scanning driver licenses and running facial recognition on everyone entering. It was very disconcerting. It is clear to me that we need new laws to protect against the misuse of this technology. Laws that apply to everyone without exceptions for law enforcement. If we don't I fear we are headed towards a 1984 type of future.

That’s... actually a reasonable way to combat ticket scalping.

Oh, absolutely. Great way to ensure sure the door staff are actually checking the ID against the ticket sales records 100% of the time.

The problem is, night clubs ain't developing this stuff in-house. And whoever develops this stuff and sells it to nightclubs will discover they can make more money if they sell the machines to nightclubs _and_ the data to the adtech industry.

Re: Amazon Rekognition updates face detection, analysis and recognition capabilities

#46
post #21

I went to a concert the other night, and they where scanning driver licenses and running facial recognition on everyone entering. It was very disconcerting. It is clear to me that we need new laws to protect against the misuse of this technology. Laws that apply to everyone without exceptions for law enforcement. If we don't I fear we are headed towards a 1984 type of future.

That’s... actually a reasonable way to combat ticket scalping.

> reasonable

That's debatable.

Re: Amazon Rekognition updates face detection, analysis and recognition capabilities

#47
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s... actually a reasonable way to combat ticket scalping.

Oh, absolutely. Great way to ensure sure the door staff are actually checking the ID against the ticket sales records 100% of the time. The problem is, night clubs ain't developing this stuff in-house. And whoever develops this stuff and sells it to nightclubs will discover they can make more money if they sell the machines to nightclubs _and_ the data to the adtech industry.

They already have the data from the ticket sale.

Re: Amazon Rekognition updates face detection, analysis and recognition capabilities

#48
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not like this is listed on the ticket. You don’t know how the venue is going to enforce until you’re there for the first time.

No no they turn around once they get to the front of the line and see what theyre doing Then post a warning on Waze as part of their civic duty, alongside a last minute ticket sale

You're not going to do that if you're with a group of friends who aren't as riled about it as you are, it's a band you really like, and it's a big event that you paid a lot of money for.

Re: Amazon Rekognition updates face detection, analysis and recognition capabilities

#49
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Identifying victims of kidnapping/human trafficking or persons of interest in large crowds/checkpoints.

I remember that in China they deployed such technology in a region to track social activists and dissidents, or to monitor entire ethnic groups. Yep, found a link pretty fast: https://www.theepochtimes.com/dissident-in-china-facial-reco...

Technology is not inherently good or bad, it all depends on how it is used.

Re: Amazon Rekognition updates face detection, analysis and recognition capabilities

#50
post #2

Woo, better facial recognition for all kinds of nefarious purposes! Edit: Dead serious, how will Rekognition positively affect the common person? All I see is a myriad of possible ways government, corporations and individuals have abused camera footage today, and emboldened with better technology these problems are likely to get much worse.

There are tons of benign/helpful use cases for face ID. Your car can recognize you and automatically set your preferred radio stations, seat position etc. Your computer can log you in without a password. Border control can be "scan your passport here and keep walking". An airplane boarding card can be "take a picture with your webcam during check-in and just walk on the plane." Your phone can automatically "press the shutter" for a family picture when everyone is smiling, instead of guessing at that timer thingie. Your makeup mirror can turn on special lights when a face is in front of it. You can pre-set mood lighting for your apartment for when you bring a new date home vs football night. Your front door can unlock itself for a handful of trusted people, even when you're out of town and forgot to feed the cat. Or it can set an alarm when your mother in law comes over. You can search your entire media library for just the right picture: "with Phil, but not Gina, where we're having fun and in cat costumes."

Face identification has become the lightest weight authentication method available. So anywhere you would otherwise use something you know (password) or something you have (a transit pass), you could consider using something you are (your face) instead. It's not right for EVERY authentication scenario, but it should be considered for many of them.

Not everything AI is creepy or privacy invading. Especially when you consider running it locally.

That said, Rekognition as a product specifically targets law enforcement and federal agencies, and most of their use cases are NOT good IMO. We do need a strong product preference for open source, or products with AI ethics oversight.

Bias: I work for Microsoft helping big companies implement latest edge tech like this. MS has an ethics board filtering all its AI work, the Azure face ID product doesn't keep user data, and we often implement local-only face id in what I consider non-creepy scenarios. So that defines a lot of how I think "responsible implementation" looks.

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