12 ms·

Amazon’s Disturbing Plan to Add Face Surveillance to Your Front Door

155 points by octosphere 8y ago

Santosh83 8y ago
It is not the technology that is dangerous but the scale and manner of its deployment. Patented, opaque, closed source, championed by mega-corporations closely allied with powerful governments, entirely beyond the analysis or oversight of the vast majority of citizens, completely connected realtime to various other systems, automated, eternally slurping up data for indefinite storage... these are the real concerning factors. After all, a good old security guard also does 'face recognition' of everyone passing by, but with a human there are obvious limits and a person to confront, charge or circumvent. With ubiquitous, tiny robots all over the place, society will get sharply stratified into the 'watched' and the 'watchers' and the latter will get access to nearly limitless data and power. That's not good.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  >society will get sharply stratified into the 'watched' and the 'watchers' and the latter will get access to nearly limitless data and power... Don't kid yourself, even the 'watchers' will be 'watched'. The people bringing all these systems together will not be your local yocal Barney Fifes. They will be professional and highly intelligent technical teams whose members have likely studied little other than security and intelligence gathering for their entire professional lives. These are not the type of teams that carelessly leave obvious security holes like that laying around. Taken as a whole, the technologies coming out today will enable surveillance regimes the likes of which even the UK and China never previously would have dared to dream up.
  - makotech222 8y ago
    Yeah, because the CEOs, Politicians, etc... are definitely the people walking around in public spaces or delivering packages or buying stuff from stores.
  - bsenftner 8y ago
    Yeah, except it's not like that. It is much closer to the random collection of anybodies found at any company, just with a tech bent. The idea of these uber specialist is myth. I work in security, at high levels. It's just normal people.
  - jolmg 8y ago
    I think you misunderstood who the watchers are supposed to be. Santosh83 is probably referring to the high risk of the establishment of a police state.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    "Taken as a whole, the technologies coming out today will enable surveillance regimes the likes of which even the UK and China never previously would have dared to dream up. " thay's really important. Hitler, Stalin, the Stasi and many others would have been very pleased to have the systems we are building right now. Once a full country surveillance system gets in the hand of a ruthless dictator it will be very hard to get rid of that dictator.
  - gaze 8y ago
    Why do you think this? Who are these elites that never leave security holes in things? The snowden leaks show they don't work for the NSA. They don't work in consumer electronics... the deeply flawed copy protection schemes in most video game consoles show that. They don't work for the FSB. What gives you the impression that these people even exist? People seem to not understand the asymmetry in difficulty between offence and defense. For something to be broken, there just needs to be one fuckup, or a few tiny fuckups that can be linked together. Smart people are not infallible. Everything is exploited eventually. The only foolproof thing to do is not to build the infrastructure in the first place. But yes, I agree with your last point. There's no privacy anymore.
  - btbuildem 8y ago
    And who watches these specialized, intelligent watchers? Another, "higher caste" of more specialized, more intelligent watchers? The more likely scenario is that this line of work would likely attract creepy antisocial perverts who like to watch, and love to exert authority -- essentially the people we would like to keep as far as possible from this kind of technology.
  - _37go 8y ago
    ring's entire technical team is based in the ukraine because the labor is cheaper and the data moderators that tag the videos for facial recognition and video processing make $3.00 - Ring isn't a sophisticated technology or even a secure product. For example, there is no two factor authentication and it's not encrypted end to end. Surveillance capitalism is a rush to the bottom to make money, not protect society, leaving gaping holes and cutting corners on quality (and fair pay) for profits.
- JohnFen 8y ago
  "After all, a good old security guard also does 'face recognition' of everyone passing by" Yes, but the essential difference is that the good old security guard isn't photographing everyone passing by and putting those pictures into a database.
  - setr 8y ago
    Which is only a problem because its... entirely beyond the analysis or oversight of the vast majority of citizens, completely connected realtime to various other systems, automated, eternally slurping up data for indefinite storage.. It wouldn’t be as concerning if it was only being stored in a local sqlite db.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - snowwrestler 8y ago
    I mean, he or she is collecting images with their eyes and storing them in their brain. We're fine with that because it's only local storage--the police can't just plug a network cord into your security guard and suck out all the images and timestamps every hour. I think facial recognition door systems are a fine idea if they can be implemented like a doorman: local storage only, carefully trained on local data. With current technology that would be impossible or extremely expensive, though.
    - JohnFen 8y ago
      "I think facial recognition door systems are a fine idea if they can be implemented like a doorman" I agree, with the addition that all actual processing is done locally, that would be fine. But that's not what this patent is talking about.
- toss1 8y ago
  This. The difference between individual human watchers doing surveillance, face recognition, etc. and at-scale watchers doing the same thing is key. The difference is no less than the old corner stores every few blocks vs Amazon's automated warehouses & shipping. An ordinary drive with a bit of speeding here and there everyday goes from perhaps a ticket or two every decade, to 6 tickets every trip. A meaningless wrong turn, I'm lost, let's look around and try to figure out where I am, turns from a non-event to a Suspicious Activity Report... Just because the laws are word-for-word unchanged, the scaling of enforcement technology transforms the identical laws into a completely different society and experience (just as other scaling technology transforms our experience in a positive way). This phenomena, as unintended consequences ("just trying to make the neighborhood safer...", but scaled 10^7), is perhaps as dangerous as Bostrom's AI warnings.
  - lambdadmitry 8y ago
    > An ordinary drive with a bit of speeding here and there everyday goes from perhaps a ticket or two every decade, to 6 tickets every trip. Can it be that the best way of avoiding that is avoiding speeding? It's interesting that you are lumping together objectively dangerous, even if prevalent in the US, public behaviour (deliberate speeding) with honest mistakes (making a wrong turn).
    - toss1 8y ago
      Yes, an obvious almost tautological suggestion, which often does not apply, and can actually increase the danger of situations even while technically reducing your chances of a ticket. I regularly drive on highways with relatively dense traffic all going 10-20mph above the speed limit; in these conditions, it is objectively MORE dangerous to attempt to go the speed limit. I've seen the whole pack drive right by a state cop at 80+, and he'll do nothing because just to turn on his lightshow will likely cause a major wreck. Outside of residential/school/congested areas with non-vehicular traffic & obstacles, it is NOT any numerical speed that causes issues, but the differential in speeds. Going too much faster -or too much slower- than surrounding traffic is what will cause accident situations (obviously, up to the limits of conditions, car preparation, driver skill & attention, etc.) The Autobahns are regulated as an excellent example of this. In rural areas very high speeds are permitted, and lane discipline is rigorously enforced. You'll get busted way harder for driving slow in the left lane than for driving 300kph. And, in the more congested zones, the speed limits come down. And the safety records exceed those of the 65MPH US highways. Speed does not kill, but rather driver ignorance does. A safe fast driver is better than an unsafe slow driver any day. And most US drivers are never taught even the basics of how to actually drive. I know otherwise very intelligent people who balked at taking their teens to driver safety & skills classes taught by SCCA and others (which objectively reduce accident rates) because they thought that teaching these skills (car control, balance, braking & turning at the limits, etc.) would give them wrong ideas...
- chaostheory 8y ago
  > a good old security guard also does 'face recognition' of everyone passing by, but with a human Not many people can afford their own good human security guard. Not everyone lives in areas where the police department is properly funded either.
  - Spivak 8y ago
    That's not really the point the parent is making. The problem isn't using an unattended system performing the function of a security guard -- because nobody's arguing that security guards are a tantamount to a surveillance state. It's that a single company operating all of these autonomous security guards gives them, and anyone with power to compel them, a level of viability which simply didn't exist before.
mosselman 8y ago
News messages such as these are increasingly scary and alarming. They paint a picture of a very nearby dystopian society that, until now, was the stuff of fiction. The news is successful in scaring us, but what can we do against this type of thing? What can I as an individual do? I can install ad-blockers, etc on my PC, but how can I prevent the technology described in the article from impacting my life or that of my children? I don't want them to grow up in a 1984 or Brave New World scenario. What can I do today to stop from, at the very least, my country from going down a path where this is considered normal?
- lghh 8y ago
  Spread awareness, donate to causes like ACLU and EFF who will fight against this stuff, raise litigation, fight for legislation.
- CalRobert 8y ago
  Well, you can: * Push your politicians to support GDPR-style legislation * Donate to your politicians so they actually listen * Run for office * Try some weird tech solution like dazzle clothing (this won't work most likely) * Take inspiration from Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, and emigrate to a place with governance that more closely reflects your own values. A place covered by the GDPR would be a good start. _Presumably_ if your country loses enough talented people it will work to retain them. But, that's a pretty long-term approach and I have doubts about it's true efficacy (My homeland is hardly building great bike infrastructure since I left, and that was one of the biggest motivations) * (Also pretty extreme and of dubious efficacy long-term) live off-grid somewhere remote and not walk by people's houses. Probably a lost cause, though. I find it infuriating that my voice is being listened to by Alexa, etc. when I'm in other people's homes, but they don't seem to care. Maybe civilization will collapse and render this a moot point.
  - bilbo0s 8y ago
    >Probably a lost cause, though... I don't know? I think idea number 2 from your list would likely be extremely effective if you had a large enough amount of money so that you could give large amounts to a large number of politicians. But, yeah, not many people out there with that kind of resource. For the majority of us, resisting these sorts of technologies and tracking is a lost cause.
nonamechicken 8y ago
In my state Kerala in India, police seems to have started using face recognition. There was a huge protest recently in a famous temple called Sabarimala. Police had installed 12 cameras in the temple compound. If I understood correctly, the system compares live video feed against a database and alerts the police if anyone in the database was caught in the camera. Quoted from the below link: >"The cameras are equipped with artificial intelligence (AI). They can recognise people, who are among a crowd, by identifying faces. To ensure safety, the photographs of wanted people will be uploaded on the system. Whenever a person who is in the wanted list appears before the camera it will detect the person and send popup notifications to the three control rooms at Sabarimala," said IG Manoj Abraham, Cyberdome nodal officer. http://www.newindianexpress.com/states/kerala/2018/oct/14/now-facial-detection-cameras-to-catch-crooks-in-sabarimala-1885170.html http://www.newindianexpress.com/states/kerala/2018/oct/14/no... While I dont know the specifics, police used this system to arrest 200 known protestors by preparing a database of 1500 people and had the system go through over 800 hours of footage. If that is not enough, now they are planning to use drones with facial recognition as well. http://www.newindianexpress.com/specials/2018/sep/17/kerala-police-plans-to-add-facial-recognition-systems-on-drones-1872892.html http://www.newindianexpress.com/specials/2018/sep/17/kerala-... I thought the plans to use face recognition in airports was scary, but they are taking it to an entirely different level altogether.
- ep103 8y ago
  NYPD was using this during Occupy. Everyone complained that Occupy lacked organization. But what was happening on the ground was that the NYPD was identifying who potential leaders were by using face recognition technology and (we believed) cell phone tracking to identify people who consistently showed up to different meetings. They would then use the same face identification technology to pick these people out of crowds, and arrest them before or when major events occurred, so they would be in holding during the event. Eventually the individuals would either be charged for resisting arrest, or let go since they were arrested without reason. Which dovetails into the other NYPD/LAPD tactic during mass protests of , in their words: "arrest people now, end the protest now, pay the civil liberties fines 10 years later."
  - 8y ago
stevespang 8y ago
Bezos - - the robber baron, slave driver goes full police state, anything to make money and run roughshod over citizen's rights . . .
PavlovsCat 8y ago
"Jeff, it's much easier to pave the way for Cthulhu when you pretend to be kind. Still a shitty thing to do, but easier."
gdulli 8y ago
I got this creepy recruiting email from Amazon. "Amazon PeopleTech’s mission is to re-invent ways for our employees to connect with one another. You will work closely with our team of engineers in designing a strategy for new projects like our new Facial Recognition technology for Amazon’s Time and Attendance systems" I love connecting with people!
bluetidepro 8y ago
"Amazon’s Disturbing Plan..."? Come on. I agree this is scary and "disturbing", but doorbell cameras have been around for awhile. It's not like Amazon is the first to do this. Phrasing like that always makes me immediately distrust the article's intent, even if at face value what they are saying is something I agree about. Just because they are openly saying it in a patent, doesn't mean the other companies weren't already doing it in some other sketchy way. With all that said, what did you think would happen when people openly started allowing listening/video devices on the inside/outside of their homes? Of course people (law or others) are eventually going to want a way to utilize that data if it's useful to them. The same way that I'm sure Facebook/Twitter/etc. work with law enforcement with their data.
- empath75 8y ago
  Did you even read the article. It’s a patent for sending facial and biometric recognition results to law enforcement.
  - bluetidepro 8y ago
    I did. The first part is just commenting about the title at more of a face value, I followed up the second part about the actual contents of the article.
  - bsenftner 8y ago
    ...and it is an extremely late patent. Patents for this type of innovation first appeared 25+ years ago when IP video was first happening. In fact, the lateness of this filing smells like it is purely for the creation of outrage articles such as what we are discussing.
    - PavlovsCat 8y ago
      > In fact, the lateness of this filing smells like it is purely for the creation of outrage articles such as what we are discussing. Amazon filed this patent now, instead of earlier, purely for the creation of "outrage articles"? Can you walk me through the logic here?
choult 8y ago
Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
LinuxBender 8y ago
Has anyone trolled Amazon yet with video loops of bad things happening? i.e. webm's from 4chan and such. I'm sure it would violate their ToS. Would it break any laws? I could imagine selling a service that multiplexes video cameras and only sends Amazon devices live video when there is really motion and not just when they say there is motion. Meaning, put the security control back on the home owner.
jbigelow76 8y ago
Likewise, homeowners can also add photos of “suspicious” people into the system and then the doorbell’s facial recognition program will scan anyone passing their home. This has to be the worst part of it, if you've ever been part of a suburban neighborhood that uses NextDoor as a community tool you'll know that Ring doorbell videos of "others" crank the pearl-clutching paranoia of bored homeowners up to 11. The comment sections will go from "Did you get a license plate?" to "Hurry, add his face to the database before he comes back to rob and murder us all!"
- SubiculumCode 8y ago
  I kept arguing with others on the Nextdoor app to keep a lid on their paranoia so much that I ended up leaving. The story that led me to leaving that community? A van drove down a cul de sac and turned around. A homeowner thought that was suspicious and so jumped in their car and followed. They followed for a long time, then suddenly the van dips into another neighborhood, goes down a street, turns at the last moment, and goes down another street. This was even more suspicious! Except, what would you expect a driver to do when someone is following you through the entire city like a crazy person?
  - jonathankoren 8y ago
    Next time, on Nextdoor... I was across town trying to get back to the highway, when I get confused in this residential neighborhood and end up on a dead end street. (Why so many dead ends?) As I get ready to turn back onto Pine, I notice this guy run out and hop in his car and start tailgating me. No way am I going home now, with this weirdo following me and probably wanting to steal my stuff. So I hit the gas, and duck down some side street hoping it’s not another dead end, but he stays on me. Luckily, I got a picture of him from the side mirror. If anyone sees this car CALL THE POLICE! [ Thanked by 15 people ]
    - dvtrn 8y ago
      When I first moved to Chicago years ago the amount of one way streets and intersecting one way streets on the northwest side made for a lot of turning around, stopping, passing the same block multiple times, pulling over to the side of a road to stare at my spotty-coverage GPS and figure out how to get back to the main two way thoroughfare. Especially while apartment hunting. I jokingly wonder how many people I freaked out on nextdoor
helloworld2212 8y ago
I'm quite surprised here to not have seen anyone point out the way these patent games typically work inside of a big company. Often a company is motivated to increase their IP portfolio. In turn they motivate their engineers by offering lucrative bonuses for each patent filed. At my last company we played this game and it was roughly $3k per patent. In general, out of the huge number of patents that get filed in a big company, very few---if any---have any hope of ever seeing the light of day as an actual invention. While I agree that the technology itself is somewhat alarming and I personally disagree with the idea of anyone building it, let's maybe save the outrage until they announce that they are actually going to build this thing and deploy it in the real world?
- JohnFen 8y ago
  "let's maybe save the outrage until they announce that they are actually going to build this thing and deploy it in the real world?" Perhaps enough outrage now would prevent it from being deployed, or would get them to engage in at least a tiny amount of mitigation of the worst aspects of it.
- gambler 8y ago
  >let's maybe save the outrage until they announce that they are actually going to build this thing and deploy it in the real world? By that time someone will make "the train had sailed" comment. I.e. claim that nothing can be done, because consumers had spoken and the technology is already being deployed en mass.
- _37go 8y ago
  it's already deployed. Ring has the best facial recognition team is Eastern Europe. it's shitty software but amazon's working on integrating rekognition with ring's own tech. over 80 police departments currently use the product to track 'suspicious people' as flagged by users or their AI. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/evkgpw/smart-doorbell-company-ring-is-working-with-cops-to-report-suspicious-people-and-activities https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/evkgpw/smart-door...
JohnFen 8y ago
That's not surprising. Amazon is actively working to create a dystopia, and this would be a logical next step.
jf- 8y ago
Have you heard of those handy online tracking companies, the ones that build profiles of you based on as much data they can scrape, steal or buy, mainly for advertising, but occasionally for more dubious purposes? Well, now thanks to Amazon Ring® powered by Rekognition™, you can have that same privacy invasion experience in real life! Not carrying your mobile device? Not to worry! Advanced facial recognition technology means that never again will you need to worry about going anywhere without being surreptitiously tracked! Every location, every purchase, and with optional amazon echo, every conversation. Amazon - total surveillance, today. My point is, I don't like it, and this is actually where we're heading with this crap. The same tracking we currently have online, but in the real world.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
imgabe 8y ago
This article is needlessly histrionic. Companies will patent anything they can just so they can have the patent and not somebody else. Jumping from that to "Amazon's plan to bring about a nightmarish dystopia" is a bit much. Could this bring about a police state? Yes absolutely. But the technology is possible to build, so someone will build it, or at least patent it. There's no preventing the technology from existing. We don't prevent a police state from happening by freaking out about the technology that enables it. We prevent it by voting for responsible leaders. So let's just assume that the technology for government oppression is going to exist and make sure we structure our government in such a way that it doesn't oppress us.
yalogin 8y ago
Ring automatically enrolls you into a community program and you don't have an option. In fact you cannot even use Ring without signing up with your address and signing up for the community feature. They suck up your data by force. You know its amazon, they don't have any qualms and reservations about how they use it.
mc32 8y ago
I'll tell you what: 1. No question this raises concerns about the system pinging authorities as someone who has been flagged in the system is detected. 2. This will sell like hotcakes with people who are on NextDoor. Everyday there is an alert about a burglary, stolen packages and people snooping around their properties. These people are very likely to approve sending any images/video of interest to police. (Right now it's very mechanical, scroll through video, capture and send --people will put out requests for footage very often). I think the only thing we can do is call for strict regulation on its use. It's gonna get deployed and it's gonna get used.
floatingatoll 8y ago
I don't welcome "general facial recognition", but I do welcome this specific and single use case. As someone with an active stalker for the past two decades, I really appreciate the value provided by a device that watches specifically for the person that's sent me death threats.
throwawaysea 8y ago
In my neighborhood, we are impacted by constant property crime - burglaries, car break-ins, mail theft, porch pirates, you name it. After being a victim myself, I can say that it does indeed cause an increase in anxiety, especially the sense of helplessness that comes with it. The police department here is woefully understaffed and has been ordered to not focus on property crime because their staffing only leaves room to focus on violent crime. The under-staffing is in part due to the anti-cop sentiment of the far-left activists. This leaves law-abiding residents to largely fend for themselves. I have always felt it would be very useful to be able to identify people in videos who may have committed a crime locally or elsewhere in the city, to learn of their movements, where they might live, what other crimes they committed, etc. This would help police prioritize some non-violent crime effectively, get a high return on the time they spend investigating property crimes (actually catching criminals), which would then in turn serve as a deterrent that is outright missing right now. I would gladly contribute my video to that cause, as would almost everyone in my neighborhood. A word on the commenters here going on about 'pearl-clutching': that's just the latest in pejoratives that are nothing but empty stereotypes. Most people on NextDoor in my city are reasonable, but are regularly unfairly characterized by the far-left progressive cabal in this manner. Caring about the safety of yourself, your loved ones, and your property is not a bad thing. We work and live in part for those very things. If you disagree, then try outlawing door locks. It is unbelievable to me that the rights of criminals are more important to commenters here than the rights of those who want to protect their own. And worse yet, the conspiracy-theory notion that we are about to be taken over by a tyrannical government because of doorbell recordings. If this was a topic they disagreed with, those same commenters would readily call this a "slippery slope fallacy". A further aside: The ACLU has been wrong a lot on this topic - for example when they called AWS's Rekognition service a "facial recognition service" instead of what it is, a generic object recognition service. They also did not seem to understand how false positives/negatives are managed and why it is fine to use an imperfect object recognition service as a first-pass filter. And they are wrong again here - people are allowed to film on public property and share it with whomever they want. They're allowed to perform whatever analysis they want and share it with whomever they want, period.
- someguydave 8y ago
  Completely agree. I’ve seen several legitimate instances of theft and porch piracy on my local Nextdoor and the government police seem to do little about it. Something like this would support private policing which is desperately needed in many areas of the US
vbuwivbiu 8y ago
The Circle
xg15 8y ago
Ok, now you just have to combine the cameras with a social-credit-as-a-service ecosystem to keep your suspicious people list up to date and one or two of these guys [1] mounted on every front porch for automatic suspicious people deterrence - and we can get a nice Black Mirror style scenario where you will be physically incapable of entering certain parts of the city if you pissed off the wrong algorithm. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/9ys1e4/automatic_sprinkler_test/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/9ys1e...
rcchyssser 8y ago
Millions of Americans manually upload photos of themselves and their families/friends now. Why not just automate it.
wemdyjreichert 8y ago
There's a solution: make it inadmissable in court. That roves a huge incentive. And get rid of the fisa and other administrative kangaroo courts held to different standards of evidence, preponderance thereof, and due process.
sizzle 8y ago
Anyone else immediately think of the all seeing 'telescreen' from 1984? What a time to be alive...

155 points by octosphere 8y ago

It is not the technology that is dangerous but the scale and manner of its deployment. Patented, opaque, closed source, championed by mega-corporations closely allied with powerful governments, entirely beyond the analysis or oversight of the vast majority of citizens, completely connected realtime to various other systems, automated, eternally slurping up data for indefinite storage... these are the real concerning factors. After all, a good old security guard also does 'face recognition' of everyone passing by, but with a human there are obvious limits and a person to confront, charge or circumvent. With ubiquitous, tiny robots all over the place, society will get sharply stratified into the 'watched' and the 'watchers' and the latter will get access to nearly limitless data and power. That's not good.

bilbo0s 8y ago
>society will get sharply stratified into the 'watched' and the 'watchers' and the latter will get access to nearly limitless data and power... Don't kid yourself, even the 'watchers' will be 'watched'. The people bringing all these systems together will not be your local yocal Barney Fifes. They will be professional and highly intelligent technical teams whose members have likely studied little other than security and intelligence gathering for their entire professional lives. These are not the type of teams that carelessly leave obvious security holes like that laying around. Taken as a whole, the technologies coming out today will enable surveillance regimes the likes of which even the UK and China never previously would have dared to dream up.
- makotech222 8y ago
  Yeah, because the CEOs, Politicians, etc... are definitely the people walking around in public spaces or delivering packages or buying stuff from stores.
- bsenftner 8y ago
  Yeah, except it's not like that. It is much closer to the random collection of anybodies found at any company, just with a tech bent. The idea of these uber specialist is myth. I work in security, at high levels. It's just normal people.
- jolmg 8y ago
  I think you misunderstood who the watchers are supposed to be. Santosh83 is probably referring to the high risk of the establishment of a police state.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  "Taken as a whole, the technologies coming out today will enable surveillance regimes the likes of which even the UK and China never previously would have dared to dream up. " thay's really important. Hitler, Stalin, the Stasi and many others would have been very pleased to have the systems we are building right now. Once a full country surveillance system gets in the hand of a ruthless dictator it will be very hard to get rid of that dictator.
- gaze 8y ago
  Why do you think this? Who are these elites that never leave security holes in things? The snowden leaks show they don't work for the NSA. They don't work in consumer electronics... the deeply flawed copy protection schemes in most video game consoles show that. They don't work for the FSB. What gives you the impression that these people even exist? People seem to not understand the asymmetry in difficulty between offence and defense. For something to be broken, there just needs to be one fuckup, or a few tiny fuckups that can be linked together. Smart people are not infallible. Everything is exploited eventually. The only foolproof thing to do is not to build the infrastructure in the first place. But yes, I agree with your last point. There's no privacy anymore.
- btbuildem 8y ago
  And who watches these specialized, intelligent watchers? Another, "higher caste" of more specialized, more intelligent watchers? The more likely scenario is that this line of work would likely attract creepy antisocial perverts who like to watch, and love to exert authority -- essentially the people we would like to keep as far as possible from this kind of technology.
- _37go 8y ago
  ring's entire technical team is based in the ukraine because the labor is cheaper and the data moderators that tag the videos for facial recognition and video processing make $3.00 - Ring isn't a sophisticated technology or even a secure product. For example, there is no two factor authentication and it's not encrypted end to end. Surveillance capitalism is a rush to the bottom to make money, not protect society, leaving gaping holes and cutting corners on quality (and fair pay) for profits.
JohnFen 8y ago
"After all, a good old security guard also does 'face recognition' of everyone passing by" Yes, but the essential difference is that the good old security guard isn't photographing everyone passing by and putting those pictures into a database.
- setr 8y ago
  Which is only a problem because its... entirely beyond the analysis or oversight of the vast majority of citizens, completely connected realtime to various other systems, automated, eternally slurping up data for indefinite storage.. It wouldn’t be as concerning if it was only being stored in a local sqlite db.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- snowwrestler 8y ago
  I mean, he or she is collecting images with their eyes and storing them in their brain. We're fine with that because it's only local storage--the police can't just plug a network cord into your security guard and suck out all the images and timestamps every hour. I think facial recognition door systems are a fine idea if they can be implemented like a doorman: local storage only, carefully trained on local data. With current technology that would be impossible or extremely expensive, though.
  - JohnFen 8y ago
    "I think facial recognition door systems are a fine idea if they can be implemented like a doorman" I agree, with the addition that all actual processing is done locally, that would be fine. But that's not what this patent is talking about.
toss1 8y ago
This. The difference between individual human watchers doing surveillance, face recognition, etc. and at-scale watchers doing the same thing is key. The difference is no less than the old corner stores every few blocks vs Amazon's automated warehouses & shipping. An ordinary drive with a bit of speeding here and there everyday goes from perhaps a ticket or two every decade, to 6 tickets every trip. A meaningless wrong turn, I'm lost, let's look around and try to figure out where I am, turns from a non-event to a Suspicious Activity Report... Just because the laws are word-for-word unchanged, the scaling of enforcement technology transforms the identical laws into a completely different society and experience (just as other scaling technology transforms our experience in a positive way). This phenomena, as unintended consequences ("just trying to make the neighborhood safer...", but scaled 10^7), is perhaps as dangerous as Bostrom's AI warnings.
- lambdadmitry 8y ago
  > An ordinary drive with a bit of speeding here and there everyday goes from perhaps a ticket or two every decade, to 6 tickets every trip. Can it be that the best way of avoiding that is avoiding speeding? It's interesting that you are lumping together objectively dangerous, even if prevalent in the US, public behaviour (deliberate speeding) with honest mistakes (making a wrong turn).
  - toss1 8y ago
    Yes, an obvious almost tautological suggestion, which often does not apply, and can actually increase the danger of situations even while technically reducing your chances of a ticket. I regularly drive on highways with relatively dense traffic all going 10-20mph above the speed limit; in these conditions, it is objectively MORE dangerous to attempt to go the speed limit. I've seen the whole pack drive right by a state cop at 80+, and he'll do nothing because just to turn on his lightshow will likely cause a major wreck. Outside of residential/school/congested areas with non-vehicular traffic & obstacles, it is NOT any numerical speed that causes issues, but the differential in speeds. Going too much faster -or too much slower- than surrounding traffic is what will cause accident situations (obviously, up to the limits of conditions, car preparation, driver skill & attention, etc.) The Autobahns are regulated as an excellent example of this. In rural areas very high speeds are permitted, and lane discipline is rigorously enforced. You'll get busted way harder for driving slow in the left lane than for driving 300kph. And, in the more congested zones, the speed limits come down. And the safety records exceed those of the 65MPH US highways. Speed does not kill, but rather driver ignorance does. A safe fast driver is better than an unsafe slow driver any day. And most US drivers are never taught even the basics of how to actually drive. I know otherwise very intelligent people who balked at taking their teens to driver safety & skills classes taught by SCCA and others (which objectively reduce accident rates) because they thought that teaching these skills (car control, balance, braking & turning at the limits, etc.) would give them wrong ideas...
chaostheory 8y ago
> a good old security guard also does 'face recognition' of everyone passing by, but with a human Not many people can afford their own good human security guard. Not everyone lives in areas where the police department is properly funded either.
- Spivak 8y ago
  That's not really the point the parent is making. The problem isn't using an unattended system performing the function of a security guard -- because nobody's arguing that security guards are a tantamount to a surveillance state. It's that a single company operating all of these autonomous security guards gives them, and anyone with power to compel them, a level of viability which simply didn't exist before.

mosselman 8y ago

News messages such as these are increasingly scary and alarming. They paint a picture of a very nearby dystopian society that, until now, was the stuff of fiction. The news is successful in scaring us, but what can we do against this type of thing? What can I as an individual do? I can install ad-blockers, etc on my PC, but how can I prevent the technology described in the article from impacting my life or that of my children? I don't want them to grow up in a 1984 or Brave New World scenario. What can I do today to stop from, at the very least, my country from going down a path where this is considered normal?

lghh 8y ago
Spread awareness, donate to causes like ACLU and EFF who will fight against this stuff, raise litigation, fight for legislation.
CalRobert 8y ago
Well, you can: * Push your politicians to support GDPR-style legislation * Donate to your politicians so they actually listen * Run for office * Try some weird tech solution like dazzle clothing (this won't work most likely) * Take inspiration from Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, and emigrate to a place with governance that more closely reflects your own values. A place covered by the GDPR would be a good start. _Presumably_ if your country loses enough talented people it will work to retain them. But, that's a pretty long-term approach and I have doubts about it's true efficacy (My homeland is hardly building great bike infrastructure since I left, and that was one of the biggest motivations) * (Also pretty extreme and of dubious efficacy long-term) live off-grid somewhere remote and not walk by people's houses. Probably a lost cause, though. I find it infuriating that my voice is being listened to by Alexa, etc. when I'm in other people's homes, but they don't seem to care. Maybe civilization will collapse and render this a moot point.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  >Probably a lost cause, though... I don't know? I think idea number 2 from your list would likely be extremely effective if you had a large enough amount of money so that you could give large amounts to a large number of politicians. But, yeah, not many people out there with that kind of resource. For the majority of us, resisting these sorts of technologies and tracking is a lost cause.

nonamechicken 8y ago

In my state Kerala in India, police seems to have started using face recognition. There was a huge protest recently in a famous temple called Sabarimala. Police had installed 12 cameras in the temple compound. If I understood correctly, the system compares live video feed against a database and alerts the police if anyone in the database was caught in the camera. Quoted from the below link: >"The cameras are equipped with artificial intelligence (AI). They can recognise people, who are among a crowd, by identifying faces. To ensure safety, the photographs of wanted people will be uploaded on the system. Whenever a person who is in the wanted list appears before the camera it will detect the person and send popup notifications to the three control rooms at Sabarimala," said IG Manoj Abraham, Cyberdome nodal officer. http://www.newindianexpress.com/states/kerala/2018/oct/14/now-facial-detection-cameras-to-catch-crooks-in-sabarimala-1885170.html http://www.newindianexpress.com/states/kerala/2018/oct/14/no... While I dont know the specifics, police used this system to arrest 200 known protestors by preparing a database of 1500 people and had the system go through over 800 hours of footage. If that is not enough, now they are planning to use drones with facial recognition as well. http://www.newindianexpress.com/specials/2018/sep/17/kerala-police-plans-to-add-facial-recognition-systems-on-drones-1872892.html http://www.newindianexpress.com/specials/2018/sep/17/kerala-... I thought the plans to use face recognition in airports was scary, but they are taking it to an entirely different level altogether.

ep103 8y ago
NYPD was using this during Occupy. Everyone complained that Occupy lacked organization. But what was happening on the ground was that the NYPD was identifying who potential leaders were by using face recognition technology and (we believed) cell phone tracking to identify people who consistently showed up to different meetings. They would then use the same face identification technology to pick these people out of crowds, and arrest them before or when major events occurred, so they would be in holding during the event. Eventually the individuals would either be charged for resisting arrest, or let go since they were arrested without reason. Which dovetails into the other NYPD/LAPD tactic during mass protests of , in their words: "arrest people now, end the protest now, pay the civil liberties fines 10 years later."
- 8y ago

stevespang 8y ago

Bezos - - the robber baron, slave driver goes full police state, anything to make money and run roughshod over citizen's rights . . .

PavlovsCat 8y ago

"Jeff, it's much easier to pave the way for Cthulhu when you pretend to be kind. Still a shitty thing to do, but easier."

gdulli 8y ago

I got this creepy recruiting email from Amazon. "Amazon PeopleTech’s mission is to re-invent ways for our employees to connect with one another. You will work closely with our team of engineers in designing a strategy for new projects like our new Facial Recognition technology for Amazon’s Time and Attendance systems" I love connecting with people!

bluetidepro 8y ago

"Amazon’s Disturbing Plan..."? Come on. I agree this is scary and "disturbing", but doorbell cameras have been around for awhile. It's not like Amazon is the first to do this. Phrasing like that always makes me immediately distrust the article's intent, even if at face value what they are saying is something I agree about. Just because they are openly saying it in a patent, doesn't mean the other companies weren't already doing it in some other sketchy way. With all that said, what did you think would happen when people openly started allowing listening/video devices on the inside/outside of their homes? Of course people (law or others) are eventually going to want a way to utilize that data if it's useful to them. The same way that I'm sure Facebook/Twitter/etc. work with law enforcement with their data.

empath75 8y ago
Did you even read the article. It’s a patent for sending facial and biometric recognition results to law enforcement.
- bluetidepro 8y ago
  I did. The first part is just commenting about the title at more of a face value, I followed up the second part about the actual contents of the article.
- bsenftner 8y ago
  ...and it is an extremely late patent. Patents for this type of innovation first appeared 25+ years ago when IP video was first happening. In fact, the lateness of this filing smells like it is purely for the creation of outrage articles such as what we are discussing.
  - PavlovsCat 8y ago
    > In fact, the lateness of this filing smells like it is purely for the creation of outrage articles such as what we are discussing. Amazon filed this patent now, instead of earlier, purely for the creation of "outrage articles"? Can you walk me through the logic here?

choult 8y ago

Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

LinuxBender 8y ago

Has anyone trolled Amazon yet with video loops of bad things happening? i.e. webm's from 4chan and such. I'm sure it would violate their ToS. Would it break any laws? I could imagine selling a service that multiplexes video cameras and only sends Amazon devices live video when there is really motion and not just when they say there is motion. Meaning, put the security control back on the home owner.

jbigelow76 8y ago

Likewise, homeowners can also add photos of “suspicious” people into the system and then the doorbell’s facial recognition program will scan anyone passing their home. This has to be the worst part of it, if you've ever been part of a suburban neighborhood that uses NextDoor as a community tool you'll know that Ring doorbell videos of "others" crank the pearl-clutching paranoia of bored homeowners up to 11. The comment sections will go from "Did you get a license plate?" to "Hurry, add his face to the database before he comes back to rob and murder us all!"

SubiculumCode 8y ago
I kept arguing with others on the Nextdoor app to keep a lid on their paranoia so much that I ended up leaving. The story that led me to leaving that community? A van drove down a cul de sac and turned around. A homeowner thought that was suspicious and so jumped in their car and followed. They followed for a long time, then suddenly the van dips into another neighborhood, goes down a street, turns at the last moment, and goes down another street. This was even more suspicious! Except, what would you expect a driver to do when someone is following you through the entire city like a crazy person?
- jonathankoren 8y ago
  Next time, on Nextdoor... I was across town trying to get back to the highway, when I get confused in this residential neighborhood and end up on a dead end street. (Why so many dead ends?) As I get ready to turn back onto Pine, I notice this guy run out and hop in his car and start tailgating me. No way am I going home now, with this weirdo following me and probably wanting to steal my stuff. So I hit the gas, and duck down some side street hoping it’s not another dead end, but he stays on me. Luckily, I got a picture of him from the side mirror. If anyone sees this car CALL THE POLICE! [ Thanked by 15 people ]
  - dvtrn 8y ago
    When I first moved to Chicago years ago the amount of one way streets and intersecting one way streets on the northwest side made for a lot of turning around, stopping, passing the same block multiple times, pulling over to the side of a road to stare at my spotty-coverage GPS and figure out how to get back to the main two way thoroughfare. Especially while apartment hunting. I jokingly wonder how many people I freaked out on nextdoor

helloworld2212 8y ago

I'm quite surprised here to not have seen anyone point out the way these patent games typically work inside of a big company. Often a company is motivated to increase their IP portfolio. In turn they motivate their engineers by offering lucrative bonuses for each patent filed. At my last company we played this game and it was roughly $3k per patent. In general, out of the huge number of patents that get filed in a big company, very few---if any---have any hope of ever seeing the light of day as an actual invention. While I agree that the technology itself is somewhat alarming and I personally disagree with the idea of anyone building it, let's maybe save the outrage until they announce that they are actually going to build this thing and deploy it in the real world?

JohnFen 8y ago
"let's maybe save the outrage until they announce that they are actually going to build this thing and deploy it in the real world?" Perhaps enough outrage now would prevent it from being deployed, or would get them to engage in at least a tiny amount of mitigation of the worst aspects of it.
gambler 8y ago
>let's maybe save the outrage until they announce that they are actually going to build this thing and deploy it in the real world? By that time someone will make "the train had sailed" comment. I.e. claim that nothing can be done, because consumers had spoken and the technology is already being deployed en mass.
_37go 8y ago
it's already deployed. Ring has the best facial recognition team is Eastern Europe. it's shitty software but amazon's working on integrating rekognition with ring's own tech. over 80 police departments currently use the product to track 'suspicious people' as flagged by users or their AI. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/evkgpw/smart-doorbell-company-ring-is-working-with-cops-to-report-suspicious-people-and-activities https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/evkgpw/smart-door...

JohnFen 8y ago

That's not surprising. Amazon is actively working to create a dystopia, and this would be a logical next step.

jf- 8y ago

Have you heard of those handy online tracking companies, the ones that build profiles of you based on as much data they can scrape, steal or buy, mainly for advertising, but occasionally for more dubious purposes? Well, now thanks to Amazon Ring® powered by Rekognition™, you can have that same privacy invasion experience in real life! Not carrying your mobile device? Not to worry! Advanced facial recognition technology means that never again will you need to worry about going anywhere without being surreptitiously tracked! Every location, every purchase, and with optional amazon echo, every conversation. Amazon - total surveillance, today. My point is, I don't like it, and this is actually where we're heading with this crap. The same tracking we currently have online, but in the real world.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

imgabe 8y ago

This article is needlessly histrionic. Companies will patent anything they can just so they can have the patent and not somebody else. Jumping from that to "Amazon's plan to bring about a nightmarish dystopia" is a bit much. Could this bring about a police state? Yes absolutely. But the technology is possible to build, so someone will build it, or at least patent it. There's no preventing the technology from existing. We don't prevent a police state from happening by freaking out about the technology that enables it. We prevent it by voting for responsible leaders. So let's just assume that the technology for government oppression is going to exist and make sure we structure our government in such a way that it doesn't oppress us.

yalogin 8y ago

Ring automatically enrolls you into a community program and you don't have an option. In fact you cannot even use Ring without signing up with your address and signing up for the community feature. They suck up your data by force. You know its amazon, they don't have any qualms and reservations about how they use it.

mc32 8y ago

I'll tell you what: 1. No question this raises concerns about the system pinging authorities as someone who has been flagged in the system is detected. 2. This will sell like hotcakes with people who are on NextDoor. Everyday there is an alert about a burglary, stolen packages and people snooping around their properties. These people are very likely to approve sending any images/video of interest to police. (Right now it's very mechanical, scroll through video, capture and send --people will put out requests for footage very often). I think the only thing we can do is call for strict regulation on its use. It's gonna get deployed and it's gonna get used.

floatingatoll 8y ago

I don't welcome "general facial recognition", but I do welcome this specific and single use case. As someone with an active stalker for the past two decades, I really appreciate the value provided by a device that watches specifically for the person that's sent me death threats.

throwawaysea 8y ago

In my neighborhood, we are impacted by constant property crime - burglaries, car break-ins, mail theft, porch pirates, you name it. After being a victim myself, I can say that it does indeed cause an increase in anxiety, especially the sense of helplessness that comes with it. The police department here is woefully understaffed and has been ordered to not focus on property crime because their staffing only leaves room to focus on violent crime. The under-staffing is in part due to the anti-cop sentiment of the far-left activists. This leaves law-abiding residents to largely fend for themselves. I have always felt it would be very useful to be able to identify people in videos who may have committed a crime locally or elsewhere in the city, to learn of their movements, where they might live, what other crimes they committed, etc. This would help police prioritize some non-violent crime effectively, get a high return on the time they spend investigating property crimes (actually catching criminals), which would then in turn serve as a deterrent that is outright missing right now. I would gladly contribute my video to that cause, as would almost everyone in my neighborhood. A word on the commenters here going on about 'pearl-clutching': that's just the latest in pejoratives that are nothing but empty stereotypes. Most people on NextDoor in my city are reasonable, but are regularly unfairly characterized by the far-left progressive cabal in this manner. Caring about the safety of yourself, your loved ones, and your property is not a bad thing. We work and live in part for those very things. If you disagree, then try outlawing door locks. It is unbelievable to me that the rights of criminals are more important to commenters here than the rights of those who want to protect their own. And worse yet, the conspiracy-theory notion that we are about to be taken over by a tyrannical government because of doorbell recordings. If this was a topic they disagreed with, those same commenters would readily call this a "slippery slope fallacy". A further aside: The ACLU has been wrong a lot on this topic - for example when they called AWS's Rekognition service a "facial recognition service" instead of what it is, a generic object recognition service. They also did not seem to understand how false positives/negatives are managed and why it is fine to use an imperfect object recognition service as a first-pass filter. And they are wrong again here - people are allowed to film on public property and share it with whomever they want. They're allowed to perform whatever analysis they want and share it with whomever they want, period.

someguydave 8y ago
Completely agree. I’ve seen several legitimate instances of theft and porch piracy on my local Nextdoor and the government police seem to do little about it. Something like this would support private policing which is desperately needed in many areas of the US

vbuwivbiu 8y ago

The Circle

xg15 8y ago

Ok, now you just have to combine the cameras with a social-credit-as-a-service ecosystem to keep your suspicious people list up to date and one or two of these guys [1] mounted on every front porch for automatic suspicious people deterrence - and we can get a nice Black Mirror style scenario where you will be physically incapable of entering certain parts of the city if you pissed off the wrong algorithm. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/9ys1e4/automatic_sprinkler_test/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/9ys1e...

rcchyssser 8y ago

Millions of Americans manually upload photos of themselves and their families/friends now. Why not just automate it.

wemdyjreichert 8y ago

There's a solution: make it inadmissable in court. That roves a huge incentive. And get rid of the fisa and other administrative kangaroo courts held to different standards of evidence, preponderance thereof, and due process.

sizzle 8y ago

Anyone else immediately think of the all seeing 'telescreen' from 1984? What a time to be alive...