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Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People
- justboxing 8y ago> Amazon’s facial recognition service, Rekognition, is designed to identify and track people going about their daily business. This isn’t hyperbole - a Rekognition spokesperson explicitly mentioned real-time tracking and identification at an Amazon Web Services summit earlier this year. The same spokesperson went on to call Orlando a “smart city,” with cameras everywhere that allow authorities to track persons of interest in real time. Truly creepy.
- 394549 8y ago> The same spokesperson went on to call Orlando a “smart city,” with cameras everywhere that allow authorities to track persons of interest in real time. Someone needs to design an AI-powered camera-seeking spraypaint drone.
- plasticchris 8y agoThis would be pretty easy at night, just seek after ir lights.
- pjc50 8y agoI wonder what the GDPR implications of this are.
- tajen 8y agoIf a European goes there, he’ll have to sign a GDPR agreement? but if the city grew tired of that, they could forbid access to Europeans altogether. Which I’m not surprised would happen one day, perhaps not under this form, but becausr of our overprotected status.
- eecc 8y agoI could become a “Canary Clause”: you know a jurisdiction doesn’t abuse privacy or doesn’t deploy warrantless ubiquitous surveillance until the GDPR compliance clause disappears
- mrep 8y agoBut it is the us government in us territory. Does gdpr even apply to other governments?
- fasteddie 8y agono
- hbosch 8y agoSorry sir, we can’t let you through customs until you Accept the U.S. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
- paxys 8y agoSounds funny, but this could actually happen. By entering the country you agree to give up your EU rights, or turn around and get back on the plane.
- njarboe 8y agoYes, this is what happens. National sovereignty still exists. Maybe, since Europeans have a supra-national entity above their countries, they don't quite grok that everywhere else a country is the top giver of the law.
- ben_w 8y agoI doubt it’s particularly different to Americans having trouble with the idea that not everyone has the first or second amendments. Or, even, an explicit constitution.
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- krick 8y agoFirst of, law exists (i.e. "means anything") only if you have the means to enforce it, like armed squads to terrorize the population or a leverage of some other kind. Like, for example, Amazon (wherever it's located) probably has to abide to GDPR as long as it wants to sell to EU customers. Orlando city, located in the US under US jurisdiction, and not trying to sell anything to anybody in the EU doesn't give a fuck about European laws, even if they stated that Orlando should. Second, it seems to be a popular misunderstanding, that GDPR affects Europeans everywhere they go and you need person's confirmation to store his data. It affects people currently located in Europe, and there are listed multiple very vague excuses for storing user's data without explicit consent, like "in order to protect the vital interests of the data subject or of another natural person", with which global tracking by law enforcement agencies could be easily justified.
- deleted_account 8y agoAre people surprised that real-time image analysis has been commodified or that local governments are already applying this technology ahead of policy discussions? Clarifying edit: I'm not being disingenuous. I may be too close to the technology to grok why this thread is a down-vote minefield. Running OpenCV on an Arduino board is years-old proof-of-concept stuff and now I have an AWS DeepLens sitting on my desk that can name which of my neighbors walked their dog past my house.
- Zarath 8y agoNo, but I'm sure many of the people working on it will continue to deny that they are simply building tools of control. That, or they don't care, or think it's a good thing.
- mulmen 8y agoI'm honestly not sure how I feel about the expectation that employees and corporations act with some (or any) kind of morality beyond "make money legally". Philosophically I would rather laws and social norms are enforced by law and not corporations or individuals with disproportionate influence.
- slededit 8y agoAre they not citizens? Surely a person has a duty above personal wealth. Past generations certainly thought that way.
- mulmen 8y agoI’m not sure about you but my personal identify is not wholly made up of my employment. My comment is clearly about the danger of imposing morality through corporate influence. I did not say that a person’s entire responsibility is to enrich themselves. I said that is the responsibility of an employee. People can and do have complex and sometimes conflicting interests and responsibilities.
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- sizzle 8y agoOn track to achieving real life "1984"
- walrus01 8y agoas implemented in China: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fq1SEqNT-7c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fq1SEqNT-7c
- touristtam 8y agoFunny how there is a debate in France about the exact same topic: https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2018/03/22/la-cnil-defavorable-a-l-utilisation-de-l-application-de-securite-reporty-a-nice_5274783_4408996.html https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2018/03/22/la-cnil-def... (FR)
- _bxg1 8y ago"asleep at the wheel" is extremely generous.
- zaroth 8y agoIt’s the hoi polloi they are hoping are asleep in this case. But IMO no amount of hand wringing will stop this inevitable total surveillance short of a constitutional amendment.
- DenisM 8y agoWe might just need to work on that. I imagine a high-profile incident with privacy violations will turn up one day and make the public interested. By the time that happens it would be beneficial to already have a privacy amendment proposal.
- wonder_bread 8y agoKind of confused why Rekognition continues to be made into the 'bad guy' here. Even if stronger protections are rolled out for this it's become far too easy to make these types of systems to do a great job of keeping them at bay at this point. Most people with programming experience could roll out a reasonably accurate facial comparison/recognition model like Rekognition and deploy it to a Raspberry Pi without expelling too much effort. There are many open datasets for it EDIT: fixed a spelling error
- HenryTheHorse 8y agoThe scale at which Amazon operates is obviously different from a weekend hackathon project. The potential for misuse is much higher.
- vinchuco 8y agoCompanies do it at scale, though. And motivated by profits, not regard for 'good guy' or 'bad guy' status.
- darawk 8y agoThis doesn't really matter. You can do it at scale too, just spin up your NN on any of the cloud platforms available. Instant scale. The fact that amazon offers this recognition lowers the barrier hardly at all.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jolux 8y ago>just spin up your NN on any of the cloud platforms available "just"... Amazon marketed it to police explicitly, I'm pretty sure the open source team working on TensorFlow isn't going around suggesting you plop a model on Linode and use it to catch criminals. This isn't something that police departments have the ability or skill to discover and implement on their own, setting the menial bits up for them and suggesting a solution is half the battle with government stuff like this.
- hakejam 8y agoRekognition is a public service and not specific to law enforcement use[1]. [1]: https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/ https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/ Disclaimer: I work for AWS.
- frgtpsswrdlame 8y ago>Rekognition is a public service When this is used to track/recognize my face in a crowd what service is it that I'm receiving?
- chadmeister 8y agoTargeted Social Engineering Services :)
- eecc 8y agoUsing batons and castor oil
- lostlogin 8y agoIf you are a celebrity: “Celebrity recognition You can quickly identify well known people in your video and image libraries to catalog footage and photos for marketing, advertising, and media industry use cases.” It’s even named with a 1984esque style.
- darawk 8y agoYou're receiving enhanced public safety.
- tajen 8y agoThe public safety of no people having different political opinion, of no people who would want to raise awareness on the problem of Amazon for this instance, because they could cause unsafe words being told to your ears.
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- closetohome 8y agoI'm a little surprised that a Libertarian think tank is taking issue with a private company going about its very profitable business.
- jessaustin 8y agoIf even the libertarians are complaining, maybe there's a problem here?
- heelhook 8y agoLooking beyond the clickbait-y headline, I think the article takes issue with the use of this technology by government, which fits perfectly well with a Libertarian POV.
- greenail 8y agoIntel is also tracking everyone through the use of a very low level instruction shipped inside of every intel CPU. Details of this trust busting instruction can be found here: https://c9x.me/x86/html/file_module_x86_id_5.html https://c9x.me/x86/html/file_module_x86_id_5.html It has also been discovered that many common languages such as C and PHP also implement abstractions to make this low level instruction much easier to use to track people with. The common use case is that software engineers write algorithms which use these instructions to summarize records and lists to group database records containing personally identifiable information into groups which can then be used to feed AI bots leveraging neural networking algorithms (which also themselves use the sneaky instructions) to do various nefarious things like creating unique identifiers. The only way to defeat this state sponsored embedded threat is to acquire a hammer and or large rock to smash your CPU into tiny bits. Tin foil hats may also provide some protection at the cost of severe social stigma and rampant dehumanizing labeling.
- spilk 8y agoI guess we will all have to wear a full face of juggalo makeup to remain anonymous in public from now on.
- LinuxBender 8y agoDoes this service exclude children under the age of 13?
- patrickg_zill 8y agoAs 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?
- louithethrid 8y agoSome are more transparent then others, in fact some are outright opaque.
- driverdan 8y agoI've long wanted to setup a system like this. Cameras facing all entrances and exits of the state capitol would be fed into ALPR and facial recognition software. There are enough photos of elected officials to train facial recognition. It would be easy to identify who is coming and going, what cars they own, who they travel with, and their patterns.
- gowld 8y agoNYT did it. https://open.nytimes.com/how-the-new-york-times-uses-software-to-recognize-members-of-congress-29b46dd426c7 https://open.nytimes.com/how-the-new-york-times-uses-softwar...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- deleted_account 8y agoThat just sounds like journalism to me, so: "Yes, it's ok."
- gowld 8y agoSays you. But will the police/FBI/DA agree, or say it's terroristic stalking?
- williesleg 8y agoAnd yet they cannot solve crimes and just write traffic tickets. I remember being in Boston a few years ago, someone smashed the passenger window of my car and stole a whole bunch of stuff. There was the crook's blood in the car along with blood fingerprints all over the place. The cops didn't even want to take any of it as evidence. Just turn it into my insurance, they said. Have a nice day.
- all_blue_chucks 8y agoFacial recognition software isn't particularly new and isn't specific to Amazon. Cato is just trying to sling manufactured mud at Bezos to further a political agenda because that's what they do.
- wwweston 8y agoIsn't Cato about "a political agenda" here in the same way the same way the EFF has political agendas? This issue is political in the sense that it's very much about social policy... and it's just possible that it's bad social policy to let people perform/offer surveillance-at-scale as a service. (It is kindof funny to see Cato discover one significant limit of a general philosophy of private market freedoms, though.)
- analyticascent 8y agoSpecifically, they take issue with the government creating demand for surveillance technology. Nothing unusual for a public policy organization that has Cato's perspective.
- sedachv 8y ago> When most people think of the tech giant Amazon, they think of an innovative, consumer-friendly company responsible for affordable deliveries. 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 https://stallman.org/amazon.html
- CoolGuySteve 8y ago> Emo Phillips once made this joke: The other day a woman came up to me and said, "Didn't I see you on television?" I said, "I don't know. You can't see out the other way." Evidently Amazon has made that joke obsolete. Like Stallman, I'm so uncomfortable installing a listening device in my home like OK Google, Alexa, Siri, etc. It creeps me out on a visceral level unlike any other kind of snooping.
- ehnto 8y agoI am honestly very surprised at how comfortable people are with them. I think the smartphone paved the way and normalized it. I remember friends and family being terrified that their SMS messages were being read. Now people often don't give it a second thought.
- beenBoutIT 8y agoNever write anything in an email/SMS/etc that you wouldn’t feel comfortable reading on the Jumbotron in Times Square. If you follow that simple rule you'll do fine.
- wepple 8y agoThis is a terribly clickbait-y title for HN. Amazon is not tracking people, AWS has a service offered to anyone who wants it which would be useful for large scale surveillance. 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.
- alexandercrohde 8y ago> 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. You're entitled to that opinion. But it's just your opinion. What I like to ask myself is: given that we know we had a corrupt individual in the highest office of the US government in the last 50 years (i.e. Nixon), how might that have turned out with each new technology that's exclusively under the executive branch's control?
- candiodari 8y agoCan we please, for once, make this not a "Trump is evil" thread ? Besides, yes, Trump is evil, but among the general US population there are far worse people than him, and despite what you probably think, together they have far, far more control over your life than Trump does. Private individuals are already implementing something worse than China's social credit score all over America. [1] Currently they're limited somewhat by technology, and I mean that in the worst possible way: they're more limited by what they think the technology can do, more so than by what is actually possible. Building webcams that asses creditworthiness of store customers and the likelihood of returns is possible today. How long until it happens ? How long until we discover that badly dressed black people are often flagged by whatever tool comes out ? Tracking people by their faces ? Been done, easy now (hell, opencv comes with it built in, so does YOLO). Tracking/identifying people by their movements (and I mean by how they walk, how they grab things, ...) ? Been done. Tracking people by the proportions of the limb lengths ? Been done. Taking a bad human tracker, feeding it into an LSTM and get vastly better performance when presenting it with video ? Been done. And it gets much worse: outsmarting most of the human race ? Been done (let's be honest: humans have lost the Turing challenge. AIs are better at chatting up humans than other humans are). But no worries : humans still beat AIs at specific problems, and indeed humans still beat AIs ... well not at making AIs actually (genetic algorithms seem to beat everything else here). But humans still beat at "full system" AI architecture. For now. And let's go further: how long until you can no longer talk to another human being ? Because that's exactly where voice recognition will lead. The 2030 version of Google Duplex : [2] And of course, that makes the technology itself evil, not it's use by the executive branch per se. I'm sure they'll abuse it, but I guarantee they won't be the worst of your worries. And it's MAD. Machine learning has joined the set of technologies that we must make sure we have. Otherwise, a conflict with, say, China is going to be thoroughly unpleasant (which would make them a lot more likely to start it as well). So we can't skip that. And yet in this thread, nobody is talking about outlawing machine learning itself. And there certainly is no international effort to do that. Without that option, we might as well stop talking about measures we can take since they'll be absurdly ineffective. You can "do no evil" but fact of the matter is since 1970 (and really since 1870) humans have been competing by robots. Humans can effectively no longer needlepoint, because they can't do so usefully, profitably, effectively, whatever you want to call it. Systematically the realm of humans is moving from everything to a niche. Today, AI is a mostly-invisible salesperson making you purchase more stuff on Amazon.com, making you watch more advertisements on Microsoft/FB/Youtube/Google, and so on. It's literally choosing what to present to you in order to accomplish that, just like that friendly salesperson did when you walked into bed bath and beyond in 1995. There is no solution here that is anywhere close to even being discussed. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-surprising-return-of-the-repo-man/2018/05/15/26fcd30e-4d5a-11e8-af46-b1d6dc0d9bfe_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.0cc2b2d1a516 https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-surprisi... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flLoSxd2nNY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flLoSxd2nNY
- oculusthrift 8y agoNot a fan of Amazon but this article is directly sponsored by the koch brothers. kind of weird we have transparently political articles like this yet others are banned.
- dredmorbius 8y agoNoted, and I'm very much notafan of Cato or the Kochs. (Or, for that matter, Amazon.) Regardless, the issue is real and concerning.
- analyticascent 8y agoUnder what conditions should financial support from people who share an organization's thesis disqualify what that organization has to say on an issue?
- briga 8y agoI distinctly remember watching the Amazon conference when they demonstrated their facial recognition software. It occurred to me that if this technology was around in Mao's China or Stalin's Russia the twentieth century might have been darker and bloodier than it already was. This technology certainly has a lot of potential for improving, but it also has a huge potential for violating human rights. Kudos to the author for talking about this.
- rapind 8y agoMany governments and large rich organizations already have this... so really AWS is just democratizing it. While I agree that's it's creepy af, it's not exactly new. Perhaps through this widening of access the stakes become more obvious and talked about (shining a light). Once a thousand startups are using this in a non-secretive way, maybe voters will wake up and demand regulation? It may be a side-effect, but Kudos to Amazon regardless if it does raise awareness.
- lazybreather 8y agoI am in this dangerous situation where I see posts like "X is tracking people online" and just scroll though without even giving it a thought. Help me!
- gordaco 8y agoThis kind of bad news fatigue is a very real (and frequent) phenomenon. And it's really, really scary when you think about it. We are so accustomed to having less and less privacy (among many other things) that moving downward at the usual speed of the last decade is just the new normal. Even worse, knowing about this phenomenon seems to do very little to stop it. At least that's what I'm feeling.
- fghtr 8y agoBecome a member of EFF and FSF, so that even if you cannot think about it anymore, some people will (I did just that).
- mvanbaak 8y agoNo, Amazon isn't! It's the company/government/whatever that implements a service Amazon is offering to everyone. All it takes you to do the same is create an AWS account, fill in some info so they can bill you for the services you use, a bit of code and some camera's. I know it's very popular these days to quickly blame it on the big tech names, and yes they are doing a lot of shady things, but articles like this are simply name calling and not explaining how things really work. Besides that, this technology is not new. Xovis camera's for example have this ability build in for a long time already. Those camera's are installed in a lot of public places like shopping malls, railway stations, airports etc and they are used to track you. Just because Amazon made a scalable central version of this doesn't make them track you. People who write articles like this should do some research first ...
- ryanmercer 8y agoThey deliver stuff to my door within 1 hour to 3 days and save me the hassle of driving 15 minutes each way to Walmart, the closest option for varied purchasing, so... I'm fine with it.
- pkphilip 8y agoDoes this come under the "No shit, Sherlock!" department?
- analyticascent 8y agoCases like this (where government is the "consumer" for the technology) make me think surveillance tech could be the law enforcement version of military spending on defense contractors.