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Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Critics See Surveillance Risk

342 points by Jerry2 8y ago

bpicolo 8y ago
> If Rekognition is not reined in, its use is also certain to spread The tech isn't new and certainly not limited to Amazon, it's going to exist regardless of whether Amazon wants to be the one providing the APIs
- codazoda 8y ago
  I agree that it's going to happen with or without Amazon but I'd rather not support this system.
  - bpicolo 8y ago
    Limiting the power of surveillance is only going to come in the form of passing laws, there's always somebody willing to build the tech for the military industrial complex. It's lucrative
    - CompanionCuuube 8y ago
      Law enforcement is not part of the military.
      - bpicolo 8y ago
        Call it the police industrial complex if you want (some people do), but it's all the same thing.
  - maldeh 8y ago
    It's possible that in the short term, Amazon could be changing the economics of mass surveillance, making it more feasible for police departments that could not afford such tech before. But at this point, I think a change of dynamic is important, and that we actually _need_ an 800 pound gorilla to frighten us, before people wake up and start demanding action at the state and federal level. It's already been half a decade since the UK surveillance regime and the reality of mass surveillance was opened to us, yet nobody batted an eyelid in the US. Meanwhile, facial recognition has improved by an order of magnitude and has already silently been seeing deployment everywhere around us. I'm being led to believe that unless we have a public poster boy to rally against, the situation isn't going to change.
    - fixermark 8y ago
      Speaking of which: how have things gone with the UK's experiment? Maybe I'm not plugged into the right channels, but I haven't heard any news about "London falsely jails thousands of people due to false-positives on the camera surveillance network" or "the Crown finds and jails protesters by the thousands."
      - maldeh 8y ago
        Last I heard, it got mired in legal issues, and was recently tossed out by the courts [0]. (Something that's not quite as likely in the US due to the EU being more privacy-conscious, and would require mass outrage and an act of congress to deflect) [0] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jan/30/uk-mass-digital-surveillance-regime-ruled-unlawful-appeal-ruling-snoopers-charter https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jan/30/uk-mass-digi...
sykh 8y ago
At some point in time we Americans are going to have to come to grips with the computational abilities of the state. There are way too few safeguards in the system and the Bill of Rights does not seem to be adequate in dealing with the new reality that private companies can acquire a vast amount of information on us and thereby sell it to law enforcement. Law enforcement can use privately obtained information without a search warrant [1]. What happens with false positives? What's the recourse? This very real, pernicious circumstance is rarely well thought out in advance. The no-fly list is a great example of what happens when there are not sufficient safeguards in the system. The reality of the computational state is not going to go away. As technology progresses the informational capacity of the state increases. Are we prepared for this? At present I think not. See the reaction to the NSA warrantless surveillance of phone calls. Our leaders for the most part decried the leaking of the surveillance rather than the act of the surveillance. [1] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/searches-private-citizens.html https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/searches-private-cit...
- excalibur 8y ago
  It's the leaking they fear most. The implementation of surveillance technologies is unavoidable. Ban them all you like, they will be used regardless. Privacy is dead, and nobody can save it. What we DO have a shot at controlling is what is done with the data. Probably the best hope for safeguarding things like freedom and democracy lies in making surveillance data transparent and public.
  - thirduncle 8y ago
    Ban them all you like, they will be used regardless. We'll see about that. I'd say legal bans are worth a try at least. Privacy is dead, and nobody can save it. If you keep repeating that to yourself as you go to sleep each night - by gosh, eventually it will become true.
    - excalibur 8y ago
      Your philosophy is admirable. Unfortunately it's also the one that led us here. Shall we wait until the surveillance state has us intractably under its boot before we stop arguing over whether its power should exist and start focusing on who we would like wielding it?
mlthoughts2018 8y ago
I find this article a bit funny, and see it mostly as hype. I worked very revently on a large internal face detection service for a legal and compliance application at a large US company. Being pragmatic engineers, the first thing we did was to pilot test Rekognition against an in-house prototype built by modifying some open source deep learning approaches. Rekognition performed so poorly compared to our prototype (which was not state of the art or anything, just good enough for our company’s bespoke conpliance problem). It was just so bad. Overall intersection-over-union scores on our training & acceptance data was really poor, and perhaps worse, the latency of the requests to Rekognition was abysmal and completely unusable for us, especially for images that had a large number of identifiable faces (Rekognition service calls isually timed out at 5 seconds and returned whatever amount of faces it could process). Our very simple prototype could fully process upwards of 30 faces with 1 second of latency, and so if using a similar 5 second timeout limit, we could process around an order of magnitude more faces (which happens more often than you think, e.g. crowds, people in public places). I just could not believe that the web service, backed by a team surely comprised of at least hundreds of top Amazon engineers, was so slow and inaccurate. We didn’t even bother trying to price out how expensive it would be for our expected amount of throughput, because we knew from a simple accuracy and per-request latency point of view, Rekognition just couldn’t cut it. As I’ve moved into a more lead role with machine learning teams, this experience really opened my eyes to how seductive cloud solutions can appear to non-technical managers. They will act like severe bean counters when they see a high salary request from a really experienced machine learning engineer, but they won’t even bother with due diligence or estimating cost-per-request or cost-per-unit-accuracy for dropping money on a cloud service. Instead of empowering a small team to do something much more cost-effective for the company, they’ll ball at their internal engineers while setting a pile of money ablaze.
- eatbitseveryday 8y ago
  > Rekognition performed so poorly compared to our prototype (which was not state of the art or anything, just good enough for our company’s bespoke conpliance problem). It was just so bad. Overall intersection-over-union scores on our training & acceptance data was really poor, and perhaps worse, the latency of the requests to Rekognition was abysmal and completely unusable for us, especially for images that had a large number of identifiable faces (Rekognition service calls isually timed out at 5 seconds and returned whatever amount of faces it could process). Criticizing the technology's performance is tangential to the emergence of the technology on public streets, and its adoption by local governments for surveillance. It does not matter what performance it has now; I argue and predict it will improve, and then your statement becomes moot. The issue is not how well it performs. The issue is allowing it to happen, and without trust from the people. My fear is: government wants surveillance, and businesses pursue revenue, so there is no incentive among those two to question their actions.
mLuby 8y ago
Asking a company to please not sell something doesn't seem like a scalable approach. As long as there's a market someone will try to enter it. Either make it illegal for companies to sell this technology or illegal for police departments to buy it. It's a political matter.
- Fysi 8y ago
  And this is ignoring the use cases that are 'for good'. http://www.marinusanalytics.com/articles/2017/10/17/amazon-rekognition-helps-marinus-analytics-fight-human-trafficking http://www.marinusanalytics.com/articles/2017/10/17/amazon-r...
- matwood 8y ago
  I agree it's a legal matter, but completely illegal is not realistic. What's needed is a legal/privacy framework that addresses these new technologies. Unfortunately, I have zero faith in the law makers to understand the technology enough to really do anything meaningful. Instead, we will probably have to wait for a SCOTUS case at some point in the future to define the legal side.
  - candiodari 8y ago
    Laws cannot stop a technology that is easily availabe, like number plate scanning or face recognition. Nothing can stop it. You might just as well outlaw knives (they are in fact illegal in many European countries, which has done nothing about their easy availability, and software will be far easier to acquire than knives)
    - mLuby 8y ago
      Face recognition and plate scanning are orders of magnitude more complex than knives, which have been around for ~1,400,000 years. Kids can (and do) make knives with random material they find. Effectively 0% of adults can make face recognition or plate scanning systems. Also laws do work in these scenarios: look at the difference between US and Israeli security practices and you'll see dramatically different laws in effect.
Spooky23 8y ago
Why? The surveillance is there. I used this with some personal video surveillance to identify some thieves who were casing driveways to find cars to get into. Instead of wasting hours looking at footage, I was able to give the police excerpts that helped them identify the perp. Also, because of the circumstances and footage, they were able to charge him with a more serious crime than petit larceny, which means he won't be back next week. It's an effective tool. If you're allowed to have a camera, you should be allowed to look at it with whatever means you want. The reality is that the horse is out of the barn. The Federal government has been doing this type of surveillance either using facial or LPR data on interstate corridors since at least the 90s.
- SubiculumCode 8y ago
  When all they probably needed was a real drug rehab program. Edit: Just saying because almost all petty thievery is committed to get goods to trade for drugs. Edit 2: Also, I'm not saying that this wasn't a good use of home surveillance, or to whatever parent's comment referred, although (s)he is probably wrong that they won't be back next week. I have acquaintances that having got hooked on meth, began stealing cars. Once caught, I thought she'd be put in prison or a drug rehab program. No. She basically served no time because the judge and everyone else know she was just a junky and there was no funding for rehab, and little room in prison.
  - kchronic8 8y ago
    Let me increase your rent so we can pay for said rehab program. If you say no, then you have no right to say anything.
    - SubiculumCode 8y ago
      Ha! I would support any tax that pays for real drug rehabs...much cheaper than prison and better chance to fix the real problem.
      - FireBeyond 8y ago
josefresco 8y ago
Reminds me of the Palantir / New Orleans situation. http://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/news/crime_police/article_4b98f8a8-1d91-11e8-86c3-0784f6dd4d4e.html http://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/news/crime_police/art... https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predictive-policing-tool-new-orleans-nopd https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predict...
draugadrotten 8y ago
Police should be given full access to the latest technology. The criminals will have the latest tech. DNA, face recognition, speech recognition, big data, ML, AI, whatever comes next. However just like with guns and wiretaps, there should be laws controlling the appropriate use of these powerful tools to avoid becoming Big Brother.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  In all honesty, we already have Big Brother. All this does is allow his Little Brother to help him keep tabs on us.
- pnathan 8y ago
  Yes, the laws should move at the pace of technical capabilities. That's the big takeaway here. Not asking the cops to live in the '70s technologically, which is often the (effective) ask from privacy groups.
  - fixermark 8y ago
    Privacy groups and the NRA. The system for tracking gun sales is kept on paper records by law; too much fear that digitizing the dataset would be tantamount to a "national registry of gun owners," which is in the set of irrational American fears alongside "National ID cards."
thisisit 8y ago
Does anyone know how good Amazon Rekognition actually is? If the technology is not good then it might post more problems than it solves.
- bsenftner 8y ago
  I write facial recognition software. If those example facial images and their match scores are any indication of their systems accuracy, it is on the poor side.
  - bitL 8y ago
    The point is that they made it available to customers as a full, scalable pipeline. They can (and will) improve their accuracy continuously. Any kiddo can take some bleeding-edge wide resnet variation and get better results than they have right now, but can't make it available at scale to anyone.
    - bsenftner 8y ago
      "but can't make it available at scale to anyone." =- I guess that's the popular misconception. Their system scales awful, rendering it's expense of operation on the high end side, for a weak product. They are simply exploiting their name.
teachrdan 8y ago
Key quotation: "Facial recognition is not new technology, but the [criticizing] organizations appear to be focusing on Amazon because of its prominence and what they see as a departure from the company’s oft-stated focus on customers." This is an interesting side-effect of the success of AWS. Amazon's customers are not just individual consumers or even sellers anymore, but organizations on the scale of multinational corporations that rely on the cloud and national governments. Interesting to see how this will play out in future AWS offerings.
- ProAm 8y ago
  Is it me or has Amazon ever cared about customers, always marketshare and profit margin. I've never felt Amazon was a pro-consumer company, merely a side-effect that they need consumers.
  - lainga 8y ago
    On the contrary as far as Amazon-the-online-store goes: they are notoriously pro-customer to the detriment of small retailers.
    - ProAm 8y ago
      The number of counterfeits and abomination of UI argues against that point. I think Amazon is against both customer and small retailer and that goes to my point they are about market share and profit margin above all else.
      - Kocrachon 8y ago
        As someone who has sold on Amazon, its not as simple as you make it sound. Amazon takes my product, which I identify, and puts it in a bin at whatever warehouse. Another seller, sends in the same product, but theirs is counterfeit. Without opening the package, how is Amazon to know which one of us is selling the counterfeit and which one is real? Now, my inventory is mixed in with amazon's and this counterfeiter, that product gets shipped out with my name because the customer chose my price of the list of sellers, but Amazon takes whichever one is closer, not the one I sent them. This is done to help ensure cheapest/fastest possible shipping. I take the blame even though someone else sent bad product. This is a shitty situation all around, but how does Amazon fight back? They do eventually go back after the counterfeiters, but its a slow and complicated process because its super simple to set up as a seller on Amazon. But, this is also not a new issue. Ebay still has this issue and I would say its far more mature than Amazon at the "3rd party seller" crap and Ebay cant fix it either. Its a shitty hard situation to deal with.
onetimemanytime 8y ago
I think this is going to happen, regardless of ACLU or whether Amazon pulls the service or not. Face recognition will be refined and sold as a package. Probably every cop car will have it one day. Courts will say that when you're in public you give certain privacy rights away etc. etc. Expect cop cars next to you if you missed a court date or violated parole. The scariest part is the DNA fishing expeditions through cousins like https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2018/04/27/golden-state-killer-dna-website-gedmatch-was-used-to-identify-joseph-deangelo-as-suspect-police-say/?utm_term=.36cdc87a39e9 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2018/04/27... . They find a hair in a crime scene and 17 years later, more or less, you need to prove that you didn't do it. Maybe the victim was next to you at Starbucks or picked your hair with his /her shoes. Good luck
- Karunamon 8y ago
  >Courts will say that when you're in public you give certain privacy rights away etc. etc. This is the law of the land right now. As to your next example, I don't see what's wrong with those, as missing a court date or violating parole is a perfectly legitimate reason for you to be arrested.
  - cryoshon 8y ago
    how will you feel when they start arresting serial jaywalkers?
    - partiallypro 8y ago
      They already wrongly ticket people at stop lights, it's a racket. They could just mail you a ticket for very small petty "crimes," like not throwing something in the right bin, jay walking, etc. Do people really think police will only use this to solve crime? Solving crimes doesn't pay the bills. Ticketing people does. Then they could also use the facial recognition to get everyone that's at a protest of the government (they already do this somewhat with cell phone signals) then they know who to put on a watch list...even if it's a legitimate protest. I'm a bit perturbed that people on this board aren't more concerned about the many bad ways that this can be used for, especially since police oversight is notoriously bad, in virtually every country, including the west.
thinkling 8y ago
Currently you have to pull out your phone and use their app to enter the Amazon Go stores (the no-cashiers convenience stores). Interesting to think that Amazon could use their face recognition tech instead to let you enter without doing anything, just like you exit "without friction". You'd just need an app the first time for them to learn your face. They haven't done this. That means they either think it'd be perceived as too creepy, or the tech isn't good enough yet.
thinkling 8y ago
Also being discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17126469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17126469
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cwperkins 8y ago
Can someone create a bodycam sophisticated enough to let the police know if a suspect is wielding a weapon or not?
djhworld 8y ago
Usually this sort of thing would go to IBM, Accenture etc. AWS has tried to position themselves as being different from the old 'dinosaurs', but the public sector market is probably ripe for them to move into. They've already made steps with GovCloud, now it's time to get specialist teams and consultant contracts going. If Amazon didn't do it I bet Google wouldn't be far behind
mattferderer 8y ago
People will be outraged until everyone starts doing it. How long until we see tons of marketplaces to sell your home & business surveillance videos? Maybe security companies will start offering free versions of things like Nest as long as you let them sell the video in their marketplace. It's the 21st Century way after all.
- GabeIsman 8y ago
  Well this is a terrifying thought.
  - fixermark 8y ago
    I can't recommend David Brin's "The Transparent Society" hard enough on this topic [https://books.google.com/books?id=wg4XBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA336&dq=0738201448&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjZoNun8JnbAhXtpVkKHRqrDcQQ6AEIKjAA#v=onepage&q=0738201448&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=wg4XBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA336&dq=0...]. It's a bit dated, but the basic premise---the pattern of technology getting smaller, cheaper, and easier applies to surveillance technology also---tends to continue to be an accurate depiction.
sebringj 8y ago
Being an app developer and producer this seems outrageous what you can do. If anyone takes a video or image, you can track other people's faces in the scene that may or may not be your users, can gather graph info about how they are related and essentially have a wrapped up motive/alibi etc about how a potential crime could have taken place using AI and auto deliver to authorities. All this from a non-opt-in mechanical turk approach where no user is compensated or willingly testifies. What the hell do you call that? A police state?
mtgx 8y ago
Amazon has always been a pro-law enforcement company. Remember how they shut down Wikileak's site with a single call from Joe Lieberman? (not even an official law enforcement request) https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-website-cables-servers-amazon https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-webs...
giancarlostoro 8y ago
I wonder how much more outraged people would be if you swapped Amazon for Facebook which has names and much more information to tie back to a bunch of faces.
- Kocrachon 8y ago
  None, because as stated, even after this current facebook backlash, usage of Facebook is still high... https://www.androidheadlines.com/2018/05/facebook-usage-actually-increased-after-privacy-scandal-data.html https://www.androidheadlines.com/2018/05/facebook-usage-actu...
fixermark 8y ago
How long until there's a pay service where private citizens can access the toolkit also? (Follow-up question: how long until the toolkit is just an open-source library that you can run on a Raspberry Pi? ;) ).
chisleu 8y ago
They are NOT selling a service that identifies people from data sets other than the police's supplied data sets. It is not inappropriate for police to be able to determine who they are interacting with if that person is a known criminal. The cat is out of the bag and is already something the police could do themselves. The real fear is when they are able to source commercially available information from linked in, facebook, etc to identify everyone's whereabouts. Pushing back this early will not have mass appeal and will not help to prevent the future, broader concerns IMHO.
- alex_young 8y ago
  > It is not inappropriate for police to be able to determine who they are interacting with if that person is a known criminal. Everyone is a criminal. You commit multiple crimes a day if you're like most people. There absolutely should be a clear delineation between what is possible and what is allowed when considering state surveillance. The 4th amendment: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." It's right there. You have a right to be secure as a person from unreasonable searches. Massive face recognition of 'criminals' is a violation of exactly that, and should be prevented without question.
  - fixermark 8y ago
    Reasonable people can disagree on the definition of "unreasonable," however. Is it "unreasonable" for the Amber Alert system to co-opt the eyes and attention of ten thousand citizens around a kidnapped child? Hard to say. Most people seem to think 'no.' If that system could co-opt camera feeds instead of human attention, we could get most (all?) of the benefits of the existing Amber Alert without having to burn civilian resources on it. Wouldn't that be a strict improvement over the current system?
    - yayana 8y ago
mcphail 8y ago
Why is today the day for backlash? They showcased this at re:Invent for all to see, and the obvious use was for law enforcement and surveillance. Yet another surveillance issue we're up in arms about today and won't care about tomorrow.
jedberg 8y ago
This is a ridiculous article. Rekognition has been available for over a year, and I've been using it for that whole year. I've even integrated it into my own home security camera. Amazon is selling it to law enforcement, but it's not like LE get special service that no one else does. Amazon built a generic facial recognition system, and it works pretty well. Even if they weren't pushing towards the police and government, they tech is out there. Those groups could have used it on their own.
- sebringj 8y ago
  I'm not sure I follow because your home security system, correct me, is only near your home, not connected to millions of people collectively that are mechanical turked unwillingly. Them apples aren't oranges.
  - jedberg 8y ago
    I'm just saying that this technology is available for everyone, even in a security context. It's not like they build this just for LE.
    - sebringj 8y ago
      Right valid true. Its just that it's scary if someone has tons of money and users and AI etc etc that has this capability and misuses it on a massive scale kind of how big data only works when its big. No one cares that my localhost website has root access to my machine for example but maybe that's a silly point but I think you get what I'm saying, kind of like the tree falling in the forest... take your pick of metaphors.
- trumped 8y ago
  This is a ridiculous comment... Because it has been available doesnt make it any better...
  - jedberg 8y ago
    Except that the article is paining it as if it's this crazy new thing and the government and Amazon must be stopped in their collaboration to turn America into a police state. When in reality it's just a service that's been around for a while that offers a technology that other people have, and was available to law enforcement long before Amazon started selling it to them. What is the news here? That Amazon sells their products to the government?
cwkoss 8y ago
Does Amazon's Rekognition TOS allow them to keep your uploaded images as training data? If so, there is some serious moral hazard around using this service - you are making anyone in your dataset more identifiable in the future.
skybrian 8y ago
Is it okay to sell face recognition services to everyone except law enforcement? Are other customers somehow more trustworthy? Maybe it shouldn't be sold at all? (And how about open source?)
trhway 8y ago
Palantir's margin is Bezos' opportunity.
chiefalchemist 8y ago
re: "“Amazon Rekognition is primed for abuse in the hands of governments,”" Govs? Big Incs? Deep Pockets? Can any of them be trusted? What used to be known as "local law enforcement" is now a heavily armed para-military organization that dreams technology wet dreams. Its vendors dream of drowning in cash. The din of fear is taking its toll. The expectation of unlawfulness is becoming self-fulfilling. The kids are not alright, as the normalization of school shootings shows. I'm not going to defend the NRA, but they are the least of my worry at this point.
amaccuish 8y ago
When this is China everyone piles in. When it's America, it's like meh
zizek23 8y ago
Silicon Valley and its offshoots are going to become surveillance central. The HQ of a surveillance economy courted by despots at home and abroad. The people working here are going to be the most hated people in the world. A new narrative about benefits other than totalitarian surveillance is going to be crafted and circulated to provide some sort of ethical fig leaf for employees but everyone involved will know the truth just not acknowledge or discuss it. Any reasonably well informed citizen intuitively will know this is not the right direction but there is an inevitability about it, money creates its own logic and many have already made their peace with it.
- forapurpose 8y ago
  > Silicon Valley and its offshoots are going to become surveillance central. The HQ of a surveillance economy courted by despots at home and abroad. The people working here are going to be the most hated people in the world. That is already becoming SV's reputation abroad: https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/05/14/tech-companies-are-ruining-americas-image/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/05/14/tech-companies-are-ruin... While Hollywood’s influence has waned, America’s leading internet companies ... have spread from Silicon Valley to all corners of the globe, even some untouched by American movies and TV shows. It’s time for Americans to recognize that they have a new major cultural export, alongside movies and television: the set of modern communications platforms created in the United States that have since overtaken the world. The question then becomes: If the world looks at America and sees Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter as its profile picture, what does the world think? Americans should be concerned. We’ve reviewed how America’s new major cultural export has been characterized in the international media and other public discourse lately, and based on that we’ve identified three key features that have become associated with it in the eyes of the global audience. They go on to discuss that SV has a growing reputation as the engine of 1) the spread of "hate and harmful ideas, 2) "foreign intervention in domestic politics", and 3) "the general surrender of privacy". Well worth reading.
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342 points by Jerry2 8y ago

> If Rekognition is not reined in, its use is also certain to spread The tech isn't new and certainly not limited to Amazon, it's going to exist regardless of whether Amazon wants to be the one providing the APIs

codazoda 8y ago
I agree that it's going to happen with or without Amazon but I'd rather not support this system.
- bpicolo 8y ago
  Limiting the power of surveillance is only going to come in the form of passing laws, there's always somebody willing to build the tech for the military industrial complex. It's lucrative
  - CompanionCuuube 8y ago
    Law enforcement is not part of the military.
    - bpicolo 8y ago
      Call it the police industrial complex if you want (some people do), but it's all the same thing.
- maldeh 8y ago
  It's possible that in the short term, Amazon could be changing the economics of mass surveillance, making it more feasible for police departments that could not afford such tech before. But at this point, I think a change of dynamic is important, and that we actually _need_ an 800 pound gorilla to frighten us, before people wake up and start demanding action at the state and federal level. It's already been half a decade since the UK surveillance regime and the reality of mass surveillance was opened to us, yet nobody batted an eyelid in the US. Meanwhile, facial recognition has improved by an order of magnitude and has already silently been seeing deployment everywhere around us. I'm being led to believe that unless we have a public poster boy to rally against, the situation isn't going to change.
  - fixermark 8y ago
    Speaking of which: how have things gone with the UK's experiment? Maybe I'm not plugged into the right channels, but I haven't heard any news about "London falsely jails thousands of people due to false-positives on the camera surveillance network" or "the Crown finds and jails protesters by the thousands."
    - maldeh 8y ago
      Last I heard, it got mired in legal issues, and was recently tossed out by the courts [0]. (Something that's not quite as likely in the US due to the EU being more privacy-conscious, and would require mass outrage and an act of congress to deflect) [0] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jan/30/uk-mass-digital-surveillance-regime-ruled-unlawful-appeal-ruling-snoopers-charter https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jan/30/uk-mass-digi...

sykh 8y ago

At some point in time we Americans are going to have to come to grips with the computational abilities of the state. There are way too few safeguards in the system and the Bill of Rights does not seem to be adequate in dealing with the new reality that private companies can acquire a vast amount of information on us and thereby sell it to law enforcement. Law enforcement can use privately obtained information without a search warrant [1]. What happens with false positives? What's the recourse? This very real, pernicious circumstance is rarely well thought out in advance. The no-fly list is a great example of what happens when there are not sufficient safeguards in the system. The reality of the computational state is not going to go away. As technology progresses the informational capacity of the state increases. Are we prepared for this? At present I think not. See the reaction to the NSA warrantless surveillance of phone calls. Our leaders for the most part decried the leaking of the surveillance rather than the act of the surveillance. [1] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/searches-private-citizens.html https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/searches-private-cit...

excalibur 8y ago
It's the leaking they fear most. The implementation of surveillance technologies is unavoidable. Ban them all you like, they will be used regardless. Privacy is dead, and nobody can save it. What we DO have a shot at controlling is what is done with the data. Probably the best hope for safeguarding things like freedom and democracy lies in making surveillance data transparent and public.
- thirduncle 8y ago
  Ban them all you like, they will be used regardless. We'll see about that. I'd say legal bans are worth a try at least. Privacy is dead, and nobody can save it. If you keep repeating that to yourself as you go to sleep each night - by gosh, eventually it will become true.
  - excalibur 8y ago
    Your philosophy is admirable. Unfortunately it's also the one that led us here. Shall we wait until the surveillance state has us intractably under its boot before we stop arguing over whether its power should exist and start focusing on who we would like wielding it?

mlthoughts2018 8y ago

I find this article a bit funny, and see it mostly as hype. I worked very revently on a large internal face detection service for a legal and compliance application at a large US company. Being pragmatic engineers, the first thing we did was to pilot test Rekognition against an in-house prototype built by modifying some open source deep learning approaches. Rekognition performed so poorly compared to our prototype (which was not state of the art or anything, just good enough for our company’s bespoke conpliance problem). It was just so bad. Overall intersection-over-union scores on our training & acceptance data was really poor, and perhaps worse, the latency of the requests to Rekognition was abysmal and completely unusable for us, especially for images that had a large number of identifiable faces (Rekognition service calls isually timed out at 5 seconds and returned whatever amount of faces it could process). Our very simple prototype could fully process upwards of 30 faces with 1 second of latency, and so if using a similar 5 second timeout limit, we could process around an order of magnitude more faces (which happens more often than you think, e.g. crowds, people in public places). I just could not believe that the web service, backed by a team surely comprised of at least hundreds of top Amazon engineers, was so slow and inaccurate. We didn’t even bother trying to price out how expensive it would be for our expected amount of throughput, because we knew from a simple accuracy and per-request latency point of view, Rekognition just couldn’t cut it. As I’ve moved into a more lead role with machine learning teams, this experience really opened my eyes to how seductive cloud solutions can appear to non-technical managers. They will act like severe bean counters when they see a high salary request from a really experienced machine learning engineer, but they won’t even bother with due diligence or estimating cost-per-request or cost-per-unit-accuracy for dropping money on a cloud service. Instead of empowering a small team to do something much more cost-effective for the company, they’ll ball at their internal engineers while setting a pile of money ablaze.

eatbitseveryday 8y ago
> Rekognition performed so poorly compared to our prototype (which was not state of the art or anything, just good enough for our company’s bespoke conpliance problem). It was just so bad. Overall intersection-over-union scores on our training & acceptance data was really poor, and perhaps worse, the latency of the requests to Rekognition was abysmal and completely unusable for us, especially for images that had a large number of identifiable faces (Rekognition service calls isually timed out at 5 seconds and returned whatever amount of faces it could process). Criticizing the technology's performance is tangential to the emergence of the technology on public streets, and its adoption by local governments for surveillance. It does not matter what performance it has now; I argue and predict it will improve, and then your statement becomes moot. The issue is not how well it performs. The issue is allowing it to happen, and without trust from the people. My fear is: government wants surveillance, and businesses pursue revenue, so there is no incentive among those two to question their actions.

mLuby 8y ago

Asking a company to please not sell something doesn't seem like a scalable approach. As long as there's a market someone will try to enter it. Either make it illegal for companies to sell this technology or illegal for police departments to buy it. It's a political matter.

Fysi 8y ago
And this is ignoring the use cases that are 'for good'. http://www.marinusanalytics.com/articles/2017/10/17/amazon-rekognition-helps-marinus-analytics-fight-human-trafficking http://www.marinusanalytics.com/articles/2017/10/17/amazon-r...
matwood 8y ago
I agree it's a legal matter, but completely illegal is not realistic. What's needed is a legal/privacy framework that addresses these new technologies. Unfortunately, I have zero faith in the law makers to understand the technology enough to really do anything meaningful. Instead, we will probably have to wait for a SCOTUS case at some point in the future to define the legal side.
- candiodari 8y ago
  Laws cannot stop a technology that is easily availabe, like number plate scanning or face recognition. Nothing can stop it. You might just as well outlaw knives (they are in fact illegal in many European countries, which has done nothing about their easy availability, and software will be far easier to acquire than knives)
  - mLuby 8y ago
    Face recognition and plate scanning are orders of magnitude more complex than knives, which have been around for ~1,400,000 years. Kids can (and do) make knives with random material they find. Effectively 0% of adults can make face recognition or plate scanning systems. Also laws do work in these scenarios: look at the difference between US and Israeli security practices and you'll see dramatically different laws in effect.

Spooky23 8y ago

Why? The surveillance is there. I used this with some personal video surveillance to identify some thieves who were casing driveways to find cars to get into. Instead of wasting hours looking at footage, I was able to give the police excerpts that helped them identify the perp. Also, because of the circumstances and footage, they were able to charge him with a more serious crime than petit larceny, which means he won't be back next week. It's an effective tool. If you're allowed to have a camera, you should be allowed to look at it with whatever means you want. The reality is that the horse is out of the barn. The Federal government has been doing this type of surveillance either using facial or LPR data on interstate corridors since at least the 90s.

SubiculumCode 8y ago
When all they probably needed was a real drug rehab program. Edit: Just saying because almost all petty thievery is committed to get goods to trade for drugs. Edit 2: Also, I'm not saying that this wasn't a good use of home surveillance, or to whatever parent's comment referred, although (s)he is probably wrong that they won't be back next week. I have acquaintances that having got hooked on meth, began stealing cars. Once caught, I thought she'd be put in prison or a drug rehab program. No. She basically served no time because the judge and everyone else know she was just a junky and there was no funding for rehab, and little room in prison.
- kchronic8 8y ago
  Let me increase your rent so we can pay for said rehab program. If you say no, then you have no right to say anything.
  - SubiculumCode 8y ago
    Ha! I would support any tax that pays for real drug rehabs...much cheaper than prison and better chance to fix the real problem.
    - FireBeyond 8y ago

josefresco 8y ago

Reminds me of the Palantir / New Orleans situation. http://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/news/crime_police/article_4b98f8a8-1d91-11e8-86c3-0784f6dd4d4e.html http://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/news/crime_police/art... https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predictive-policing-tool-new-orleans-nopd https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predict...

draugadrotten 8y ago

Police should be given full access to the latest technology. The criminals will have the latest tech. DNA, face recognition, speech recognition, big data, ML, AI, whatever comes next. However just like with guns and wiretaps, there should be laws controlling the appropriate use of these powerful tools to avoid becoming Big Brother.

bilbo0s 8y ago
In all honesty, we already have Big Brother. All this does is allow his Little Brother to help him keep tabs on us.
pnathan 8y ago
Yes, the laws should move at the pace of technical capabilities. That's the big takeaway here. Not asking the cops to live in the '70s technologically, which is often the (effective) ask from privacy groups.
- fixermark 8y ago
  Privacy groups and the NRA. The system for tracking gun sales is kept on paper records by law; too much fear that digitizing the dataset would be tantamount to a "national registry of gun owners," which is in the set of irrational American fears alongside "National ID cards."

thisisit 8y ago

Does anyone know how good Amazon Rekognition actually is? If the technology is not good then it might post more problems than it solves.

bsenftner 8y ago
I write facial recognition software. If those example facial images and their match scores are any indication of their systems accuracy, it is on the poor side.
- bitL 8y ago
  The point is that they made it available to customers as a full, scalable pipeline. They can (and will) improve their accuracy continuously. Any kiddo can take some bleeding-edge wide resnet variation and get better results than they have right now, but can't make it available at scale to anyone.
  - bsenftner 8y ago
    "but can't make it available at scale to anyone." =- I guess that's the popular misconception. Their system scales awful, rendering it's expense of operation on the high end side, for a weak product. They are simply exploiting their name.

teachrdan 8y ago

Key quotation: "Facial recognition is not new technology, but the [criticizing] organizations appear to be focusing on Amazon because of its prominence and what they see as a departure from the company’s oft-stated focus on customers." This is an interesting side-effect of the success of AWS. Amazon's customers are not just individual consumers or even sellers anymore, but organizations on the scale of multinational corporations that rely on the cloud and national governments. Interesting to see how this will play out in future AWS offerings.

ProAm 8y ago
Is it me or has Amazon ever cared about customers, always marketshare and profit margin. I've never felt Amazon was a pro-consumer company, merely a side-effect that they need consumers.
- lainga 8y ago
  On the contrary as far as Amazon-the-online-store goes: they are notoriously pro-customer to the detriment of small retailers.
  - ProAm 8y ago
    The number of counterfeits and abomination of UI argues against that point. I think Amazon is against both customer and small retailer and that goes to my point they are about market share and profit margin above all else.
    - Kocrachon 8y ago
      As someone who has sold on Amazon, its not as simple as you make it sound. Amazon takes my product, which I identify, and puts it in a bin at whatever warehouse. Another seller, sends in the same product, but theirs is counterfeit. Without opening the package, how is Amazon to know which one of us is selling the counterfeit and which one is real? Now, my inventory is mixed in with amazon's and this counterfeiter, that product gets shipped out with my name because the customer chose my price of the list of sellers, but Amazon takes whichever one is closer, not the one I sent them. This is done to help ensure cheapest/fastest possible shipping. I take the blame even though someone else sent bad product. This is a shitty situation all around, but how does Amazon fight back? They do eventually go back after the counterfeiters, but its a slow and complicated process because its super simple to set up as a seller on Amazon. But, this is also not a new issue. Ebay still has this issue and I would say its far more mature than Amazon at the "3rd party seller" crap and Ebay cant fix it either. Its a shitty hard situation to deal with.

onetimemanytime 8y ago

I think this is going to happen, regardless of ACLU or whether Amazon pulls the service or not. Face recognition will be refined and sold as a package. Probably every cop car will have it one day. Courts will say that when you're in public you give certain privacy rights away etc. etc. Expect cop cars next to you if you missed a court date or violated parole. The scariest part is the DNA fishing expeditions through cousins like https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2018/04/27/golden-state-killer-dna-website-gedmatch-was-used-to-identify-joseph-deangelo-as-suspect-police-say/?utm_term=.36cdc87a39e9 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2018/04/27... . They find a hair in a crime scene and 17 years later, more or less, you need to prove that you didn't do it. Maybe the victim was next to you at Starbucks or picked your hair with his /her shoes. Good luck

Karunamon 8y ago
>Courts will say that when you're in public you give certain privacy rights away etc. etc. This is the law of the land right now. As to your next example, I don't see what's wrong with those, as missing a court date or violating parole is a perfectly legitimate reason for you to be arrested.
- cryoshon 8y ago
  how will you feel when they start arresting serial jaywalkers?
  - partiallypro 8y ago
    They already wrongly ticket people at stop lights, it's a racket. They could just mail you a ticket for very small petty "crimes," like not throwing something in the right bin, jay walking, etc. Do people really think police will only use this to solve crime? Solving crimes doesn't pay the bills. Ticketing people does. Then they could also use the facial recognition to get everyone that's at a protest of the government (they already do this somewhat with cell phone signals) then they know who to put on a watch list...even if it's a legitimate protest. I'm a bit perturbed that people on this board aren't more concerned about the many bad ways that this can be used for, especially since police oversight is notoriously bad, in virtually every country, including the west.

thinkling 8y ago

Currently you have to pull out your phone and use their app to enter the Amazon Go stores (the no-cashiers convenience stores). Interesting to think that Amazon could use their face recognition tech instead to let you enter without doing anything, just like you exit "without friction". You'd just need an app the first time for them to learn your face. They haven't done this. That means they either think it'd be perceived as too creepy, or the tech isn't good enough yet.

thinkling 8y ago

Also being discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17126469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17126469

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cwperkins 8y ago

Can someone create a bodycam sophisticated enough to let the police know if a suspect is wielding a weapon or not?

djhworld 8y ago

Usually this sort of thing would go to IBM, Accenture etc. AWS has tried to position themselves as being different from the old 'dinosaurs', but the public sector market is probably ripe for them to move into. They've already made steps with GovCloud, now it's time to get specialist teams and consultant contracts going. If Amazon didn't do it I bet Google wouldn't be far behind

mattferderer 8y ago

People will be outraged until everyone starts doing it. How long until we see tons of marketplaces to sell your home & business surveillance videos? Maybe security companies will start offering free versions of things like Nest as long as you let them sell the video in their marketplace. It's the 21st Century way after all.

GabeIsman 8y ago
Well this is a terrifying thought.
- fixermark 8y ago
  I can't recommend David Brin's "The Transparent Society" hard enough on this topic [https://books.google.com/books?id=wg4XBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA336&dq=0738201448&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjZoNun8JnbAhXtpVkKHRqrDcQQ6AEIKjAA#v=onepage&q=0738201448&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=wg4XBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA336&dq=0...]. It's a bit dated, but the basic premise---the pattern of technology getting smaller, cheaper, and easier applies to surveillance technology also---tends to continue to be an accurate depiction.

sebringj 8y ago

Being an app developer and producer this seems outrageous what you can do. If anyone takes a video or image, you can track other people's faces in the scene that may or may not be your users, can gather graph info about how they are related and essentially have a wrapped up motive/alibi etc about how a potential crime could have taken place using AI and auto deliver to authorities. All this from a non-opt-in mechanical turk approach where no user is compensated or willingly testifies. What the hell do you call that? A police state?

mtgx 8y ago

Amazon has always been a pro-law enforcement company. Remember how they shut down Wikileak's site with a single call from Joe Lieberman? (not even an official law enforcement request) https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-website-cables-servers-amazon https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-webs...

giancarlostoro 8y ago

I wonder how much more outraged people would be if you swapped Amazon for Facebook which has names and much more information to tie back to a bunch of faces.

Kocrachon 8y ago
None, because as stated, even after this current facebook backlash, usage of Facebook is still high... https://www.androidheadlines.com/2018/05/facebook-usage-actually-increased-after-privacy-scandal-data.html https://www.androidheadlines.com/2018/05/facebook-usage-actu...

fixermark 8y ago

How long until there's a pay service where private citizens can access the toolkit also? (Follow-up question: how long until the toolkit is just an open-source library that you can run on a Raspberry Pi? ;) ).

chisleu 8y ago

They are NOT selling a service that identifies people from data sets other than the police's supplied data sets. It is not inappropriate for police to be able to determine who they are interacting with if that person is a known criminal. The cat is out of the bag and is already something the police could do themselves. The real fear is when they are able to source commercially available information from linked in, facebook, etc to identify everyone's whereabouts. Pushing back this early will not have mass appeal and will not help to prevent the future, broader concerns IMHO.

alex_young 8y ago
> It is not inappropriate for police to be able to determine who they are interacting with if that person is a known criminal. Everyone is a criminal. You commit multiple crimes a day if you're like most people. There absolutely should be a clear delineation between what is possible and what is allowed when considering state surveillance. The 4th amendment: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." It's right there. You have a right to be secure as a person from unreasonable searches. Massive face recognition of 'criminals' is a violation of exactly that, and should be prevented without question.
- fixermark 8y ago
  Reasonable people can disagree on the definition of "unreasonable," however. Is it "unreasonable" for the Amber Alert system to co-opt the eyes and attention of ten thousand citizens around a kidnapped child? Hard to say. Most people seem to think 'no.' If that system could co-opt camera feeds instead of human attention, we could get most (all?) of the benefits of the existing Amber Alert without having to burn civilian resources on it. Wouldn't that be a strict improvement over the current system?
  - yayana 8y ago

mcphail 8y ago

Why is today the day for backlash? They showcased this at re:Invent for all to see, and the obvious use was for law enforcement and surveillance. Yet another surveillance issue we're up in arms about today and won't care about tomorrow.

jedberg 8y ago

This is a ridiculous article. Rekognition has been available for over a year, and I've been using it for that whole year. I've even integrated it into my own home security camera. Amazon is selling it to law enforcement, but it's not like LE get special service that no one else does. Amazon built a generic facial recognition system, and it works pretty well. Even if they weren't pushing towards the police and government, they tech is out there. Those groups could have used it on their own.

sebringj 8y ago
I'm not sure I follow because your home security system, correct me, is only near your home, not connected to millions of people collectively that are mechanical turked unwillingly. Them apples aren't oranges.
- jedberg 8y ago
  I'm just saying that this technology is available for everyone, even in a security context. It's not like they build this just for LE.
  - sebringj 8y ago
    Right valid true. Its just that it's scary if someone has tons of money and users and AI etc etc that has this capability and misuses it on a massive scale kind of how big data only works when its big. No one cares that my localhost website has root access to my machine for example but maybe that's a silly point but I think you get what I'm saying, kind of like the tree falling in the forest... take your pick of metaphors.
trumped 8y ago
This is a ridiculous comment... Because it has been available doesnt make it any better...
- jedberg 8y ago
  Except that the article is paining it as if it's this crazy new thing and the government and Amazon must be stopped in their collaboration to turn America into a police state. When in reality it's just a service that's been around for a while that offers a technology that other people have, and was available to law enforcement long before Amazon started selling it to them. What is the news here? That Amazon sells their products to the government?

cwkoss 8y ago

Does Amazon's Rekognition TOS allow them to keep your uploaded images as training data? If so, there is some serious moral hazard around using this service - you are making anyone in your dataset more identifiable in the future.

skybrian 8y ago

Is it okay to sell face recognition services to everyone except law enforcement? Are other customers somehow more trustworthy? Maybe it shouldn't be sold at all? (And how about open source?)

trhway 8y ago

Palantir's margin is Bezos' opportunity.

chiefalchemist 8y ago

re: "“Amazon Rekognition is primed for abuse in the hands of governments,”" Govs? Big Incs? Deep Pockets? Can any of them be trusted? What used to be known as "local law enforcement" is now a heavily armed para-military organization that dreams technology wet dreams. Its vendors dream of drowning in cash. The din of fear is taking its toll. The expectation of unlawfulness is becoming self-fulfilling. The kids are not alright, as the normalization of school shootings shows. I'm not going to defend the NRA, but they are the least of my worry at this point.

amaccuish 8y ago

When this is China everyone piles in. When it's America, it's like meh

zizek23 8y ago

Silicon Valley and its offshoots are going to become surveillance central. The HQ of a surveillance economy courted by despots at home and abroad. The people working here are going to be the most hated people in the world. A new narrative about benefits other than totalitarian surveillance is going to be crafted and circulated to provide some sort of ethical fig leaf for employees but everyone involved will know the truth just not acknowledge or discuss it. Any reasonably well informed citizen intuitively will know this is not the right direction but there is an inevitability about it, money creates its own logic and many have already made their peace with it.

forapurpose 8y ago
> Silicon Valley and its offshoots are going to become surveillance central. The HQ of a surveillance economy courted by despots at home and abroad. The people working here are going to be the most hated people in the world. That is already becoming SV's reputation abroad: https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/05/14/tech-companies-are-ruining-americas-image/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/05/14/tech-companies-are-ruin... While Hollywood’s influence has waned, America’s leading internet companies ... have spread from Silicon Valley to all corners of the globe, even some untouched by American movies and TV shows. It’s time for Americans to recognize that they have a new major cultural export, alongside movies and television: the set of modern communications platforms created in the United States that have since overtaken the world. The question then becomes: If the world looks at America and sees Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter as its profile picture, what does the world think? Americans should be concerned. We’ve reviewed how America’s new major cultural export has been characterized in the international media and other public discourse lately, and based on that we’ve identified three key features that have become associated with it in the eyes of the global audience. They go on to discuss that SV has a growing reputation as the engine of 1) the spread of "hate and harmful ideas, 2) "foreign intervention in domestic politics", and 3) "the general surrender of privacy". Well worth reading.

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