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Ah, the public corporation! Fictive structures created so that profit-making shall never be interfered with by moral or ethical concerns! Just creating shareho

Ah, 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 ago
I do wish you were exaggerating...
throwaway2048 7y ago
Queue 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 ago
  It'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.
    - andrepd 7y ago
      >> "Amazon is [...] ruthlessly efficient..." >this part is capitalism working as intended and (mostly) as desired. I think we need to be careful to define what we mean by "efficient". Do we frame efficient as "churns out the highest revenue / spending ratio" (ironically evaluating capitalism by a metric created by capitalism)? Then yes, that may well be true. But what about the overworked and abused workers? What about the stifled competition? What about the 40% increase in fuel and emissions to reduce shipping from 3 to 2 days? Is it all worth it, to get your consumerist crap a few hours earlier in the post? This are not just rhetorical questions, these are actual questions we need to pose ourselves (e.g. is it worth an excess X million tons of CO2 per year to get prime deliveries Y hours faster). Would that fit into a definition like "increases overall quality of life the most"? Food for thought, in my opinion. >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. Isn't this one of the classical critiques of capitalist (e.g. Marx), that it is impossible to have a negotiation between two equal parties when the two parties are so... well, unequal.
- rednixion 7y ago
  Should also add that maximizing shareholder value isn't a hard legal requirement since those laws are often misquoted to imply the opposite for some reason and that the board had "no choice" to pursue a particular controversial revenue stream, source: https://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/academics/clarke_business_law_institute/corporations-and-society/Common-Misunderstandings-About-Corporations.cfm https://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/academics/clarke_business_...
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    Yes. If maximizing shareholder value was the end-all and be-all, then every corporation would be in the sex, drugs, and gambling businesses.
    - llamataboot 7y ago
      I mean, the gambling business may be profitable, but are the profits really left on the table at this point? You don't just have to build a casino, you have to build a /better casino/. Profitability has little to do with the overall margins of the market you are in, but in whether you can find places to optimize ROI that your competitors have not.
    - jjeaff 7y ago
      Gaming industry has around 10% net profit margins. Compare that to Apples 30%.
malvosenior 7y ago
Why do you deem all use of facial recognition to be immoral? Is it more moral to only allow the governments access to this tech? Are there really no consumer friendly applications of facial recognition? I'm sure there are and the only way we can explore these benefits is to allow the population access to the technology.
- xvector 7y ago
  RTFA: > The first proposal would have made the company stop offering facial recognition to governments unless its board determined sales did not violate civil liberties. A second would have requested a study by September of the extent to which Amazon’s service harmed rights and privacy. There is no world in which you are not disgustingly greedy, unempathetic, and immoral to reject sales of facial recognition technology to abusive governments.
  - malvosenior 7y ago
    Whether a governement is abusive or not is greatly in the eye of the beholder so yes, there are plenty of worldviews where such a thing wouldn't be "disgustingly greedy, unempathetic, and immoral". Besides, there's a lot more going on in this space (and article) than the vote itself. There are calls to regulate facial recognition, which I think is an immoral option (and futile) as it only allows governments access to a powerful technology.
    - AmericanChopper 7y ago
      I think it’s entirely misguided to place the responsibility to ensure that customers are not using products to violate civil liberties on to corporate boards. Legislature should define them, and courts should uphold them. To say that these responsibilities should be shifted to the board room is alarming and undemocratic.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
    That's not what the rejection of this proposition indicates. The shareholders are not saying, "Amazon, sell to anyone no matter how bad." They are saying, "Amazon, continue using whatever processes you are already using to determine who to restrict from using this product." It is very common for people who have a particular issue that they care about to attempt to require the board of a company to handle that issue. But if big companies acquiesced to all such requests, the board would take on a large workload, making sometimes detailed decisions where they have no expertise. Company owners delegate much of their authority to boards. Boards delegate much of their authority to employees. I am sure there will be entities to which Amazon would not offer facial recognition services. But that decision does not need to be made at the level of the board. BTW, this is why management almost always fights such propositions: it ties the hands of the company to use an inefficient decision process, for no provable gain on any worthwhile metric.
asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
There are many people who don't think there's anything immoral about facial recognition, or even its lawful use by law enforcement. I am among them. Such individuals probably comprise a higher fraction of Amazon's voting shareholders than the population at large. Especially if you count by votes, since if Bezos thought there was anything wrong with it the program wouldn't exist.
- llamataboot 7y ago
  Just out of curiosity - How have your interactions been with law enforcement during your life? Largely positive? Largely negative? Or non-existent? Do you, overall, feel that the US in largely a place where law-abiding citizens are free to go about their days?
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
    There are obviously serious problems with law enforcement in the united states. Although I think that these mostly manifest in face to face encounters with the poor, people of color, and the mentally ill. I can't think of many recent cases where local law enforcement's application of information technology resulted in gross injustice.
    - llamataboot 7y ago
      The idealistic argument would be that moving to IT and algorithms reduces the gross amount of human bias that currently enters into the system. The reality may be far different as the algorithms themselved make the biases even less seen and less able to be contested.We're not in full minority report territory, but I think the worry is that added the ability to do near permanent surveillance to an already militarized police force that thinks they are fighting a war is not...going to turn out well for some of us.
      - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
        > The idealistic argument would be that moving to IT and algorithms reduces the gross amount of human bias that currently enters into the system. That is not my argument. I am merely saying that I don't think facial recognition is going to present problems that outweigh its value as a law enforcement tool. There will no doubt be some abuses, just as there is of any new technology. I support regulation and intense scrutiny of how law enforcement uses these tools, to minimize the severity and duration of these abuses. But I don't think that means it's a good idea that Amazon's board should have to approve each entity attempting to use their services individually.
mc32 7y ago
Public corporations, private corporations, state-owned, party-controlled corporations. It doesn’t matter. At least public corporations are known to bow to pressure. I think ownership is irrelevant. What matters is lawfulness and what remains lawful after pressure or indifference from the constituencies. Hand in hand with this is the rule of law. Some countries on paper have great liberties and rights for their people, but in practice it’s up to the party to interpret and enforce (as in the great purges, etc,)
- SquishyPanda23 7y ago
  Yeah but everyone on this site will tell you that laws and regulations are horrid evil things. So if we can't expect anything from the corporations because we should be looking to laws, and if we can't pass laws because they are evil hindrances to corporations, then what should we do?
  - xtian 7y ago
    Consume
  - munk-a 7y ago
    I mean, not everyone... in fact I've always sort of assumed that those that push hard against regulations are the silicon valley crowd of folks - and you folks are fine folks, but that part of the world is just weird.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    Not everyone. I happen to think that laws and regulations can be wonderful things.
    - ljm 7y ago
      It strikes me as odd that we accept and even celebrate law and order for the individual person, but many people balk as soon as the same standard is applied to an organisation. The war on drugs and mass incarceration of weed smokers is fine. Regulating a woman's body by banning abortion is fine. Regulating against a woman to protect the rights of a rapist is fine. Regulating sexuality is fine. But regulate ISPs, or Hollywood, or financial institutions, or Walmart or Amazon, or whatever other corporation? Oh hell no, that's a cardinal sin. You can't get in the way of money. I think that running a business should be a privilege, one that can be properly revoked when the business fails to serve the society it depends on.
manigandham 7y ago
Governments are fictive structures created, in part, so that they can enforce moral and ethical concerns against profit-making. That's where attention should be focused instead.

RIMR 7y ago

I do wish you were exaggerating...

throwaway2048 7y ago

Queue 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 ago
It'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.
  - andrepd 7y ago
    >> "Amazon is [...] ruthlessly efficient..." >this part is capitalism working as intended and (mostly) as desired. I think we need to be careful to define what we mean by "efficient". Do we frame efficient as "churns out the highest revenue / spending ratio" (ironically evaluating capitalism by a metric created by capitalism)? Then yes, that may well be true. But what about the overworked and abused workers? What about the stifled competition? What about the 40% increase in fuel and emissions to reduce shipping from 3 to 2 days? Is it all worth it, to get your consumerist crap a few hours earlier in the post? This are not just rhetorical questions, these are actual questions we need to pose ourselves (e.g. is it worth an excess X million tons of CO2 per year to get prime deliveries Y hours faster). Would that fit into a definition like "increases overall quality of life the most"? Food for thought, in my opinion. >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. Isn't this one of the classical critiques of capitalist (e.g. Marx), that it is impossible to have a negotiation between two equal parties when the two parties are so... well, unequal.
rednixion 7y ago
Should also add that maximizing shareholder value isn't a hard legal requirement since those laws are often misquoted to imply the opposite for some reason and that the board had "no choice" to pursue a particular controversial revenue stream, source: https://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/academics/clarke_business_law_institute/corporations-and-society/Common-Misunderstandings-About-Corporations.cfm https://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/academics/clarke_business_...
- JohnFen 7y ago
  Yes. If maximizing shareholder value was the end-all and be-all, then every corporation would be in the sex, drugs, and gambling businesses.
  - llamataboot 7y ago
    I mean, the gambling business may be profitable, but are the profits really left on the table at this point? You don't just have to build a casino, you have to build a /better casino/. Profitability has little to do with the overall margins of the market you are in, but in whether you can find places to optimize ROI that your competitors have not.
  - jjeaff 7y ago
    Gaming industry has around 10% net profit margins. Compare that to Apples 30%.

malvosenior 7y ago

Why do you deem all use of facial recognition to be immoral? Is it more moral to only allow the governments access to this tech? Are there really no consumer friendly applications of facial recognition? I'm sure there are and the only way we can explore these benefits is to allow the population access to the technology.

xvector 7y ago
RTFA: > The first proposal would have made the company stop offering facial recognition to governments unless its board determined sales did not violate civil liberties. A second would have requested a study by September of the extent to which Amazon’s service harmed rights and privacy. There is no world in which you are not disgustingly greedy, unempathetic, and immoral to reject sales of facial recognition technology to abusive governments.
- malvosenior 7y ago
  Whether a governement is abusive or not is greatly in the eye of the beholder so yes, there are plenty of worldviews where such a thing wouldn't be "disgustingly greedy, unempathetic, and immoral". Besides, there's a lot more going on in this space (and article) than the vote itself. There are calls to regulate facial recognition, which I think is an immoral option (and futile) as it only allows governments access to a powerful technology.
  - AmericanChopper 7y ago
    I think it’s entirely misguided to place the responsibility to ensure that customers are not using products to violate civil liberties on to corporate boards. Legislature should define them, and courts should uphold them. To say that these responsibilities should be shifted to the board room is alarming and undemocratic.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
  That's not what the rejection of this proposition indicates. The shareholders are not saying, "Amazon, sell to anyone no matter how bad." They are saying, "Amazon, continue using whatever processes you are already using to determine who to restrict from using this product." It is very common for people who have a particular issue that they care about to attempt to require the board of a company to handle that issue. But if big companies acquiesced to all such requests, the board would take on a large workload, making sometimes detailed decisions where they have no expertise. Company owners delegate much of their authority to boards. Boards delegate much of their authority to employees. I am sure there will be entities to which Amazon would not offer facial recognition services. But that decision does not need to be made at the level of the board. BTW, this is why management almost always fights such propositions: it ties the hands of the company to use an inefficient decision process, for no provable gain on any worthwhile metric.

asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago

There are many people who don't think there's anything immoral about facial recognition, or even its lawful use by law enforcement. I am among them. Such individuals probably comprise a higher fraction of Amazon's voting shareholders than the population at large. Especially if you count by votes, since if Bezos thought there was anything wrong with it the program wouldn't exist.

llamataboot 7y ago
Just out of curiosity - How have your interactions been with law enforcement during your life? Largely positive? Largely negative? Or non-existent? Do you, overall, feel that the US in largely a place where law-abiding citizens are free to go about their days?
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
  There are obviously serious problems with law enforcement in the united states. Although I think that these mostly manifest in face to face encounters with the poor, people of color, and the mentally ill. I can't think of many recent cases where local law enforcement's application of information technology resulted in gross injustice.
  - llamataboot 7y ago
    The idealistic argument would be that moving to IT and algorithms reduces the gross amount of human bias that currently enters into the system. The reality may be far different as the algorithms themselved make the biases even less seen and less able to be contested.We're not in full minority report territory, but I think the worry is that added the ability to do near permanent surveillance to an already militarized police force that thinks they are fighting a war is not...going to turn out well for some of us.
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
      > The idealistic argument would be that moving to IT and algorithms reduces the gross amount of human bias that currently enters into the system. That is not my argument. I am merely saying that I don't think facial recognition is going to present problems that outweigh its value as a law enforcement tool. There will no doubt be some abuses, just as there is of any new technology. I support regulation and intense scrutiny of how law enforcement uses these tools, to minimize the severity and duration of these abuses. But I don't think that means it's a good idea that Amazon's board should have to approve each entity attempting to use their services individually.

mc32 7y ago

Public corporations, private corporations, state-owned, party-controlled corporations. It doesn’t matter. At least public corporations are known to bow to pressure. I think ownership is irrelevant. What matters is lawfulness and what remains lawful after pressure or indifference from the constituencies. Hand in hand with this is the rule of law. Some countries on paper have great liberties and rights for their people, but in practice it’s up to the party to interpret and enforce (as in the great purges, etc,)

SquishyPanda23 7y ago
Yeah but everyone on this site will tell you that laws and regulations are horrid evil things. So if we can't expect anything from the corporations because we should be looking to laws, and if we can't pass laws because they are evil hindrances to corporations, then what should we do?
- xtian 7y ago
  Consume
- munk-a 7y ago
  I mean, not everyone... in fact I've always sort of assumed that those that push hard against regulations are the silicon valley crowd of folks - and you folks are fine folks, but that part of the world is just weird.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  Not everyone. I happen to think that laws and regulations can be wonderful things.
  - ljm 7y ago
    It strikes me as odd that we accept and even celebrate law and order for the individual person, but many people balk as soon as the same standard is applied to an organisation. The war on drugs and mass incarceration of weed smokers is fine. Regulating a woman's body by banning abortion is fine. Regulating against a woman to protect the rights of a rapist is fine. Regulating sexuality is fine. But regulate ISPs, or Hollywood, or financial institutions, or Walmart or Amazon, or whatever other corporation? Oh hell no, that's a cardinal sin. You can't get in the way of money. I think that running a business should be a privilege, one that can be properly revoked when the business fails to serve the society it depends on.

manigandham 7y ago

Governments are fictive structures created, in part, so that they can enforce moral and ethical concerns against profit-making. That's where attention should be focused instead.