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Amazon defeated Rekognition shareholder revolt by a large margin
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y agoMost surprising thing in that was that the request to generate a report on the management of food waste reached a support level of 25%! I am really surprised that this is an important issue to Amazon shareholders.
- tclancy 7y agoWe are going to metric each other to death: I'll make you worry about food spoilage in the fridge at your work and you harp on water usage in the restrooms at my work until we are all enslaved by our own 401ks tied up in index funds!
- ve55 7y agoThe solution to this is not "regulate Amazon's facial recognition". It's just "regulate all facial recognition". While that's obviously challenging, targeting Amazon specifically doesn't actually improve the status quo in a lasting way.
- aaronbrethorst 7y agoIt's likely coming. https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/22/18635848/facial-recognition-tech-regulation-house-oversight-committee-republicans-democrats https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/22/18635848/facial-recogniti...
- sambull 7y agoAgreed, where do a I sign up. With the proliferation of license plate readers and other surveillance cameras in the last 5 years it's a matter of time before this creeps out to full algorithmic 'risk scores' for when you have encounters with enforcement. For some that may mean just getting shot [0], while they think someone risky might be in the vehicle, based on association. Or other harassment. [0] https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-no-charges-lapd-shooting-newspaper-delivery-women-dorner-manhunt-20160127-story.html https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-no-charges-lapd...
- tastygreenapple 7y agoIt sounds preferable to calculate risk scores deterministically rather than rely on Law Enforcement's discretion. Risk scores are computed for every traffic stop, wouldn't you want to take that process away from the office and give it to a computer?
- freeone3000 7y agoNo! Because, for some reason that has no basis in reality, people think computers are less biased than humans! They trust computers OVER PEOPLE, even if the computer is racist, or just wrong. Humans are accountable, changeable, cross-examinable. Computer systems are not. Please do not give enforcement systems over to computer systems, and have the bias calcified forever.
- freeopinion 7y agoI'm not arguing for or against computers vs humans, but your argument is puzzling to me. Computer systems are accountable, changeable, and cross-examinable. Arguably more so than humans. I do stipulate that computer systems can be racist or otherwise biased and can be "just wrong".
- ddxxdd 7y agoI fully agree; a neural network can be continuously trained. Software can continuously perform A/B testing and change its mind when its current procedure proves inefficient. The human mind tends to be set in its ways.
- freeone3000 7y agoBut it doesn't. Current systems do not do this, but people trust in them because machine learning is "more accurate", somehow. It's a huge problem managing expectations around a black box. Online training does not happen in any form at scale. These "fair" systems are, by and large, nonsense.
- floe 7y agoAgreed, but I think actions that only target Amazon can still help us get closer to that solution - by raising awareness of the issue.
- mtgx 7y agoYes, unfortunately, in the US the corporations own the government, so such policies, even if very popular, have very little chance of passing if the large companies behind such tech oppose those policies. This is why you have to go after the companies first and boycott them/cause PR nightmares for them.
- 3327 7y agoWe are moving towards minority report. These powerful tools are great, but in the hands of a Tyrant when that day comes (not if), it will come, it will be very difficult to unwind the grip of power with technology so advanced. The rebels will still find a way, but it will take years and many lives.
- crowtoe76 7y agoThe day is upon us. I'm sure there are many HN readers here now who are actively working to build the open prison system that is America, because of money, power, NDAs, National Security, lies. Basically the only place I find "dissent" is in internet forums, which amounts to some high-falutin hot air being flung around, the same thing we've been doing for years. Most anyone who cares is too scared to do anything, because the government readily destroys any problematic individual or group. As an individual, you are powerless. If you group, they will know. That it's now fashionable to install always-on microphones in people's homes, that we carry always-on cell phones broadcasting our information wherever we go, that the streets and skies are covered in cameras and sensors watching our every movement, yet we mill about with casual disregard for the implications, gives me little hope that, as citizens, we could ever collectively wake up or rise up. We are taught fear and hate and division. If we should ever forget, they'll remind us by writing messages with our blood. We point fingers at a bumbling scapegoat sitting in a temporary seat, while the real power lies off-camera.
- nwsm 7y agoEven a proposal "requesting a report on the impact of government use of certain technologies" lost 94k to 239k. Source in the same SEC filing mentioned in the article.
- challenger22 7y agoReasonable to me. Forcing some peon to write a report costs $.
- multibit 7y ago> The tech firm had said it was aware of civil rights concerns but had not received any reports of law enforcement clients misusing its Rekognition tool. This really depends on their definition of "misuse", which can be molded to suit their financial goals. Eventually reports of questionable law enforcement use will come in, and I have serious doubts that any large corporation would willingly cut off sales to a large set of existing government clients. This area desperately needs regulation.
- village-idiot 7y agoThey’ll just raise the bar to “well, no enforcement personnel went to jail, so we’re in the clear”
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago> I have serious doubts that any large corporation would willingly cut off sales to a large set of existing government clients. Barret stopped selling to CA government agencies after CA banned "regular peasants" from owning Barret's flagship product. That said, this situation is very different politically. People aren't going to stop using AWS en-masse because Amazon is helping enable the police state.
- Blackthorn 7y agoSame for New York now that we can't own them there either. Nice to have someone stand up for us at least, as opposed to all those that will still happily sell to law enforcement.
- peteradio 7y agoThe anonymous report box was found to be emptying into an incinerator, the issue has been corrected we are unaware that any reports were incinerated.
- mruts 7y agoI’m not sure how I feel about facial recognition. On one hand, I think code is just information and no piece of information should be illegal to possess. I also think we need to protect our rights with math and code not laws. But I’m not sure that would help against the very real and dystopian future that seems just around the corner. Facial recognition is probably the key cornerstone of said future and I’m not sure what we should do. Banning facial recognition also feels wrong to me, and violates the aforementioned axiom about information. Moreover, many cities are already blanketed in thousands of government cameras and facial recognition doesn’t seem like anymore an abridgement of our privacy than the cameras alone. Maybe we should just ban police cameras on streets? But the ship has probably already sailed on that one.
- eloff 7y agoHuman rights are not a mathematical or computer science concept, they are in fact a law concept. I know it's tempting for computer people on hackernews to want to solve problems with the tools of their own domain - but law is exactly the place where rights need to be protected, not code.
- JohnFen 7y agoBut it would help a lot of developers didn't work on technologies that clearly lead to a dystopian future, or for companies that are working toward the direction. I know that would never happen, but it would sure help.
- mruts 7y agoIf you don't have axiomatic beliefs, then where do your beliefs come from? Some abstract feeling? Whatever "feels" right? Clearly (to me at least), you need a system of axiomatic beliefs. If your axioms don't form a coherent system (i.e you can prove a contradiction), then you really don't believe anything at all. It's surprising to me that very few people think about morality this way. Everyone has a different view of morality of course, but you should at the very least try and distill it into an elegant system that is a) consistent and b) has sufficient predictive power to be useful. An example of a system that fulfills a) but not b) would be something like: There's no morality anyone can do anything they want. That's only one axiom and pretty elegant as systems go. The problem with it is that it's so trivial that it can't assign value judgements to anything at all, rendering it all but worthless. The system that I tend to follow has three primary axioms: 1) There are two kinds of things in the world: people and property. 2) People own property and they can do anything they want with said property as long as it doesn't violate the rights of others to do the same. Moreover, the person himself is property and thus is solely owned by himself. 3) By violating the axioms above, one forfeits his right to the above axioms. While not perfect, this system is internally consistent and also has sufficient predictive power: If someone punches me, he's violating my property of myself (2), and therefore can be sent to jail (3). If I break into someones house, same thing: violates (2) and therefore can be punished by (3). There are some things that the system can't assign judgements to, however: What are children? What rights do they have? What about abortion? What exactly violates someone else's property? Does air pollution can't as violation? What about the environment? What rights to animals have (the system says they're property, but some people might have a problem with others torturing animals, for example)? Where does the government get it's legitimacy? Can the government levy taxes? etc etc etc In truth, the things it can't make judgements about are probably than the things it can. But I personally haven't found a better or more elegant system to frame the world in, so I generally stick with it while being aware of it's limitations.
- scarejunba 7y agoSuperRecognizers plus facial recognition bans makes me think of Dune-style people as computers. Instead of a computer running the program we just have the guys in Room 901 do it.
- crankylinuxuser 7y agoYoure looking for the word "Mentat" (Dune human 'computers'. They were used after the AI war that turned computers against humans. When the humans won, they banned all forms of machine learning.) And that's how facial recog is legal. Its legal to put people in public and write down who they are. So its legal for a computer to do it. And I even wrote my own for a 2015 maker convention and deployed this. No GPU, no internet. CPU bound and worked very well: https://hackaday.com/2015/03/04/face-recognition-for-your-next-con/ https://hackaday.com/2015/03/04/face-recognition-for-your-ne... Aside lawmakers restricting law-upholders (hah), we've got a snowballs chance in hell in solving this. FaceRec is here to stay. :(
- mtgx 7y agoSo then they'll only assign them to the Really Important Cases - not millions of people at once.
- oldjokes 7y agoIs this really a valid test anymore with 50%+ of outstanding shares being held by index funds? Who actually controls the companies when shareholders don't really exist like they used to? What does shareholder primacy even mean anymore?
- maest 7y agoYou're right - index funds voting really hurts the process, largely because index funds don't ask their investor base how they should vote. Instead, they default to following corporate recommendations and voting down any shareholder proposals. So really, all those shares are voted according to what corporate management wants, not to what the original retail investors want. It's distorting the power balance in a really perverse way. It's hard to say at the moment, because the data isn't available yet, but I bet index funds voted >95% against this proposal - that's the historical average. We'll know for sure what the stats are once the fund providers disclose their voting, which happens yearly.
- devit 7y agoWhy do they do that instead of abstaining? It seems like their duty to the index fund owners is to vote like other shareholders (which is most easily achieved by abstaining) and not like management.
- froindt 7y agoHow does abstaining count towards having quorum? Does it count equal to other votes?
- maest 7y agoThey legally have to vote their shares. Individuals are exempt for that. It's interesting to think about index fund providers incentives: (1) track the market (2) do it very cheaply Voting shares is a cost center with no benefit towards the business. Fund providers don't want to spend time and money to do research on individual proposals, that would be too expensive. So they do the cheapest thing possible and default to following corporate recs. (That's actually a simplification, what happens in practice is, they use third party proxy voting advisors, but the end results is mostly the same, except that they vote down really egregious proposals, e.g. crazy CEO pay in the context of a free falling share price)
- Causality1 7y agoConsidering the hellscape that is working in an Amazon warehouse I'm amazed anyone thought it was going to pass. A company that makes its employees piss in bottles doesn't give a damn about the slow erosion of American privacy rights.
- sigkrieger 7y agoNo offense here, just giving my thoughts. Americans haven’t had privacy rights in a while and while the technology is new and fancy, American citizens haven’t been as free as they think they are in a while considering PRISM, border control checks that include your fingerprints and have the right to demand access your personal devices...
- guuhv 7y agoSo like in European countries, only that in European countries you have to give up your fingerprints when you turn 14, and it's mandatory.
- skykooler 7y agoI'm surprised to see content from such a high-profile site as the BBC with typographical errors: "The Bloomberg news agency and CNBC are bother reporting that"
- acct1771 7y agoWait until you start reading multiple sources for each and every story, and start to see the (lack of) consistency of larger media fact-checking.
- Abishek_Muthian 7y agoI had used Amazon Rekognition in our dating product extensively for moderation till Aug 2018, it was in-accurate for people with darker skin often with wrong gender and age identification. I had contacted them regarding these issues and was told that they are working with new models. I haven't tested it recently to see if the situation had improved. I didn't use the Face Recognition API for privacy reasons, I assume that would be the most used API by law-enforcement; but if it is anything like my experience then I would be very worried for some innocent to be wrongly tagged by the system.
- JohnFen 7y ago> I would be very worried for some innocent to be wrongly tagged by the system. You should. Law enforcement in particular doesn't think that false positives are that big of a deal (after all, they argue, all that would cause is a cop to talk to the wrong person). They prefer to accept more false positives if that means fewer false negatives. I disagree entirely with that.
- k__ 7y agoMaybe masks become a thing again? Venecian style.