19 ms·

A one-year moratorium on police use of Rekognition

603 points by robbiet480 6y ago

robbiet480 6y ago
Better than nothing I guess but still not a perfect solution.
- iris18 6y ago
  > Better than nothing I guess but still not a perfect solution.
badRNG 6y ago
What is the difference between Rekognition and Clearview AI? I'm assuming that Rekognition is just using government photo databases rather than social media? It seems that Amazon has a far better reputation on HN compared to Clearview AI. Is that deserved?
- Grimm1 6y ago
  Rekognition is just their normal CV offering you can use for anything from what I know.
allears 6y ago
Translation: We already made a bundle on this, but we're seeing too much pushback, so we're getting out before the downside eats into our profits.
- jjeaff 6y ago
  Or getting out while black lives matter and will get back in when everyone has forgotten again.
- solidasparagus 6y ago
  It's reactions like this that make companies not want to even try. "People are going to bitch whether we sell to the police or not so there is no upside to stopping". Why not have a little positivity that AWS is finally restricting access to their technology beyond what is legally required?
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    Go all in then. Disallow the use of the technology without independent oversight. But don't do a half hearted measure because you're unwilling to commit, or you're going to grasp for some positive PR. > Why not have a little positivity that AWS is finally restricting access to their technology beyond what is legally required? Because it's not enough. "Please sir, may I have some more" is not how you address the weaponization of technology by a trillion dollar org.
    - solidasparagus 6y ago
      Why do we need to demand all or nothing? AWS is never going to allow for independent oversight - not even Google does that. Demanding this just means that AWS would never make any improvements.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - sgift 6y ago
      Independent oversight? So .. like from a government? Cause that's the definition of independent, from the people for the people. And if the next answer is "that's not how government is in reality" neither is any other 'independent' oversight. Humans are easily corruptible. We better find a solution for this problem or all that will happen is an endless line of watchers watching other watchers.
      - toomuchtodo 6y ago
        Humans are the only solution. Rational humans are never going to rely on technology alone for enforcement, governance, and/or oversight. If you have a problem with the humans currently making decisions, find better humans. Checks and balances. Don't like the Big Tech corporate surveillance state? Write better laws regulating them. Don't like the people writing laws currently? Vote and run against them. Still not heard? There are yet more avenues for recourse. The idea that technology is going to fix these problems holds no basis in reality.
- slg 6y ago
  It is a one year moratorium. They aren't even getting out for good. They are pausing it, hoping this issue will be forgotten about it a year, and then they will resume making money off it.
- noway421 6y ago
  > We already made a bundle on this Closing a profit generating business line is all more difficult than closing an unproven one. Props to folks at Amazon, this a change for the better. I'm wary about their competitors though. Looks like an opportunity for Microsoft to monopolise the face recognition software market. Can't think of any market force to solve this, and regulation would probably leave a lot of room to game the system.
woodruffw 6y ago
As we all know, every moral issue has a 1-year expiration date.
- cle 6y ago
  Every moral issue is also black-and-white and requires no practical (or ethical) implementation plan.
Terretta 6y ago
It's probably the legal and PR teams' fault, but this surely could have been worded to sound less like potential corporate doublespeak: "We’ve advocated that governments should put in place stronger regulations to govern the ethical use of facial recognition technology, and in recent days, Congress appears ready to take on this challenge. We hope this one-year moratorium might give Congress enough time to implement appropriate rules, and we stand ready to help if requested." Dead giveaway is that Legal and PR teams relentlessly edit out self-agency.
th0ma5 6y ago
What opportunities exist for use of facial recognition by protest groups and citizen watchdogs? Any products? Any success stories?
deegles 6y ago
"We’ve advocated that governments should put in place stronger regulations to govern the ethical use of facial recognition technology" Or you know... you could do it yourself. Ethics don't have to come from regulations.
- everfree 6y ago
  They're hamstrung by their shareholders. This is why it's impossible to find a public company that cares about ethics in any context other than potential blowback. Amazon can keep the sharks at bay for a year and cry for help, but if regulation is too late, they're going to be eaten for lunch by shareholders and they know this.
  - gbear605 6y ago
    Despite what many people believe, shareholders don’t actually work like that. They care about making money, but no one is going to sell Amazon because they’re not continuing a single low profit line item. No shareholder is condemning Apple for not making Rekognition, and Amazon wouldn’t be killed for dropping it.
    - everfree 6y ago
      > Despite what many people believe, shareholders don’t actually work like that. Shareholders do determine whether a company does something ethical or something profitable. And by the numbers, they choose profit unless it would cause public outcry (and sometimes despite that). Last year, only 2% of Amazon stockholders voted to ban the sale of facial recognition software to the government, and only 28% even wanted a report on possible threats to civil liberties. https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazon-shareholders-proposals-climate-facial-recognition-won-30-percent-vote/ https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazon-shareholders-proposals-... > They care about making money, but no one is going to sell Amazon because they’re not continuing a single low profit line item. This is true, but I don't understand how it's relevant. > No shareholder is condemning Apple for not making Rekognition Nobody is condemning Apple because it would be more of a risk for them to develop it, since they would have to do a larger pivot from their current core product. Amazon in contrast is already in the business of selling cloud services, so it's a product with a straightforward path to profitability. > and Amazon wouldn’t be killed for dropping it. My point is that Amazon won't drop it in the long term. The 1-year moratorium is to cover their butt until they can figure out how to sell the technology to the police without becoming the scapegoat for the recently news-blasted civil liberties movements. If I were in their position I'd do the same.
chishaku 6y ago
The ACLU is doing a lot of great work to hold government accountable when it comes to facial recognition tech. https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-challenges-fbi-face-recognition-secrecy https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-challenges-fbi-face... https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-challenges-dhs-face-recognition-secrecy https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-challenges-dhs-face... Would be great to see Amazon's support. The ACLU ran an experiment with Rekognition and these are their findings: "Using Rekognition, we built a face database and search tool using 25,000 publicly available arrest photos. Then we searched that database against public photos of every current member of the House and Senate. We used the default match settings that Amazon sets for Rekognition. ... the software incorrectly matched 28 members of Congress, identifying them as other people who have been arrested for a crime. ... Academic research [0] has also already shown that face recognition is less accurate for darker-skinned faces and women. Our results validate this concern: Nearly 40 percent of Rekognition’s false matches in our test were of people of color, even though they make up only 20 percent of Congress." https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-technology/surveillance-technologies/amazons-face-recognition-falsely-matched-28 https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-technology/surveillance-te... [0]: http://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a/buolamwini18a.pdf http://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a/buolamwini18a...
- chishaku 6y ago
  If so inclined, support the ACLU: https://action.aclu.org/give/donate-to-aclu https://action.aclu.org/give/donate-to-aclu
  - ve55 6y ago
    The ACLU used to be on the top of my list of my personal favorite charities, but I've found they've become significantly more reactionary in the last few years, prioritizing emotionally outraging causes over utilitarian causes, so don't donate to them any longer. With that said, some of their work is still great, and I'm thankful for it.
    - xrd 6y ago
ikeyany 6y ago
Why do they say Congress is ready to take on this challenge? Congress hasn't passed a thing yet.
- thephyber 6y ago
  "ready to take on" sounds more like the beginning of the funnel. "hasn't passed a thing" sounds like the end of a Congressional funnel. edit: this just purely a retort about the specific complaint of the parent. I don't deny that Congress hasn't actually done much useful to forward the policy changes I would deem desirable here.
  - deleted 6y ago
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ErikAugust 6y ago
Has anyone ever here actually demoed Rekognition? I did two years ago, maybe. From that, I felt like it doesn't work and shouldn't be used in production, never mind police production.
- coderintherye 6y ago
  Yes, we ran it against our borrower image set and the results were atrocious, those this was now a couple years past. Never tried again after that.
  - ciarannolan 6y ago
    > we ran it against our borrower image set Why?
    - coderintherye 6y ago
      It was experimental for trying to help identify repeat borrowers, that way we could link to their previous loan. Separately, we experimented with various vendors "face detection" (not whose face, but rather just "is there a face") just to see how many faces appeared in a photo, because for group loans you needed at least 75% of the borrowers present in the photo. If this didn't happen then it meant the loan didn't get posted and someone would have to go back and get all the borrowers together again for another photo which is laborious and inefficient. Much better if you could give the feedback upfront. Granted, as I noted in another comment, at the time all the major vendor's tools had abysmal accuracy and we abandoned the effort.
      - ciarannolan 6y ago
        Interesting, thanks!
rhema 6y ago
You don't really need facial recognition once you have enough data from contact tracing.
dfsegoat 6y ago
AWS is running a nice screen here. I recall reading about Rekognition being documented as having accuracy problems when individuals in question had darker skin [2,3]. >> "The latest cause for concern is a study published this week by the MIT Media Lab, which found that Rekognition performed worse when identifying an individual’s gender if they were female or darker-skinned." [1] I can't really comment. Just recalled this in the memory banks and thought they might address this directly [they may have]. 1 - https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/25/18197137/amazon-rekognition-facial-recognition-bias-race-gender https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/25/18197137/amazon-rekogniti... 2- https://www.media.mit.edu/articles/amazon-is-pushing-facial-technology-that-a-study-says-could-be-biased/ https://www.media.mit.edu/articles/amazon-is-pushing-facial-... 3- https://www.marketwatch.com/story/ai-experts-take-on-amazon-after-researchers-findings-of-racial-bias-in-facial-recognition-2019-04-03 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/ai-experts-take-on-amazon-...
- hpoe 6y ago
  There was a discussion on HN last week that I can't find where I was enlightened to find out that one of the big problems around doing facial recognition is proper lighting and without it you can't really build good models and be able to really use the image. As an extension of this photographs of individuals with darker skin required more lighting than photographs of individuals with darker skin. I don't know all of what goes into the ML for facial recognition and I am sure there are people far smarter than me working on it (and making way more money than me to boot), but I guess my thought here is that some variation of Poe's Law applies. I know that people are quick to jump to condemn something as racist but sometimes there really are just honest mistakes. I have a hard time believing that anyone at any level of the AWS structure set out to produce a racist facial recognition, but rather it may have just been an honest over site and rather than rushing to crucify them we should instead look at it as a learning opportunity to help develop further the field of facial recognition. EDIT: I wanted to clarify that although I don't think it was done purposefully I don't think it doesn't bespeak a problem; my intention was rather to serve as a suggestion that we should sometimes temper the often strong reaction produced when labeling something racist, and focus our efforts on identifying and solving the issue rather than trying to act punitive. To forestall objections I do recognize this is an issue that does require correction, and that it does bespeak a larger societal problem that has real consequences for real people ever day, but in my experience we will get more progress by attempting to work together in a spirit of cooperation rather than a spirit of anger and vengance.
hpoe 6y ago
I see this as an extension of the Facebook <moderating/censoring> discussion, which is really a broader question of what moral obligations do corporations have beyond following the law and trying to provide the optimal product to their consumers? Also there seemed to be no substantive discussion prior this about the police using Rekognition until it became a hot button issue. What will the widespread effects be if corporations start allowing their decisions to be governed by <outrage of the mob/principled consumer pressure>? Finally I wonder how they will implement this, I mean after all I can sign up and start using any AWS service with just a credit card what's to stop police departments from simply using a corporate card and signing up for a different account? Also does this apply to just local PDs or does it extend to the FBI, NSA, CIA, or other 3 letter government agencies? Disclaimer: The purpose of these comments are intended to be observational not advocational.
- moron4hire 6y ago
  Well, considering that corporations are people now, I would say they have all the same moral obligation as people.
- albntomat0 6y ago
  Similarly, I would argue that we don't want to be reliant on corporations to determine what the lines are themselves, as they should not be de-facto moral authorities. Determining what is acceptable needs to come from our society as a whole, through reasoned debate and proper functioning of government.
  - tdfx 6y ago
    > through reasoned debate and proper functioning of government. Yikes. Is there a fallback option?
    - albntomat0 6y ago
      The other options seem to be the benevolence of Bezos or Twitter condemnation, so not really.
1-6 6y ago
So... cloud service providers now have the right to determine what services they want to allow and what they want to shut off? HAL 9000: "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that"
- fwip 6y ago
  What do you mean "now?" They've always had the power to do that.
  - 1-6 6y ago
    Time for some cloud neutrality.
- ricardobeat 6y ago
  No, they have always had that right, as does any other private business. You can always refuse service if it is not on discriminatory grounds (gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion or disability).
  - heavyset_go 6y ago
    Sexuality is only a protected class in some states, and sexuality isn't a protected class at the federal level. Unfortunately, there are plenty of places in the US where one can experience legal discrimination based on their sexuality in housing, employment, education, health insurance and healthcare. There are several maps here[1] that show where those places are. Many of them don't classify violence motivated by the victims' sexuality as hate crimes, either. There's also a table here[1] that summarizes the discrepancies in the US. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_United_States#Anti-discrimination_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_United_Stat... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_United_States#Summary_table_of_LGBT_rights_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_United_Stat...
_bxg1 6y ago
"We are waiting until the current news cycle has blown over"
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boomboomsubban 6y ago
Isn't it open to anyone with an AWS account? So how are they even trying to implement this and what would be stopping any third party from using this to submit reports to law enforcement?
- ajhurliman 6y ago
  If you're spending enough on AWS, the interaction isn't completely faceless. You'll usually get an account manager assigned to you and they might suspect something is up if they have a lot of mug shots coming through. If it's a third party with a new name unrelated to law enforcement, that complicates the chain of custody and probably wouldn't be worth it to any agencies to set it up to skirt a 1 year moratorium, even if someone at the agency thought it was a good idea to try and flout Amazon's policies (they definitely won't, agencies just don't move that quickly). That being said, there's no way to guarantee that it won't be used, but it would be difficult for LAPD to be running at scale with nobody raising any flags.
  - joncrane 6y ago
    >they might suspect something is up if they have a lot of mug shots coming through Can AWS see the images used with Rekognition?
- deleted 6y ago
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noway421 6y ago
Amazing news!
jonplackett 6y ago
Can someone explain what has kicked off this retraction from face recognition from IBM and now Amazon? I mean it’s always had dubious uses. What has made this happen right now?
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Opinion of police departments is falling so this could quite plausibly be the next big battleground.
- 1-6 6y ago
  It's perfectly acceptable to cash in on using face recognition for profit but dubious when used to lock people behind bars sarcasm
- pvaldes 6y ago
  Probably that everybody is using masks so the system lacks of essential parts and does not work anymore until is rebuilt and fixed. There could be also a risk of database being tainted by masks with something print over it, like lips, wrinkles in the mask, or even the face of somebody. And of course you can not require citizens to show the face and to cover the face at the same time, so to try to publicly denounce people with the face covered as delinquent wannabe is not possible at this moment. But I'm just speculating.
  - 1-6 6y ago
    You have a point there. I can see people continuing to wear masks even after the order is lifted across cities.
    - pvaldes 6y ago
      Taking in mind the US healthcare system, americans should have a bigger incentive to wear masks than south koreans, if only for protecting themselves and their families from hospital bills.
MattGaiser 6y ago
Then won’t departments just go to the highly secretive companies like Palantir?
- notriddle 6y ago
  This is why the blog post includes a note on how they want it to be illegal. It'll still happen, but in order to keep it secret, they'll need to employ it less often.
superzamp 6y ago
I remember at the AWS summit maybe two years ago, they were casually showcasing how some police depts were using Rekognition. Oh my, what a culture shock. How can you basically foreshadow 1984 on stage without blinking an eye?
lgleason 6y ago
Pretty soon you will see telephone companies refusing service, car companies refusing to service cars etc. based on a moral judgement of the customer. Then whey will finish the process of getting anybody accused of wrong-think purged from employment etc.. Hmmmm, where is history was that tried before? What could possibly go wrong?
- amaccuish 6y ago
  You mean like baking cakes? Conservatives can't have it both ways.
  - sadsadsadsad 6y ago
    Sorry friend, this has nothing to do with being politcaly conservative. Those are religious nuts. There is a new generation of conservatives that are tech-savvy and not bible thumpers. Stop being ignorant.
  - doublesCs 6y ago
    Yeah, they wanna have their cake and eat it too.
- boustrophedon 6y ago
  This is already the case today under capitalism. A business may refuse service to anyone provided they are not a member of a protected class (the Civil Rights act and the ADA define a few).
  - deleted 6y ago
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  - DaniloDias 6y ago
    It’s more disturbingly the case under whatever economy China runs. https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/04/03/life-inside-chinas-social-credit-laboratory/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/04/03/life-inside-chinas-soci...
throwawaysea 6y ago
Personally I am pro facial recognition being used, and believe it is very necessary if police budgets are cut and patrols are reduced. We need a way to hold criminals accountable and bring them to justice. Cameras with facial recognition let us identify their location and send police officers to apprehend criminals, instead of relying on the random chance that an officer spots someone while driving around and matches their face with a list of perps they've seen before. I haven't heard of any police departments using facial recognition as a definite match. All of them use human confirmation. So basically, the number of false positives does not matter - it's more that facial recognition reduces the total amount of data to a more manageable number that are scrutinized by human eyes. I don't know why people would be against this. Steps like this moratorium just seem like posturing or an overreaction. The recent policing incidents that have been in the news do not involve facial recognition and there is no reason to tie them in.
deleted 6y ago
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golemiprague 6y ago
So Amazon can do face recognition but police can't? Bezos doesn't need police work, he can hide behind his walled house with a private security which he will no doubt will sell his recognition software to if required, but the rest of you plebs, we will throw you to the hands of criminals and predators because of some anecdotal incident with a black guy. Why not stop selling equipment also to hospitals? I have heard they also make mistakes, even sometimes negligent doctors killing people, only Amazon are pure and don't do any evil.
m0zg 6y ago
Anyone with a modicum of skill and a few GPUs can do what Rekognition does using code freely available on GitHub and public datasets. This cat is _way_ out of the bag.
1-6 6y ago
This reminds me of an FBI agent who likes to keep his gun in his back pocket and have it bulging out, just to impress people who knew what he did. I can't imagine how a few bad apples within the police force would sit behind a computer playing with Facebook profile pictures and matching them against Rekognition.
kingo55 6y ago
It's always a slippery slope when companies morally compel themselves to block use cases from their service. I welcome this move from Amazon, but I hope it doesn't foreshadow more moral bans in future e.g. spurred on by the next angry mobs who will try to limit free speech in society.
- genoapol 6y ago
  I hope unpolished technologies that put already marginalized groups in more potentially deadly and unecessary interactions with the police get binned. If anyone has a hard time empathizing here, imagine your kids in the false positive person's shoes.
1-6 6y ago
Ahh, one more year until I finish creating my fake digital self and delete fingerprints.
ipsocannibal 6y ago
Step 2: End Ring contracts with police departments. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/08/five-concerns-about-amazon-rings-deals-police https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/08/five-concerns-about-am...
siruncledrew 6y ago
What prevents a private company (ex. Clearview) from using Rekognition to accomplish the same thing for the police as a government-contractor? Without any kinds of laws, wouldn’t things like this incentivize new niches to popup to milk money from the government?
a3n 6y ago
"We are implementing a one-year moratorium on police use of Rekognition" ... until this whole thing blows over. /s They're leaving money on the table, but it will still be there in a year, and they'll only miss whatever Amazon's functional analog of "compound interest" is.
- deft 6y ago
  Yeah holy... So in a year from now the cops can resume evil behaviour?
  - txcwpalpha 6y ago
    My guess is that they don't view facial recognition as an inherently bad thing, but they do view it as bad when wielded by bad actors (such as the current police environment). The optimistic view is that this moratorium is to see if police departments truly do reform themselves over the next year to the point where they can be trusted to use facial recognition again. I hope a reevaluation takes place then.
  - Natsu 6y ago
    Presumably the expect the election to change things.
1-6 6y ago
I can see how this decision would stop immediate problems following recent events. However, in the long-term, wouldn't machine learning help regulate and fix human bias?
ConradKilroy 6y ago
Also check out 'Data for Black Lives' organization, they had been working closely with ACLU on this matter.
demarq 6y ago
This is an important step
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  No, this is more likely simple opportunism. They want to supply the police of course, just not yet when public opinion is against police.
detaro 6y ago
Wonder if that extends to the Bodycam analysis services running under a different brand, which allows searching for people based on various criteria and matching against a watch list? https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SS88XH_2.0.0/iva/ref_analyticpbwc.html https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SS88XH_2.0.0/iva...
- bigiain 6y ago
  Wasn't yesterday's facial recognition news all about how IBM weren't making enough money ... oh, hang on <check notes> decided to take a moral stance against law enforcement use of facial recognition? (while cynically trying to link an organisation who built themselves providing IT services to nazi genocide, with the ethical side of the current police brutality protests... :sigh: )
  - deleted 6y ago
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  - kitd 6y ago
    built themselves providing IT services to nazi genocide Seriously?
    - the_pwner224 6y ago
      They did make many sales to the Nazis, of computers as well as whatever software stuff that went along with that, including stuff designed to support their Jew/+ extermination operations. I recall it from an article (on HN?) some time ago about U.S. companies that helped the Nazis. But there's tons of stuff about it on Google.
      - genoapol 6y ago
        Correct, every concentration camp had an on-site IBM office that assisted in prisoner data processing. These offices continued to operate even after the war started until the end of WW2.
      - 6y ago
presty 6y ago
Does anyone know how exactly is the Police integration done with Rekognition? I mean, they must have it integrated into their IT systems, right? Who did that integration? AWS itself? Or some consulting companies? Or the PD's Tech Department?
keithyjohnson 6y ago
Keep it up
737min 6y ago
Does the same apply to users from mainland China or companies like Zoom? If not, why not?
- eunos 6y ago
  China got their fair amount of Computer Vision companies anyway. Sensetime, yitu, megvii, cloudwalk and so on. I even heard one using Gait analysis but I forgot the name.
smashah 6y ago
What about in the UK? At the BLM protest, the police rub around with their camcorder on the stick to justify kettling people for 4+ hours and squash people's will to protest. They require you to show your face or arrest you. All because they want to use Rekognition to cross reference everyone's face.
- easytiger 6y ago
  good
  - scubbo 6y ago
    Care to elaborate?
    - smashah 6y ago
      What did they say?
      - Thorrez 6y ago
        If you want to see dead posts, go into your settings and set showdead to Yes.
        smashah 6y ago
        Ah thanks very helpful
    - easytiger 6y ago
      That it is good that the police are holding people attacking the police to account? Why does that need an explanation?
      - scubbo 6y ago
        I reject the implication that police will only use facial recognition on people who are attacking the police, or that the repercussions for being present at (not necessarily instigating, or using violence during) a violent altercation will be proportional.
samstave 6y ago
So i have a schitzo view on subjects like this; 1. I am against places that say “photography prohibited - private property” — if i can see it, i should be free to photograph it. 2. I am against ANY use of facial recognition ever anywhere. I own my face and i am allowed to keep it private if i choose to. So,yes completely schitzo and i realize this. But its not an evenly distributed spectrum of a problem. Its a weighted web of nuanced issues. I just dont know how to balance it. Id love to discuss this if anyone is open.
- 8note 6y ago
  If you're showing your face everywhere, you aren't keeping it private. You are in control of whether your face can be seen
samstave 6y ago
Super funny thought: The reason why super heroes wear masks and capes is to avoid facial and gait recognition cameras!
deeblering4 6y ago
This reads to me as simply “oops bad timing this year, let’s try again next year”. Yeah, sure, whatever Evilcorp.
- elmo2you 6y ago
  I believe that you that's a fairly accurate assessment. More so, the whole thing is kind of a red herring. Facial recognition technology is, after all is said and done, probably illegal in any country that implements the protection of basic human rights into its national laws. If countries (including the USA) do not, it says enough of its own about them. Nor has the idea of (national) exceptionalism ever produced a more equal and/and fair society. AFAIK, not a single in all history. For those who like to argue that such technology could be legalized when people (collectively) agree with its use through political consensus (aka "the people", through politicians, voted for it), there are good reasons for why basic human rights are defined as "inalienable". Regretfully, many countries have nonetheless ignored that fact, whenever it suited the personal interests of politicians and those that stand behind them in the shadows. “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power” ― Benito Mussolini
jokit 6y ago
This makes more sense. The idea that the communists would want to eliminate their jackboots is laughable. They just want to sabotage their opposition. The last thing they want is independent people. A temporary hold on resources they can't yet abuse. This makes a lot more sense. It's not the abuse of power that is the problem, but the power to abuse.
ardy42 6y ago
> We’ve advocated that governments should put in place stronger regulations to govern the ethical use of facial recognition technology, and in recent days, Congress appears ready to take on this challenge. We hope this one-year moratorium might give Congress enough time to implement appropriate rules, and we stand ready to help if requested. That's a little weak. If they were serious, the moratorium would extend indefinitely, or until such rules were in place. One year might just be long enough for the fervor to die down, so they don't take such a PR hit when they resume sales.
samstave 6y ago
“Police use” == contractors providing subsequent services to said police and bilking tax payer money for said service, with likely companies founded by public servants’ significant others to do said billing (remember this actually happened in 2009 by wives of bankers setting up companies to get bailout funds)
coronadisaster 6y ago
Are they still sharing Ring doorbell videos with police?
trynewideas 6y ago
https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/10/amazon-rekognition-moratorium/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/10/amazon-rekognition-morator... > Amazon is known to have pitched its facial recognition technology, Rekognition, to federal agencies, like Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Last year, Amazon’s cloud chief Andy Jassy said in an interview the company would provide Rekognition to “any” government department. > Amazon spokesperson Kristin Brown declined to comment further or say if the moratorium applies to federal law enforcement.
sneak 6y ago
Is this a moratorium on sales, or are they shutting off the service of cops using this? Will this apply to feds and US military, as well?
lemmox 6y ago
I wonder if this means that existing customers/products had to stop using the service? If so this might be the first time I recall seeing a cloud vendor flex like this. CTOs of city and law enforcement orgs are probably seriously questioning the vulnerability of relying on cloud SaaS.
blickentwapft 6y ago
The cynic might say “because in a year this will all have blown over and we can get back to selling”.
mmanfrin 6y ago
AKA 'We're going to sell it to police but only after people stop looking'
jariel 6y ago
There's a lot of talk about the technology - but this aside, why are police even using this? We don't need this kind of hyper surveillance for common crime, people with warrants, it's just too much of an intrusion. I can see this being used in certain places for 'high value individuals' such as those marked by the FBI (major crimes, multiple murders) or literally 'terrorists' - but for regular crime, I think it's way too much. We can't be under constant surveillance by the police computers that's just no way to live.
raxxorrax 6y ago
I call this profiteering on dilemma. Disgusting in my opinion. Just my opinion.
talkingtab 6y ago
Not Enough. Period. Yet another PR move to placate rather than address the problem.
deleted 6y ago
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downerending 6y ago
Arguing in the other direction, it turned out to be very important that Floyd killing was captured on video and the killer identified. Since that happened, there have been dozens (at least) of murders and vicious, life-changing assaults, most captured on video. I'd be very happy to see every one of the bad guys identified, and this seems like it would be effective toward that end.

603 points by robbiet480 6y ago

robbiet480 6y ago

Better than nothing I guess but still not a perfect solution.

iris18 6y ago
> Better than nothing I guess but still not a perfect solution.

badRNG 6y ago

What is the difference between Rekognition and Clearview AI? I'm assuming that Rekognition is just using government photo databases rather than social media? It seems that Amazon has a far better reputation on HN compared to Clearview AI. Is that deserved?

Grimm1 6y ago
Rekognition is just their normal CV offering you can use for anything from what I know.

allears 6y ago

Translation: We already made a bundle on this, but we're seeing too much pushback, so we're getting out before the downside eats into our profits.

jjeaff 6y ago
Or getting out while black lives matter and will get back in when everyone has forgotten again.
solidasparagus 6y ago
It's reactions like this that make companies not want to even try. "People are going to bitch whether we sell to the police or not so there is no upside to stopping". Why not have a little positivity that AWS is finally restricting access to their technology beyond what is legally required?
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  Go all in then. Disallow the use of the technology without independent oversight. But don't do a half hearted measure because you're unwilling to commit, or you're going to grasp for some positive PR. > Why not have a little positivity that AWS is finally restricting access to their technology beyond what is legally required? Because it's not enough. "Please sir, may I have some more" is not how you address the weaponization of technology by a trillion dollar org.
  - solidasparagus 6y ago
    Why do we need to demand all or nothing? AWS is never going to allow for independent oversight - not even Google does that. Demanding this just means that AWS would never make any improvements.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - sgift 6y ago
    Independent oversight? So .. like from a government? Cause that's the definition of independent, from the people for the people. And if the next answer is "that's not how government is in reality" neither is any other 'independent' oversight. Humans are easily corruptible. We better find a solution for this problem or all that will happen is an endless line of watchers watching other watchers.
    - toomuchtodo 6y ago
      Humans are the only solution. Rational humans are never going to rely on technology alone for enforcement, governance, and/or oversight. If you have a problem with the humans currently making decisions, find better humans. Checks and balances. Don't like the Big Tech corporate surveillance state? Write better laws regulating them. Don't like the people writing laws currently? Vote and run against them. Still not heard? There are yet more avenues for recourse. The idea that technology is going to fix these problems holds no basis in reality.
slg 6y ago
It is a one year moratorium. They aren't even getting out for good. They are pausing it, hoping this issue will be forgotten about it a year, and then they will resume making money off it.
noway421 6y ago
> We already made a bundle on this Closing a profit generating business line is all more difficult than closing an unproven one. Props to folks at Amazon, this a change for the better. I'm wary about their competitors though. Looks like an opportunity for Microsoft to monopolise the face recognition software market. Can't think of any market force to solve this, and regulation would probably leave a lot of room to game the system.

woodruffw 6y ago

As we all know, every moral issue has a 1-year expiration date.

cle 6y ago
Every moral issue is also black-and-white and requires no practical (or ethical) implementation plan.

Terretta 6y ago

It's probably the legal and PR teams' fault, but this surely could have been worded to sound less like potential corporate doublespeak: "We’ve advocated that governments should put in place stronger regulations to govern the ethical use of facial recognition technology, and in recent days, Congress appears ready to take on this challenge. We hope this one-year moratorium might give Congress enough time to implement appropriate rules, and we stand ready to help if requested." Dead giveaway is that Legal and PR teams relentlessly edit out self-agency.

th0ma5 6y ago

What opportunities exist for use of facial recognition by protest groups and citizen watchdogs? Any products? Any success stories?

deegles 6y ago

"We’ve advocated that governments should put in place stronger regulations to govern the ethical use of facial recognition technology" Or you know... you could do it yourself. Ethics don't have to come from regulations.

everfree 6y ago
They're hamstrung by their shareholders. This is why it's impossible to find a public company that cares about ethics in any context other than potential blowback. Amazon can keep the sharks at bay for a year and cry for help, but if regulation is too late, they're going to be eaten for lunch by shareholders and they know this.
- gbear605 6y ago
  Despite what many people believe, shareholders don’t actually work like that. They care about making money, but no one is going to sell Amazon because they’re not continuing a single low profit line item. No shareholder is condemning Apple for not making Rekognition, and Amazon wouldn’t be killed for dropping it.
  - everfree 6y ago
    > Despite what many people believe, shareholders don’t actually work like that. Shareholders do determine whether a company does something ethical or something profitable. And by the numbers, they choose profit unless it would cause public outcry (and sometimes despite that). Last year, only 2% of Amazon stockholders voted to ban the sale of facial recognition software to the government, and only 28% even wanted a report on possible threats to civil liberties. https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazon-shareholders-proposals-climate-facial-recognition-won-30-percent-vote/ https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazon-shareholders-proposals-... > They care about making money, but no one is going to sell Amazon because they’re not continuing a single low profit line item. This is true, but I don't understand how it's relevant. > No shareholder is condemning Apple for not making Rekognition Nobody is condemning Apple because it would be more of a risk for them to develop it, since they would have to do a larger pivot from their current core product. Amazon in contrast is already in the business of selling cloud services, so it's a product with a straightforward path to profitability. > and Amazon wouldn’t be killed for dropping it. My point is that Amazon won't drop it in the long term. The 1-year moratorium is to cover their butt until they can figure out how to sell the technology to the police without becoming the scapegoat for the recently news-blasted civil liberties movements. If I were in their position I'd do the same.

chishaku 6y ago

The ACLU is doing a lot of great work to hold government accountable when it comes to facial recognition tech. https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-challenges-fbi-face-recognition-secrecy https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-challenges-fbi-face... https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-challenges-dhs-face-recognition-secrecy https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-challenges-dhs-face... Would be great to see Amazon's support. The ACLU ran an experiment with Rekognition and these are their findings: "Using Rekognition, we built a face database and search tool using 25,000 publicly available arrest photos. Then we searched that database against public photos of every current member of the House and Senate. We used the default match settings that Amazon sets for Rekognition. ... the software incorrectly matched 28 members of Congress, identifying them as other people who have been arrested for a crime. ... Academic research [0] has also already shown that face recognition is less accurate for darker-skinned faces and women. Our results validate this concern: Nearly 40 percent of Rekognition’s false matches in our test were of people of color, even though they make up only 20 percent of Congress." https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-technology/surveillance-technologies/amazons-face-recognition-falsely-matched-28 https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-technology/surveillance-te... [0]: http://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a/buolamwini18a.pdf http://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a/buolamwini18a...

chishaku 6y ago
If so inclined, support the ACLU: https://action.aclu.org/give/donate-to-aclu https://action.aclu.org/give/donate-to-aclu
- ve55 6y ago
  The ACLU used to be on the top of my list of my personal favorite charities, but I've found they've become significantly more reactionary in the last few years, prioritizing emotionally outraging causes over utilitarian causes, so don't donate to them any longer. With that said, some of their work is still great, and I'm thankful for it.
  - xrd 6y ago

ikeyany 6y ago

Why do they say Congress is ready to take on this challenge? Congress hasn't passed a thing yet.

thephyber 6y ago
"ready to take on" sounds more like the beginning of the funnel. "hasn't passed a thing" sounds like the end of a Congressional funnel. edit: this just purely a retort about the specific complaint of the parent. I don't deny that Congress hasn't actually done much useful to forward the policy changes I would deem desirable here.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

ErikAugust 6y ago

Has anyone ever here actually demoed Rekognition? I did two years ago, maybe. From that, I felt like it doesn't work and shouldn't be used in production, never mind police production.

coderintherye 6y ago
Yes, we ran it against our borrower image set and the results were atrocious, those this was now a couple years past. Never tried again after that.
- ciarannolan 6y ago
  > we ran it against our borrower image set Why?
  - coderintherye 6y ago
    It was experimental for trying to help identify repeat borrowers, that way we could link to their previous loan. Separately, we experimented with various vendors "face detection" (not whose face, but rather just "is there a face") just to see how many faces appeared in a photo, because for group loans you needed at least 75% of the borrowers present in the photo. If this didn't happen then it meant the loan didn't get posted and someone would have to go back and get all the borrowers together again for another photo which is laborious and inefficient. Much better if you could give the feedback upfront. Granted, as I noted in another comment, at the time all the major vendor's tools had abysmal accuracy and we abandoned the effort.
    - ciarannolan 6y ago
      Interesting, thanks!

rhema 6y ago

You don't really need facial recognition once you have enough data from contact tracing.

dfsegoat 6y ago

AWS is running a nice screen here. I recall reading about Rekognition being documented as having accuracy problems when individuals in question had darker skin [2,3]. >> "The latest cause for concern is a study published this week by the MIT Media Lab, which found that Rekognition performed worse when identifying an individual’s gender if they were female or darker-skinned." [1] I can't really comment. Just recalled this in the memory banks and thought they might address this directly [they may have]. 1 - https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/25/18197137/amazon-rekognition-facial-recognition-bias-race-gender https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/25/18197137/amazon-rekogniti... 2- https://www.media.mit.edu/articles/amazon-is-pushing-facial-technology-that-a-study-says-could-be-biased/ https://www.media.mit.edu/articles/amazon-is-pushing-facial-... 3- https://www.marketwatch.com/story/ai-experts-take-on-amazon-after-researchers-findings-of-racial-bias-in-facial-recognition-2019-04-03 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/ai-experts-take-on-amazon-...

hpoe 6y ago
There was a discussion on HN last week that I can't find where I was enlightened to find out that one of the big problems around doing facial recognition is proper lighting and without it you can't really build good models and be able to really use the image. As an extension of this photographs of individuals with darker skin required more lighting than photographs of individuals with darker skin. I don't know all of what goes into the ML for facial recognition and I am sure there are people far smarter than me working on it (and making way more money than me to boot), but I guess my thought here is that some variation of Poe's Law applies. I know that people are quick to jump to condemn something as racist but sometimes there really are just honest mistakes. I have a hard time believing that anyone at any level of the AWS structure set out to produce a racist facial recognition, but rather it may have just been an honest over site and rather than rushing to crucify them we should instead look at it as a learning opportunity to help develop further the field of facial recognition. EDIT: I wanted to clarify that although I don't think it was done purposefully I don't think it doesn't bespeak a problem; my intention was rather to serve as a suggestion that we should sometimes temper the often strong reaction produced when labeling something racist, and focus our efforts on identifying and solving the issue rather than trying to act punitive. To forestall objections I do recognize this is an issue that does require correction, and that it does bespeak a larger societal problem that has real consequences for real people ever day, but in my experience we will get more progress by attempting to work together in a spirit of cooperation rather than a spirit of anger and vengance.

hpoe 6y ago

I see this as an extension of the Facebook <moderating/censoring> discussion, which is really a broader question of what moral obligations do corporations have beyond following the law and trying to provide the optimal product to their consumers? Also there seemed to be no substantive discussion prior this about the police using Rekognition until it became a hot button issue. What will the widespread effects be if corporations start allowing their decisions to be governed by <outrage of the mob/principled consumer pressure>? Finally I wonder how they will implement this, I mean after all I can sign up and start using any AWS service with just a credit card what's to stop police departments from simply using a corporate card and signing up for a different account? Also does this apply to just local PDs or does it extend to the FBI, NSA, CIA, or other 3 letter government agencies? Disclaimer: The purpose of these comments are intended to be observational not advocational.

moron4hire 6y ago
Well, considering that corporations are people now, I would say they have all the same moral obligation as people.
albntomat0 6y ago
Similarly, I would argue that we don't want to be reliant on corporations to determine what the lines are themselves, as they should not be de-facto moral authorities. Determining what is acceptable needs to come from our society as a whole, through reasoned debate and proper functioning of government.
- tdfx 6y ago
  > through reasoned debate and proper functioning of government. Yikes. Is there a fallback option?
  - albntomat0 6y ago
    The other options seem to be the benevolence of Bezos or Twitter condemnation, so not really.

1-6 6y ago

So... cloud service providers now have the right to determine what services they want to allow and what they want to shut off? HAL 9000: "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that"

fwip 6y ago
What do you mean "now?" They've always had the power to do that.
- 1-6 6y ago
  Time for some cloud neutrality.
ricardobeat 6y ago
No, they have always had that right, as does any other private business. You can always refuse service if it is not on discriminatory grounds (gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion or disability).
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  Sexuality is only a protected class in some states, and sexuality isn't a protected class at the federal level. Unfortunately, there are plenty of places in the US where one can experience legal discrimination based on their sexuality in housing, employment, education, health insurance and healthcare. There are several maps here[1] that show where those places are. Many of them don't classify violence motivated by the victims' sexuality as hate crimes, either. There's also a table here[1] that summarizes the discrepancies in the US. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_United_States#Anti-discrimination_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_United_Stat... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_United_States#Summary_table_of_LGBT_rights_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_United_Stat...

_bxg1 6y ago

"We are waiting until the current news cycle has blown over"

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

boomboomsubban 6y ago

Isn't it open to anyone with an AWS account? So how are they even trying to implement this and what would be stopping any third party from using this to submit reports to law enforcement?

ajhurliman 6y ago
If you're spending enough on AWS, the interaction isn't completely faceless. You'll usually get an account manager assigned to you and they might suspect something is up if they have a lot of mug shots coming through. If it's a third party with a new name unrelated to law enforcement, that complicates the chain of custody and probably wouldn't be worth it to any agencies to set it up to skirt a 1 year moratorium, even if someone at the agency thought it was a good idea to try and flout Amazon's policies (they definitely won't, agencies just don't move that quickly). That being said, there's no way to guarantee that it won't be used, but it would be difficult for LAPD to be running at scale with nobody raising any flags.
- joncrane 6y ago
  >they might suspect something is up if they have a lot of mug shots coming through Can AWS see the images used with Rekognition?
deleted 6y ago
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noway421 6y ago

Amazing news!

jonplackett 6y ago

Can someone explain what has kicked off this retraction from face recognition from IBM and now Amazon? I mean it’s always had dubious uses. What has made this happen right now?

MattGaiser 6y ago
Opinion of police departments is falling so this could quite plausibly be the next big battleground.
1-6 6y ago
It's perfectly acceptable to cash in on using face recognition for profit but dubious when used to lock people behind bars sarcasm
pvaldes 6y ago
Probably that everybody is using masks so the system lacks of essential parts and does not work anymore until is rebuilt and fixed. There could be also a risk of database being tainted by masks with something print over it, like lips, wrinkles in the mask, or even the face of somebody. And of course you can not require citizens to show the face and to cover the face at the same time, so to try to publicly denounce people with the face covered as delinquent wannabe is not possible at this moment. But I'm just speculating.
- 1-6 6y ago
  You have a point there. I can see people continuing to wear masks even after the order is lifted across cities.
  - pvaldes 6y ago
    Taking in mind the US healthcare system, americans should have a bigger incentive to wear masks than south koreans, if only for protecting themselves and their families from hospital bills.

MattGaiser 6y ago

Then won’t departments just go to the highly secretive companies like Palantir?

notriddle 6y ago
This is why the blog post includes a note on how they want it to be illegal. It'll still happen, but in order to keep it secret, they'll need to employ it less often.

superzamp 6y ago

I remember at the AWS summit maybe two years ago, they were casually showcasing how some police depts were using Rekognition. Oh my, what a culture shock. How can you basically foreshadow 1984 on stage without blinking an eye?

lgleason 6y ago

Pretty soon you will see telephone companies refusing service, car companies refusing to service cars etc. based on a moral judgement of the customer. Then whey will finish the process of getting anybody accused of wrong-think purged from employment etc.. Hmmmm, where is history was that tried before? What could possibly go wrong?

amaccuish 6y ago
You mean like baking cakes? Conservatives can't have it both ways.
- sadsadsadsad 6y ago
  Sorry friend, this has nothing to do with being politcaly conservative. Those are religious nuts. There is a new generation of conservatives that are tech-savvy and not bible thumpers. Stop being ignorant.
- doublesCs 6y ago
  Yeah, they wanna have their cake and eat it too.
boustrophedon 6y ago
This is already the case today under capitalism. A business may refuse service to anyone provided they are not a member of a protected class (the Civil Rights act and the ADA define a few).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- DaniloDias 6y ago
  It’s more disturbingly the case under whatever economy China runs. https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/04/03/life-inside-chinas-social-credit-laboratory/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/04/03/life-inside-chinas-soci...

throwawaysea 6y ago

Personally I am pro facial recognition being used, and believe it is very necessary if police budgets are cut and patrols are reduced. We need a way to hold criminals accountable and bring them to justice. Cameras with facial recognition let us identify their location and send police officers to apprehend criminals, instead of relying on the random chance that an officer spots someone while driving around and matches their face with a list of perps they've seen before. I haven't heard of any police departments using facial recognition as a definite match. All of them use human confirmation. So basically, the number of false positives does not matter - it's more that facial recognition reduces the total amount of data to a more manageable number that are scrutinized by human eyes. I don't know why people would be against this. Steps like this moratorium just seem like posturing or an overreaction. The recent policing incidents that have been in the news do not involve facial recognition and there is no reason to tie them in.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

golemiprague 6y ago

So Amazon can do face recognition but police can't? Bezos doesn't need police work, he can hide behind his walled house with a private security which he will no doubt will sell his recognition software to if required, but the rest of you plebs, we will throw you to the hands of criminals and predators because of some anecdotal incident with a black guy. Why not stop selling equipment also to hospitals? I have heard they also make mistakes, even sometimes negligent doctors killing people, only Amazon are pure and don't do any evil.

m0zg 6y ago

Anyone with a modicum of skill and a few GPUs can do what Rekognition does using code freely available on GitHub and public datasets. This cat is _way_ out of the bag.

1-6 6y ago

This reminds me of an FBI agent who likes to keep his gun in his back pocket and have it bulging out, just to impress people who knew what he did. I can't imagine how a few bad apples within the police force would sit behind a computer playing with Facebook profile pictures and matching them against Rekognition.

kingo55 6y ago

It's always a slippery slope when companies morally compel themselves to block use cases from their service. I welcome this move from Amazon, but I hope it doesn't foreshadow more moral bans in future e.g. spurred on by the next angry mobs who will try to limit free speech in society.

genoapol 6y ago
I hope unpolished technologies that put already marginalized groups in more potentially deadly and unecessary interactions with the police get binned. If anyone has a hard time empathizing here, imagine your kids in the false positive person's shoes.

1-6 6y ago

Ahh, one more year until I finish creating my fake digital self and delete fingerprints.

ipsocannibal 6y ago

Step 2: End Ring contracts with police departments. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/08/five-concerns-about-amazon-rings-deals-police https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/08/five-concerns-about-am...

siruncledrew 6y ago

What prevents a private company (ex. Clearview) from using Rekognition to accomplish the same thing for the police as a government-contractor? Without any kinds of laws, wouldn’t things like this incentivize new niches to popup to milk money from the government?

a3n 6y ago

"We are implementing a one-year moratorium on police use of Rekognition" ... until this whole thing blows over. /s They're leaving money on the table, but it will still be there in a year, and they'll only miss whatever Amazon's functional analog of "compound interest" is.

deft 6y ago
Yeah holy... So in a year from now the cops can resume evil behaviour?
- txcwpalpha 6y ago
  My guess is that they don't view facial recognition as an inherently bad thing, but they do view it as bad when wielded by bad actors (such as the current police environment). The optimistic view is that this moratorium is to see if police departments truly do reform themselves over the next year to the point where they can be trusted to use facial recognition again. I hope a reevaluation takes place then.
- Natsu 6y ago
  Presumably the expect the election to change things.

1-6 6y ago

I can see how this decision would stop immediate problems following recent events. However, in the long-term, wouldn't machine learning help regulate and fix human bias?

ConradKilroy 6y ago

Also check out 'Data for Black Lives' organization, they had been working closely with ACLU on this matter.

demarq 6y ago

This is an important step

raxxorrax 6y ago
No, this is more likely simple opportunism. They want to supply the police of course, just not yet when public opinion is against police.

detaro 6y ago

Wonder if that extends to the Bodycam analysis services running under a different brand, which allows searching for people based on various criteria and matching against a watch list? https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SS88XH_2.0.0/iva/ref_analyticpbwc.html https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SS88XH_2.0.0/iva...

bigiain 6y ago
Wasn't yesterday's facial recognition news all about how IBM weren't making enough money ... oh, hang on <check notes> decided to take a moral stance against law enforcement use of facial recognition? (while cynically trying to link an organisation who built themselves providing IT services to nazi genocide, with the ethical side of the current police brutality protests... :sigh: )
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- kitd 6y ago
  built themselves providing IT services to nazi genocide Seriously?
  - the_pwner224 6y ago
    They did make many sales to the Nazis, of computers as well as whatever software stuff that went along with that, including stuff designed to support their Jew/+ extermination operations. I recall it from an article (on HN?) some time ago about U.S. companies that helped the Nazis. But there's tons of stuff about it on Google.
    - genoapol 6y ago
      Correct, every concentration camp had an on-site IBM office that assisted in prisoner data processing. These offices continued to operate even after the war started until the end of WW2.
    - 6y ago

presty 6y ago

Does anyone know how exactly is the Police integration done with Rekognition? I mean, they must have it integrated into their IT systems, right? Who did that integration? AWS itself? Or some consulting companies? Or the PD's Tech Department?

keithyjohnson 6y ago

Keep it up

737min 6y ago

Does the same apply to users from mainland China or companies like Zoom? If not, why not?

eunos 6y ago
China got their fair amount of Computer Vision companies anyway. Sensetime, yitu, megvii, cloudwalk and so on. I even heard one using Gait analysis but I forgot the name.

smashah 6y ago

What about in the UK? At the BLM protest, the police rub around with their camcorder on the stick to justify kettling people for 4+ hours and squash people's will to protest. They require you to show your face or arrest you. All because they want to use Rekognition to cross reference everyone's face.

easytiger 6y ago
good
- scubbo 6y ago
  Care to elaborate?
  - smashah 6y ago
    What did they say?
    - Thorrez 6y ago
      If you want to see dead posts, go into your settings and set showdead to Yes.
      - smashah 6y ago
        Ah thanks very helpful
  - easytiger 6y ago
    That it is good that the police are holding people attacking the police to account? Why does that need an explanation?
    - scubbo 6y ago
      I reject the implication that police will only use facial recognition on people who are attacking the police, or that the repercussions for being present at (not necessarily instigating, or using violence during) a violent altercation will be proportional.

samstave 6y ago

So i have a schitzo view on subjects like this; 1. I am against places that say “photography prohibited - private property” — if i can see it, i should be free to photograph it. 2. I am against ANY use of facial recognition ever anywhere. I own my face and i am allowed to keep it private if i choose to. So,yes completely schitzo and i realize this. But its not an evenly distributed spectrum of a problem. Its a weighted web of nuanced issues. I just dont know how to balance it. Id love to discuss this if anyone is open.

8note 6y ago
If you're showing your face everywhere, you aren't keeping it private. You are in control of whether your face can be seen

samstave 6y ago

Super funny thought: The reason why super heroes wear masks and capes is to avoid facial and gait recognition cameras!

deeblering4 6y ago

This reads to me as simply “oops bad timing this year, let’s try again next year”. Yeah, sure, whatever Evilcorp.

elmo2you 6y ago
I believe that you that's a fairly accurate assessment. More so, the whole thing is kind of a red herring. Facial recognition technology is, after all is said and done, probably illegal in any country that implements the protection of basic human rights into its national laws. If countries (including the USA) do not, it says enough of its own about them. Nor has the idea of (national) exceptionalism ever produced a more equal and/and fair society. AFAIK, not a single in all history. For those who like to argue that such technology could be legalized when people (collectively) agree with its use through political consensus (aka "the people", through politicians, voted for it), there are good reasons for why basic human rights are defined as "inalienable". Regretfully, many countries have nonetheless ignored that fact, whenever it suited the personal interests of politicians and those that stand behind them in the shadows. “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power” ― Benito Mussolini

jokit 6y ago

This makes more sense. The idea that the communists would want to eliminate their jackboots is laughable. They just want to sabotage their opposition. The last thing they want is independent people. A temporary hold on resources they can't yet abuse. This makes a lot more sense. It's not the abuse of power that is the problem, but the power to abuse.

ardy42 6y ago

> We’ve advocated that governments should put in place stronger regulations to govern the ethical use of facial recognition technology, and in recent days, Congress appears ready to take on this challenge. We hope this one-year moratorium might give Congress enough time to implement appropriate rules, and we stand ready to help if requested. That's a little weak. If they were serious, the moratorium would extend indefinitely, or until such rules were in place. One year might just be long enough for the fervor to die down, so they don't take such a PR hit when they resume sales.

samstave 6y ago

“Police use” == contractors providing subsequent services to said police and bilking tax payer money for said service, with likely companies founded by public servants’ significant others to do said billing (remember this actually happened in 2009 by wives of bankers setting up companies to get bailout funds)

coronadisaster 6y ago

Are they still sharing Ring doorbell videos with police?

trynewideas 6y ago

https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/10/amazon-rekognition-moratorium/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/10/amazon-rekognition-morator... > Amazon is known to have pitched its facial recognition technology, Rekognition, to federal agencies, like Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Last year, Amazon’s cloud chief Andy Jassy said in an interview the company would provide Rekognition to “any” government department. > Amazon spokesperson Kristin Brown declined to comment further or say if the moratorium applies to federal law enforcement.

sneak 6y ago

Is this a moratorium on sales, or are they shutting off the service of cops using this? Will this apply to feds and US military, as well?

lemmox 6y ago

I wonder if this means that existing customers/products had to stop using the service? If so this might be the first time I recall seeing a cloud vendor flex like this. CTOs of city and law enforcement orgs are probably seriously questioning the vulnerability of relying on cloud SaaS.

blickentwapft 6y ago

The cynic might say “because in a year this will all have blown over and we can get back to selling”.

mmanfrin 6y ago

AKA 'We're going to sell it to police but only after people stop looking'

jariel 6y ago

There's a lot of talk about the technology - but this aside, why are police even using this? We don't need this kind of hyper surveillance for common crime, people with warrants, it's just too much of an intrusion. I can see this being used in certain places for 'high value individuals' such as those marked by the FBI (major crimes, multiple murders) or literally 'terrorists' - but for regular crime, I think it's way too much. We can't be under constant surveillance by the police computers that's just no way to live.

raxxorrax 6y ago

I call this profiteering on dilemma. Disgusting in my opinion. Just my opinion.

talkingtab 6y ago

Not Enough. Period. Yet another PR move to placate rather than address the problem.

deleted 6y ago

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downerending 6y ago

Arguing in the other direction, it turned out to be very important that Floyd killing was captured on video and the killer identified. Since that happened, there have been dozens (at least) of murders and vicious, life-changing assaults, most captured on video. I'd be very happy to see every one of the bad guys identified, and this seems like it would be effective toward that end.