18 ms·
Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition ban
- jokoon 7y agoShouldn't this technology be outlawed outside law enforcement? It sounds like it can be used like a powerful tool.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- sneak 7y agoWhy should private analysis of photos legally acquired be illegal? If computers are legal and software is legal and photography is legal, it seems to me that running your own software on your own computers over your own photos should be legal. I don’t like the implication either, but I think perhaps the thing we should be looking at is why it is legal for companies to take photos of us for commercial purposes without our explicit consent. I also feel it would be much more practical to regulate and enforce than regulating what algorithms they get to use on already-captured imagery.
- mLuby 7y agoRight, so parent is suggesting making facial recognition software (as a class) illegal. You'd still be able to use your legal computer to analyze legal photographs, but we could, as a society, say it is a Bad Idea™ to make that analysis trivial. Alternatively we could say that everyone should be able to do facial recognition analysis, but then access to the photographs becomes the gatekeeper of power.
- hn23 7y agoAmazon stuff runs on Amazon servers... cloud means, it is not your computer, most likey not your Software and sooner or later not your data.
- xvector 7y ago> Why should private analysis of photos legally acquired be illegal? For the same reason most horrifyingly destructive items created out of perfectly legal items are illegal?
- chrisseaton 7y agoIs the sole argument that you're presenting in favour of outlawing really that 'it can be used like a powerful tool'?
- llamataboot 7y agoI'm actually rather the /most/ concerned about law enforcement having access to it.
- Nasrudith 7y agoYeah banning its use outside law enforcement sounds like the worst option given it is anti-transparency and accountability while allowing abuse. It woukd be far easier to selectively hide misconduct that way.
- testvox 7y agoYeah I don't care much about what Amazon does with it, at least compared to the police. Amazon doesn't have the ability to kill me or lock me in a cage for 50 years.
- xmprt 7y agoA really good definition of government that I've heard is "an organization that has a monopoly on force." There's probably more that I'm forgetting but I think that definition is important because it's something that people often forget or choose to ignore.
- msla 7y ago> A really good definition of government that I've heard is "an organization that has a monopoly on force." There's probably more that I'm forgetting but I think that definition is important because it's something that people often forget or choose to ignore. Max Weber, although his definition is a bit more nuanced: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber > Weber defined the state as an entity that successfully claims a "monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory". "Legitimate" is a tarpit, but in practical terms it's pretty much what others recognize as legitimate. That's the difference between a warlord and a dictator: One controls an armed gang, the other controls a military. This poses some problems for people claiming that anarchism can work: If a region declares itself anarchist, but the majority can and will enforce its rules by force, is it anarchist or majoritarian? Is there any practical difference?
- JohnFen 7y ago> Amazon doesn't have the ability to kill me or lock me in a cage for 50 years. I wouldn't be so certain about that. History is filled with examples of corporations doing exactly that sort of thing, usually (but not always) by having a government act as their proxy.
- godzillabrennus 7y agoLove that the article says people can use the AWS support system to report issues with the technology. That's a black hole of no return if you are a paying customer much less someone random off the internet.
- vasco 7y agoLet me just make a distinction that if you are a support paying customer, you get very fast and somewhat (depends who you get) helpful support, including real time webchat or through the phone. It's arguable this should be included at all levels but I guess AWS wants to keep their support top notch for the larger pocket users.
- linuxftw 7y agoThe one time I raised a ticket on a corp AWS account, it was handled swiftly and competently. I'm sure it depends much on what your issue is.
- mattbeckman 7y agoEvery ticket I've ever created on the paid Developer support plan was within the "24 hour" and "12 hour" windows for guidance and system impaired issues. However, always always always at the far end of those windows. Meaning if I had something I really needed help with, it was going to be a conversation for the following day. I'm not really mad, we're just pre-release, and the number crunching to go from Developer adding 3% to cost vs. Business adding 10% to cost is too damn high. Our infra is about $10K/mo right now (pre-release), so we're talking $1000/mo for live chat and a shorter window vs. $250-300/mo we're paying right now.
- dv_dt 7y agoCan one report an AWS issue from a TSA inspection room?
- snorrah 7y ago
- NeoBasilisk 7y agomust accumulate capital
- malvosenior 7y agoRegulating this technology seems like regulating encryption. Futile. You can never put the tech genie back in the bottle. Especially since presumably many of the foundation layers of this technology are open source with wide scale applications. Will they outlaw machine learning? TensorFlow? Obviously whatever Amazon is doing is more complicated than throwing a ton of face images at TensorFlow but as technology progresses, the advances will bubble up to the application layer. The thought that you could even regulate facial recognition just shows how out to lunch lawmakers and the media are when it comes to technology, how it's developed and how it's deployed.
- Bjartr 7y agoThis isn't about regulation of facial recognition tech (in the legal sense), this is about voluntarily choosing to not pursue a course of action because it is unethical and how shareholders have overruled decision makers on that matter.
- malvosenior 7y agoFrom the article: Responding to the shareholder vote, Democratic U.S. Representative Jimmy Gomez said, “that just means that it’s more important that Congress acts.” Republican members of the committee expressed concern about U.S. citizens having their rights violated and their information shared with the likes of the FBI without elected officials’ oversight. A second hearing on the topic is scheduled for June 4. Any federal regulation would follow a major decision by San Francisco officials earlier this month to ban city personnel from using the technology. That contrasts with New York, Chicago and Detroit, where law enforcement have reportedly used facial recognition or acquired it with the hope of speeding up post-crime investigations.
- xvector 7y agoActively producing and selling the tools to strip human rights is far worse than standing by while someone uses said tools.
- malvosenior 7y ago
- danielovichdk 7y agoDont buy from Amazon. How hard can it be
- xfitm3 7y agoSurprisingly difficult. Winding down from Amazon personally has taken months, but thats futile. At work I spend 8 figures a year on AWS.
- RIMR 7y agoAnd there are no alternatives that exist?
- munk-a 7y agoAWS definitely has competitors you can switch to pretty easily, I think Amazon's retail side is the harder portion to jettison.
- lotsofpulp 7y agoThe retail side is very easy to jettison. Most of the goods can be found at target, Walmart, Best Buy, Costco, or Newegg. At least it was for me.
- xfitm3 7y agoDo you use AWS? It's extremely difficult to move away if you use services like RDS, ElasticSearch, ElastiCache, Lambda, KMS, parameter store, etc. It will cost a couple years of ops time to reliably migrate to a competitor like GCP + change work patterns. Not to mention that Google products like Functions are still alpha and unreliable.
- deathanatos 7y agoFor example, my friend has a doorbell with a camera. The doorbell has software that runs facial recognition on me, and it often correctly identifies me, regardless of whether I look into the camera or not. (Nowadays I do, since I know it already knows me, I just make silly faces since I know it goes to his phone.) Now, IDK how I feel about this doorbell. But it's also his property; am I to say he can't have an AI-enhanced doorbell on his house? But that doorbell also likely uploads my image, and data about me, to centralized servers somewhere, largely without my consent. (Aside from perhaps my implied consent of entering his property, but even then, I don't think I noticed it the first time I visited. Now I'm aware of it, since he told me, and has demoed the tech to me in various ways.) (IDK if this particular thing is an Amazon product or not, and in fact, I highly suspect it isn't, but I want to pose it as an example of just because I might voluntarily choose to not use the tech, that choice only goes so far, and there are still privacy implications for me despite it.)
- llamataboot 7y agoAh, the public corporation! Fictive structures created so that profit-making shall never be interfered with by moral or ethical concerns! Just creating shareholder value, what else can you expect us to do!
- RIMR 7y agoI do wish you were exaggerating...
- throwaway2048 7y agoQueue the torrent of HN comments that conflate "is technically legal" and "Is morally responsible", after all the highest form of morality is making money.
- llamataboot 7y agoIt's always funny to see the upvote/downvote swings on comments like these. I try to keep them more substantive overall, but what else can be said about this. Clearly there are still major ethical concerns with access to these facial recognition black boxes and clearly amazon shareholders are far more concerned with expanding into any legal market as quick as possible. Amazon is /the/ poster child of late capitalism as far as I'm concerned. Ruthlessly efficient, impossible to escape even if you hate them (I mean, come on, like I'm gonna go to a store when I just grab it on Prime now), and literally run all the retail stuff as a revenue front to expand deep into subterranean territory (AWS, etc). No nod to "Don't Be Evil" here, just a gigantic black box that can pump out money for shareholders. Enough money and leverage to apply impossible pressure in almost any market they decide to want to dominate (Still waiting to see what they do to grocery with the WF buy). And still mostly building the layers and connections for domination. They haven't even switched into eat-the-world mode yet, they are still just grinding and building resources...
- clairity 7y ago> "Amazon is [...] ruthlessly efficient..." this part is capitalism working as intended and (mostly) as desired. the challenge of course is that it has also led to highly undesirable power structures (corporations, oligopolies, cabals, cartels, etc.) that increasingly eclipses the individual as principal agent. that's a failure (by omission) of capitalism. while governments, communities and other social structures can contain that consolidation of power to some extent, subservience to corporate power is a looming threat for common folk. it's crucial to further codify and protect the equivalence of the individual and the corporation. for instance, contracts (like EULA's) shouldn't be one-sided ultimatums inflicted on the indivudual, but the beginning of a negotiation between two equal parties. corporations would argue that the administrative overhead of this would be prohibitive, but that's the price for access to a lucrative market (and that sweet, sweet revenue stream). in addition, corporations naturally have asymmetrical information advantages that need to be leveled in the exchange of value contemplated by an economic transaction. we have financial disclosure laws, for example, but they don't go far enough. basic information like the actual prices paid by other customers and the reasons for differences should be made available to the counter-party.
- jcims 7y agoWhat was the point of taking this to shareholders? On what planet would anyone expect them to vote any other way?
- throwaway2048 7y agoThe point of it was to deliver an excuse as to why their hands are tied, it went to vote precisely because the outcome was already obvious.
- coss 7y agoAlmost all blue collar employees (software engineers) are shareholders at Amazon.
- dragonwriter 7y ago> blue collar employees (software engineers) Huh?
- WorkingClassSWE 7y agoWorking class might've been a better term
- richthegeek 7y agoSE are not working class. At best they are at the top end of the middle range, and generally above 100k is considered 'upper middle'.
- cge 7y agoThe idea of SE as working class is from categorization based on labor relations, not on income. In a Marxist-theoretic framework, for example, SE are clearly working class.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
- calimac 7y agoThe headline should read Bezos rejects facial recognition ban.
- stevespang 7y agoIn other words, we are willing to sell out our privacy and security for MONEY . . . or as Ben Franklin stated: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary (elusive) Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"
- Vordax 7y agoWhat I really wanted was facial recognition in Google Glasses. I hate it when I am in the store and someone comes up and says Hi <name> hows the wife and kids, and I am like "who is this....". Would be great to say "Hey Bob, doing good" :)
- malandrew 7y agoI'm sitting here imagining a very distant future where the part of the brain that recognizes faces eventually becomes vestigial and we end up relying on technology to recognize the people in our lives. Basically acquired prosopagnosia.
- sunsetMurk 7y agoAlmost feel like that's not so distant. Imagine how fewer people we would recognize if we weren't regularly pinged with an update about them or their picture scrolled passed on a device.
- Dylan16807 7y agoThat sounds like the tech helping memorize faces, the exact opposite?
- tty2300 7y agoSoon you will also be able to see a rating next to their name showing their social credit score so you will know how much interacting with them will affect your score.
- tjpnz 7y agoHello Black Mirror.
- plandis 7y agoIn my mind selling facial recognition seems no different than selling a hammer. It’s amoral, it can be used for good or bad. Id much rather see laws to limit when and how the technology can be applied.
- buildzr 7y agoThere's undeniably a freedom tradeoff here as facial recognition systems expand and many corporations and governments gain access to millions of capable sensors sending this data. I can't think of a single use case where doing this in the cloud is a worthwhile tradeoff. If you want to do this locally, sure, I can see many silly use cases for it, but as soon as you start shipping that data off to say... Amazon, things get pretty sketchy pretty fast in my book. So while I agree there are good use cases for facial recognition, I feel these should never be implemented on centralized services.
- tty2300 7y agoEven locally is bad. Retail will use this right away to track everyone and what products they look at.
- ahelwer 7y agoThere are very, very few moral applications of facial recognition. Logging into your phone/laptop or assisting people with prosopagnosia, I guess. Everything else basically enables mass surveillance. It is frankly astonishing, and an exemplar of technologist naivete, that so much effort was (and continues to be) dumped into developing this technology.
- exabrial 7y agoProgressives are progressive until it's their own backyard. Great article about that earlier today on HN.
- artiste 7y agoDo you have a link handy?
- SeanBoocock 7y agoI don't understand this comment. Being critical of the implications of facial recognition technology doesn't map cleanly along the political spectrum, but the most vocal criticism has come from the left. Amazon shareholders largely consist of institutional investors whose interests (and politics) tend to the more conservative. In what sense are progressives being hypocritical here? As far as I can tell progressive (leaning) employees and other minority shareholders proposed an initiative that was rejected by the majority, more conservative shareholders.
- andrepd 7y agoIt amazes me still how much power in our "democratic" system is help completely outside of the control of the public. How some people, by virtue of owning capital, are vested with such powers that can make or break the lives of millions. Theirs are the decisions that can kill thousands or cause suffering to millions. Democracy is not a boolean. It's a continuum. To me, it means "power held by the people whom it concerns". That's it! But even in our best democracies, only some portion of power is held democratically. Other decisions, often no less impactful or critical or harmful (think polluting factories, advertisers that insidiously manipulate people's psyches, governance of enterprises bigger than many nations, etc), are done by undemocratic, unelectable, unaccountable elites. This needs fixing. PS: this is bad even if the capital "well earned", for some definition of "well earned", but it is especially aggravating when we're talking about the Saudi royals or the Waltons of this world...
- mindfulhack 7y agoUncanny. I watched the documentary "The Corporation" the other day (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/corporation https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/corporation) and it opened my mind to this issue completely. It is well worth the watch.
- ageek123 7y agoHuh? If the government wanted to ban facial recognition, they could do it. Our democratic system absolutely has the power to ban it. It hasn't been done, presumably because there isn't a public consensus that it should be banned. If you're arguing for public ownership of companies, that's literally communism -- so not "democratic." But we don't need communism to regulate facial recognition.
- ma2rten 7y agoIf you hadn't replied first, I would have replied the exact same thing as your first paragraph - also starting with "Huh?". That said, public ownership of companies is not necessarily undemocratic. It's just a bad idea for different reasons. USPS would be an example in the US of publicly owned company. I believe that Marx even originally intended communism to be democratic. The regime in the USSR was supposed to be transitory.
- mindgam3 7y agoOne of the things that blows my mind about the current tech landscape is that Microsoft now appears to occupy the moral high ground with its stance calling for regulation on facial recognition. I grew up with a profound distaste for Microsoft's anti-competitive business culture under Gates. But now I have to give credit where it's due. Even Apple, which has come out with strong statements on privacy, is lagging behind MSFT in this area as far as I can tell.
- harry8 7y agoThe sad thing is that Microsoft really haven't improved. The competition got more successful and took the ethics down much lower than the bar set by Microsoft. They only look good because their power diminished and others are more effective at being utterly horrible. Apple are but one example. Can you imagine if Microsoft had tried to take 30% of your sales revenue for selling software that runs on windows? Apple did it, got away with it and took that bar down lower. Google followed and got right in there. Privacy concerns? Race to the bottom with facebrick, goog and everyone else seeing who can fk everyone over with a bait and switch strategy, deeper, faster and more profoundly. Microsoft haven't really competed there but I'm pretty sure it's not because they've taken a moral position anymore than IBM did about competitive practises in the 90s. Microsoft probably haven't got a lot of my data under false pretenses and without my explicit consent but it's unlikely because they chose that - they just don't have much I'd want to use as a lever to rip me off. At least yet. IBM look ok now, right? Whodathunk they literally provided the infrastructure for Nazi death camps? [1] Did their investors bless that moral position in those days too? There go Amazon claiming the right to sell facial recognition services to assist despots destroying the lives of humans. How much money is enough Bezos? Does your toy rocket make you feel better about it? He probably wasn't so bad at one time. It can happen to any of us even without masses of money to lubricate the process. Nonbinding resolution saying "Don't sell this stuff to evil bastards." Non-binding. Can't even have that as an "ideal" to aspire to. Get rid of that, could be money in it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
- didibus 7y agoI'm pretty sure Microsoft sells facial recognition to government and military. They have opposed some bills which imposed too strict restrictions on its use as well if I reckon. And Amazon has similarly suggested that there should be regulation put in place. Here's the thing, regulation is good in this case, as long as it doesn't prevent Microsoft or Amazon from still selling the tech. That's why Microsoft opposed certain proposed bans, but recommend for regulation. Things like, having to get a warrant are good, because Microsoft still sells the tech, but they don't get blamed when its use wrongly.
- m3kw9 7y agoIf there is a ban, it should be country law, not just one company. How is this gonna achieve anything if another company goes ahead anyways?
- aeturnum 7y agoThis same argument could be made about any decision to abstain from anything. If a country banned facial recognition the work could happen in another country. You can make it even more farcical by changing the act you abstain from: Why not kill someone? They will die eventually. For any actor, their choice to do or not do something matters. It might not matter much, but it has some impact. I would not describe Amazon as a small player or having a small impact. Dismissing the importance of what they choose seems myopic. To return to your frame, I'd say that if Amazon stuck to its decision not to work on the technology it would be more meaningful than any national ban outside of, probably, the US or China. In general - it seems like, if we don't like something, we should celebrate it not being done. Even if it's not done in some limited context. In fact, outside of a world government with effective law enforcement - all choices not to do things are limited. So it's really all we have!
- lukasLansky 7y agoYes, AI regulation needs to be global to be effective. The difference between "we should abstain from our moral values because everyone dies anyway in the end" and "we should find ways to pursue our moral values effectively" is substantial. You don't have to be nihilistic to not accept cheap signaling being sold as a solution to real problems. Few corporations deciding to not do dirty work, just providing their lower-level cloud resources to thousands of smaller firms who will gladly compete for any kind of money -- that does not solve anything. Stuff like GDPR can change at least something.
- aeturnum 7y ago> AI regulation needs to be global to be effective. [...] not accept cheap signaling being sold as a solution to real problems. Amazon making a pledge not to work on facial recognition does not seem like cheap signaling to me! Cheap signaling would be Google's "AI Ethics Board" staffed with people unlikely to make trouble while Google continues to work on AI. A pledge not to work on technology is an expensive signal! Ideally, sure, to stop something everyone agrees not to do it. But history is stuffed full of examples where one company could have made a difference. Imagine if IBM refused to work with the Nazis or if Dow Chemical refused to sell agent orange to the US. It is impossible to solve anything "forever." Facial recognition will be developed, but how long that takes and how well the world can grapple with the consequences matters!
- fooblitzky 7y ago"The proposals faced an uphill battle. Amazon’s board recommended against them" - for those not aware, the way shareholder voting works for Amazon, is that shares that aren't voted are assumed to vote the same way the board recommends. This means to get any proposal different to the board's recommendation, you need to get more active voters for the proposal, than those opposed + not voting. There was a shareholder proposal recently to make the default for non-voters abstain instead of "whatever the board wants", but the board recommended against it and it was defeated.
- microdrum 7y agoSecurity cameras are already everywhere. So, um, should there be a law that only human retinas can look at them? Why allow recording of the feeds, for that matter?
- tanilama 7y agoAnd that is good news. Company should focus on making good services and good profit, not virtue signaling on political fluff
- hannasanarion 7y agoIt is not "virtue signaling" to choose to stop doing evil.
- RyanAF7 7y agoOh yeah? How many votes did fake Jeff Bezos have along with his fake-ass divorced wife who specifically left him voting rights. This shits called a long con, folks.
- spunker540 7y agoI feel like there are clearly ways in which facial recognition can improve a lot of systems -- ticketing (think airports, sporting events, concerts etc); automated stores (like the amazon cashierless stores); payment (imagine not needing a wallet because the combination of your face, gait, and voice is enough to verify you); security (home/building/car entry, detecting suspicious individuals, known terrorists, past offenders, restraining orders) There are also the many valid awful ways it which it can be used, particularly by the government. Why not just ask for laws preventing the bad uses? I don't get why it has to be all or nothing. If it's strictly government use that is concerning, or police use, then pass laws banning government collection of facial recognition models. There's no need to pass laws banning all forms of racial recognition simply because there are certain dangerous use cases. It'd be like if back in the 20's or 30's someone said we need to ban cars because they could someday be driven by terrorists into large groups of people. It's a tragically valid concern, but we all agree it's not reason enough to ban cars altogether. An even more realistic example is folks back in the day complaining about how dangerous cars were, and rather than banning all cars deciding on speed limits and safety belts and airbags and anti-lock brakes and so on. It doesn't have to be all or nothing.
- travisporter 7y ago“payment (imagine not needing a wallet because the combination of your face, gait, and voice is enough to verify you)“ If it can be done from a distance, this is bone chilling to me. A company could use this to literally extract money from someone’s bank account. I agree with the rest of your sentiment though.
- onemoresoop 7y agoWhats the big deal to not carry a wallet? It’s not the convenience I’d swap for privacy. If you imagine where this could go wrong it becomes easier to just stick to the wallet. Even to cash.
- headsoup 7y agoIt seems to fall under the quiet assumption that technology advances and automation are inherently good, and that manual processes and analogue things are inefficient and undesirable. We don't even do the whole 'should we' evaluation because it is assumed it will happen anyway somehow and we'll figure out the rules after the fact.
- jxramos 7y agoWhat’s the backstory here? Did Amazon ban some facial recognition product it’s developed from being used in certain circumstances and the shareholders overturned that decision?
- fooblitzky 7y agoNo, some shareholders brought forth a motion to ban the product at the shareholder's meeting, and it was voted down.
- KorematsuFred 7y agoWhat is wrong with facial recognition ? The problem should be government using it to enforce laws. Even that is debatable. Most public spaces are currently under surveillance.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y agoJust a reminder that like encryption, facial recognition is just applied math. Why are people trying to ban math?
- chmod775 7y agoFirst off, this was specifically about banning the selling of facial recognition software to specific players. Also: Just a reminder that nuclear bombs are just physics is just applied math (kinda). Just because what you're doing is rooted in the field of mathmatics doesn't automatically mean you should be doing it or selling it, especially when your application is crossing into the physical world where there is the wellbeing of humans to be concerned about. Even if the entity you're selling to could just very well build it themselves, it still doesn't remove your moral obligation to not be the one providing it.
- Traubenfuchs 7y agoWhy would shareholders reject something that can make them money? This is not a charity.
- rospaya 7y agoConscience?
- m-p-3 7y agoLooks like Amazon is incapable of policing itself then.