5 ms·

Dont buy from Amazon. How hard can it be

xfitm3 7y ago
Surprisingly difficult. Winding down from Amazon personally has taken months, but thats futile. At work I spend 8 figures a year on AWS.
- RIMR 7y ago
  And there are no alternatives that exist?
- munk-a 7y ago
  AWS definitely has competitors you can switch to pretty easily, I think Amazon's retail side is the harder portion to jettison.
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    The 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 ago
    Do 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 ago
For 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.)
- rifung 7y ago
  > 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.) Even if it weren't his property, if you were in the public aren't people legally allowed to take photos of you and upload it wherever they want? If it weren't legal there wouldn't be paparazzi I would think.
  - egd 7y ago
    > Even if it weren't his property, if you were in the public aren't people legally allowed to take photos of you and upload it wherever they want? If it weren't legal there wouldn't be paparazzi I would think. This is probably one of the areas where the law's not quite caught up to reality. 50 years ago, the probable life story of a picture of you taken by someone in public was that it would be developed, maybe reproduced once or twice, possibly sold to a magazine or displayed somewhere, and then it would spend the next half century in a drawer somewhere. In 2019, the life story of a picture of you taken by someone with an Android phone is that it is uploaded to Google's servers, where it's analyzed, tagged via facial recognition, combined with location data, associated with your profile, and used to build a better understanding of who you are, who you know, and who you associate with, so Google can package that data and use it to target better ads at you (and Google's one of the "better" players in this space, in that the worst they're likely to do is advertise to you). I don't think it's quite caught up to people that the average amount of processing being applied to any given picture of them in 2019 is about on par with what the CIA would've dedicated to a picture of the Russian ambassador back in 1969.
    - kalleboo 7y ago
      How does the GDPR apply in this case? If they take a photo of you in public and manage to associate it with your profile, I assume that instantly becomes PII that you have a right to have deleted, right?
munk-a 7y ago
Actually pretty ease with Ali-Express, but I don't know how much that fulfills your reason to not buy from Amazon. The brick and mortar stores are probably never coming back like they were before.
tanilama 7y ago
Not hard. But boycotting Amazon because of it is selling facial recognition API? Most people will call it nonsense.

Surprisingly difficult. Winding down from Amazon personally has taken months, but thats futile. At work I spend 8 figures a year on AWS.

RIMR 7y ago
And there are no alternatives that exist?
munk-a 7y ago
AWS definitely has competitors you can switch to pretty easily, I think Amazon's retail side is the harder portion to jettison.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  The 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 ago
  Do 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 ago

For 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.)

rifung 7y ago
> 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.) Even if it weren't his property, if you were in the public aren't people legally allowed to take photos of you and upload it wherever they want? If it weren't legal there wouldn't be paparazzi I would think.
- egd 7y ago
  > Even if it weren't his property, if you were in the public aren't people legally allowed to take photos of you and upload it wherever they want? If it weren't legal there wouldn't be paparazzi I would think. This is probably one of the areas where the law's not quite caught up to reality. 50 years ago, the probable life story of a picture of you taken by someone in public was that it would be developed, maybe reproduced once or twice, possibly sold to a magazine or displayed somewhere, and then it would spend the next half century in a drawer somewhere. In 2019, the life story of a picture of you taken by someone with an Android phone is that it is uploaded to Google's servers, where it's analyzed, tagged via facial recognition, combined with location data, associated with your profile, and used to build a better understanding of who you are, who you know, and who you associate with, so Google can package that data and use it to target better ads at you (and Google's one of the "better" players in this space, in that the worst they're likely to do is advertise to you). I don't think it's quite caught up to people that the average amount of processing being applied to any given picture of them in 2019 is about on par with what the CIA would've dedicated to a picture of the Russian ambassador back in 1969.
  - kalleboo 7y ago
    How does the GDPR apply in this case? If they take a photo of you in public and manage to associate it with your profile, I assume that instantly becomes PII that you have a right to have deleted, right?

munk-a 7y ago

Actually pretty ease with Ali-Express, but I don't know how much that fulfills your reason to not buy from Amazon. The brick and mortar stores are probably never coming back like they were before.

tanilama 7y ago

Not hard. But boycotting Amazon because of it is selling facial recognition API? Most people will call it nonsense.