Slashdot Mirror
Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Prompting Outcry Over Surveillance (nytimes.com)
Nick Wingfield, reporting for The New York Times: In late 2016, Amazon introduced a new online service that could help identify faces and other objects in images, offering it to anyone at a low cost through its giant cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services. Not long after, it began pitching the technology to law enforcement agencies, saying the program could aid criminal investigations by recognizing suspects in photos and videos. It used a couple of early customers, like the Orlando Police Department in Florida and the Washington County Sheriff's Office in Oregon, to encourage other officials to sign up.
But now that aggressive push is putting the giant tech company at the center of an increasingly heated debate around the role of facial recognition in law enforcement. Fans of the technology see a powerful new tool for catching criminals, but detractors see an instrument of mass surveillance. On Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union led a group of more than two dozen civil rights organizations that asked Amazon to stop selling its image recognition system, called Rekognition, to law enforcement. The group says that the police could use it to track protesters or others whom authorities deem suspicious, rather than limiting it to people committing crimes.
But now that aggressive push is putting the giant tech company at the center of an increasingly heated debate around the role of facial recognition in law enforcement. Fans of the technology see a powerful new tool for catching criminals, but detractors see an instrument of mass surveillance. On Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union led a group of more than two dozen civil rights organizations that asked Amazon to stop selling its image recognition system, called Rekognition, to law enforcement. The group says that the police could use it to track protesters or others whom authorities deem suspicious, rather than limiting it to people committing crimes.
Amazon, Google, Microsoft, et al. The problem with these companies is that they want to be everything to everyone. Impossible. Do one or maybe two things really well and focus only on those things. Evil results otherwise, as we are seeing.
Slashdot management should resign. This site is an embarrassment.
You are either a Prime Citizen or a Suspect.
I am American and many people agree that the vast majority of the public SUPPORT this kind of law and order in this country and you libtards are the minority, AGAIN. This is why we support who we support even though it makes you weak snowflakes so angry, the people who will make this country great are the ones who oppose the city thugs who terrorize our daughters and cuckold our sons.
that's why prime subscription just jumped $20.
Get ready for a marathon of APK posts all Memorial Day weekend! Starting Friday, APK will be posting frequently about many topics including:
1) Why moderation is censorship and should be abolished ... AND SO MUCH MORE!
2) Why bump stocks must be banned to stop mass shootings and make us secure
3) Why custom hosts files are a cure-all for security problems
4) All about Vatican conspiracies and their conspiracy with the Democrats to meddle in the 2016 and 2018 elections
5) How George Soros is behind efforts to put soy in milk and cause men to become effeminate
6) Discussing various Slashdot users like Ol Olsoc, amicusNYCL, Coren22, arth1, Zontar The Mindless, and so many others who are butthurt because they tried arguing with APK
Stay tuned all Memorial Day weekend for the APK marathon on Slashdot!
I get that Law Enforcement in general is trying to help the public, and are trying to find tools to make their job easier and more efficient. However in order to protect our freedoms law enforcement needs to be hard work, even if it means our lives are measurable less safe.
We cannot have Safety and Freedom. For increase safety there is a trade-off in freedom. While there may be some rules that will increase safety by a factor of ten and reduce freedom by one tenth, and may be considered a fair trade off, there are other things that may give us marginal safety benefits with a large hit to our freedom.
Law Enforcement professionals work with the scum of the earth all the time, this is affecting their judgement, and their job is to keep people safe. So I do not fault them for wanting more tools to make their job easier and more effective. However we as citizens need to stand up and say. "We thank you for the effort and your hard work. But we can't let your job be easier at a high costs of our freedoms"
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Well ... if Amazon is selling this to whoever, then I'm sure some "protesters" will also use this to face ID people at the "wrong" political rallies, etc.
Since "protesters" love to get people fired, blacklisted, harassed at home, etc. that should be fun.
It's the tech genie. You can force yourself to put it back in the bottle, maybe, but you can't really force everyone to do so.
Ok, I know there is somehow a fundamental difference between a computer system with unlimited memory and processing power, versus a person who has really good memory.
But entertain me on this thought experiment. Why is having a police force use such a system so different from if they had on their payroll someone who was really really good at remembering faces? Or someone who knew everyone in town?
At what point is an automated / faster system an unreasonable infringement of your rights compared to what each of us can do to some degree? Is it the natural size (200-300 people?) of our memory and human facial recognition that sets the limit on what is an invasion of privacy or not? Where is the line? What is different about using this system compared to a police officer asking everyone he/she can find whether they know person X?
I find the definition of reasonable privacy difficult to nail down.
We all know they will find some excuse to bolt facial recognition on a new generation of speakers.
Yes, the tech is all wonderful and "could" help catch criminals... or anyone else you please.
Meaning that it's a fuckton of power you're putting in the hands of law enforcement. And we put restrictions on the amount of power we put in their hands for a very clear and tangible reason. So, dear proponents, how do you propose to restrict this awesomely powerful thing so that it will do more good than evil, hm? I'd love to hear your well-thought-out explanations of just how your plans and measures will work. And, of course, you will not assume they will always work but you will also explain what to do should they not quite work as envisioned. I think this is a reasonable thing to ask of proponents of new technology that gives law enforcement awesome new power over not just criminals, but over everyone.
The tech isn't the problem, the police and the laws are the problem. If you're in public, you won't be able to hide. It's long past time we change our laws and reform our law enforcement so regular people won't see any need to hide.
Time for a government that's less authoritarian and less punitive. Let us live our own lives and make our own choices.
Humans forget. Humans forgive.
A picture can still have people cry bloody murder, 50 years later.
And statistically, it's said that there are about 5000 people with the reasons, the will and the means to actually murder you for it.
And then there's the whole Cardinal Richelieu "7 lines to hang a man" problem.
This is why the equivalent amount of human cops would be quite a different thing. (Aside from showing more visibly, how totalitarion society has become.)
I'd wager when a politician or two is ID'd with someone they would prefer not to be associated with and it cause political problems for them we'll see some laws enacted.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
voice recognition.
I never agreed to the conecpt of revenge.
As in: That it was acceptable, to be violent to a person who one deemed evil, wrong, violent themselves, or whatever.
Because I cannot say "Harm is wrong", and then go, and be a good role model, by harming them myself!
Much lesss expect them to not conlude that harm is aww-right and only being dominant on the definition of right and wrong matters.
What gives me the right to declare right and wrong anyway? Or declare that it would be universal.
If a society of nothing but murderers in an embargo would be more successful than mine, would I still be right? Who defines success anyway? Goals vary.
Sun-Tsu already knew that war and harm is only that last resort, that you use when you realize you have failed.
Succes would have meant preventing it from happening in the first place, by actually investing resouces in people's well-being and wealth, in the face of natural disasters or other adversities
Not by fueling organizations that care about literally nothing but taking away people's wealth without giving something equal in return and getting away with it (if necessary, over their dead bodies).
Look I totes get it, surveillance state yadda yadda. I hate it as much as the next guy here. But why try to stop the progress? This is just algorithms and database, if Amazon can offer such a service but is talked out of it somehow then someone else will. If you want to stop this, there has to be legislation against this kind of service, rather than pushback against isolated incidents. And even then someone would eventually make "black" version if the AI scraping off public databases. Either way privacy is kinda screwed so I'd rather see this kind of service regulated and public.
All of these surveillance companies are run by Jews,
Google: Jewish
Facebook/Instagram : Jewish
Amazon: Jewish
i would summise that its not a tech problem, but a Jewish problem, particularly their over-representation in these fields, in 1939 these troublemakers would of helped the Stasi just so long as they where getting paid.
maybe you should keep an eye on them, before the problem gets solved by other means.
Shalom shlomo
The new facial recognition system is all over the streets and on police worn glasses. The goal? The system learns your normal patterns and alerts a human when you even go to another neighborhood.
Guaranteed this will lead to a reduction in rights, freedom and ability to move. It will create paranoia and will be abused. Plain and simple.
Isn't it creepy enough that we have facial recognition all over the place? Airports, drivers licenses, license plate readers and heck even DOTs in different states are mandated to put up Bluetooth / Wifi readers along the roads. We just got a bunch of them. (Solar powered White boxes with small rubber antennas)
Humanity is using technology for evil purposes that will be abused.
Everyone seems to have forgotten that Windows 10 still spies on you and that google quietly snuck in needing location services turned on for growing amount of Bluetooth and Wifi functions. Amazing what we forget when we accept things little by little.
Tech Companies are not your friend any longer.
We already have mass surveillance everywhere. We have license plate trackers that scan you not only while you're parked but while you conduct your daily business driving. We have surveillance systems at every store, nearly every business and now more and more homes. Congress for years has had a war on cash to take care of "scofflaws of taxation" but it's really about tracking every financial transaction you do as well. All Amazon does is take images and associate
you with your picture to tie up the loose ends? Your privacy? Your Freedom? They're long gone because the technology is cheap and scales. What we need is a Moore's law for surveillance.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Privacy has long been dead, Police have been using many pieces of technology for years. Ever since 9-11 there has been a focus to use technology to identify people, automobiles, and many countries with stronger security then the US already use facial detection in public places. Get a clue tin foil hat people, privacy is dead. You want privacy live in a cave and don't come out.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Conservatives also are concerned with civil liberties and the sureveillance state. You must have skipped that lesson in your moscow school.
you can have NO DOUBT the CIA and NSA ALREADY ARE !!.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Corporate Hr will use this data to control it's employee's of-duty behavior.
"We have a photo of you on bourbon street wearing lots of necklaces, this is a violation of our corporate policy"
"We have a photo of you at a gun range, corporate policy does not permit that."
"You were photographed in the grocery store purchasing a competitors product, that is a violation of corporate policy"
coming soon,
"Your TV reported you for making derogatory comments about our trusted partner's products"
Rick B.
Who cares as long as you got your guns right??
Just like the criminal paedophile he is, Trump is afraid of technology outing him.
I mean really... It baffles me how much people don't know about the state of Biometrics and their use around the world and this country. "ZOMG!! Law enforcement has this new tool that's going to steal my privacy!!" News Flash: Law enforcement from the local to the federal level have had this technology and have been using it successfully for 30+ years now.. Amazon's latest effort is pretty good but it's not even close to the forensic quality algorithms the "quieter" side of the industry have at their disposal. All of the "they might use this to do that" type conversations are funny in that "they can and already are and have been for a long time"
Get mad about it all you want but please stop thinking this is new or anything that can be stopped. Your privacy is a myth.. stop pretending you have it. The only thing Amazon has done here is make this tech more accessible for *you to use. "The Man" already has it and better and didn't need Amazon to provide it.. AWS just made it cheaper for them to procure.
The solution is simple. Stop posting every single mundane second of yourself online.
it lowers the bar for abuse. It makes all sorts of nasty things that weren't practical suddenly worthwhile. There's all sorts of implications on this. For one thing, we have pretty uneven law enforcement in this country. A popular example is a pretty woman in a low cut dress getting out of speeding tickets. A not so popular example is how our drug war is waged mostly on minorities and was started by Nixon to attack the left.
On the one hand if big data forces even law enforcement that's a good thing. But on the other hand it's not hard to alter the inputs. Then there's various inherent biases. Black people's faces are harder to recognize (remember XBox Kinnect?) That could lead to uneven outcomes when white people are easier to collar. Or it might go the other way when more leg work is done chasing down black people to make up for perceived inequalities in the system.
I guess my point is we haven't really put a lot of thought to long term side effects of something like this. Like a lot of things there's no quick and easy answer. It's going to be a mess.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The AWS Rekognition image recognition service that is the basis of this is no doubt the same technology behind Amazon's Prime Photos people recognition, and it's ridiculously inaccurate, especially with black people. Prime Photos seems to think that almost any random black woman appearing in our photo collection is my wife, even when there's no family relation whatsoever. Even I, who have difficulty recognizing faces, can easily tell them apart, yet Rekognition cannot.
Prime Photos does not let you correct its erroneous identifications. I have no doubt that law enforcement will not second-guess Amazon's identifications.
However in order to protect our freedoms law enforcement needs to be hard work, even if it means our lives are measurable less safe.
I agree with that generally, but not in this context.
If you are in public anyone can see you. What is the ethical difference between an investigator or member of the public seeing you walking around and calling the police, vs. an automated system scanning every face in the city? There is only a difference in scale, not in ethics.
Now where I would start to question things would be if they were identifying and tracking location of everyone it finds. That I find ethically questionable, even if inevitable see: past story of car repossession company doing this ALREADY with a mobile fleet of cars.
But just recognizing everyone out in plain sight? I don't see the reduction of freedom there, at all.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You're really asking what the difference is between an automated system that can scan/process millions of photos in a searchable database with what a single person can remember?
it knows you, John Doe, were at point A at 12:41PM, and the next spy-camera that recognizes you knows you were at point B at 12:43PM, etc, etc. Unless you're advocating not keeping the data unless there's a match to a specific face.
Exactly - if you are not a Person of Interest (just to throw a TV reference in there), I would say ethically you'd want the system to not keep track of who it was it recognized being there.
But the reality of course, is far different - as I mentioned with the repo firm, there are already *private* firms recording where license plates are, all around a city, multiple times per day. They don't discard any of that (AFAIK) because someday that car might need to be repoed...
Now indépendant of the ethics of the situation, I still maintain that if you are where you can be seen in public, you have absolutely zero expectation of privacy. You might WANT privacy but you cannot realistically EXPECT it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
1984 has arrived. The extreme danger of Amazon getting in bed with government for the purpose of facial recognition is that Amazon is ALSO heavily pushing its Echo/Alexa products for the home.
Essentially, once your face has been identified, Amazon can conveniently provide all your Echo/Alexa audio records stored on its servers after the inevitable warrant is served to retrieve them, and local authorities can troll those records in an attempt to catch you admitting to a crime.
Worse than that, you could be tracked almost anywhere through voice recognition in tandem with facial recognition so long as an Alexa-enabled device is nearby, once your face/person has been flagged as a "person of interest."
Because of the immense marketing data Amazon, Facebook, and Google gather on you that's already remitted to numerous 3-letter government agencies, it would be rather trivial to target specific groups of people, such as specific religions, minorities, the disabled, immigrants of all kinds, specific political persuasions or policies, or whatever else. The sky's the limit here.
In other words, if/when your government goes bad, Amazon is completely willing to be the accomplice facilitating the stripping of your civil rights.
The only appropriate response to these developments is outrage.
As a certain Ian Malcolm once said, "Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should."
"If you're in public you have no expectation of privacy."
Well, people can see you, obviously, and some might know you. Most people do expect some privacy though, even in public. The people around you may only approach you on the basis of how well you know them. And in most cities and towns, the people around you are relative strangers. A stranger cannot simply come up to you and demand your name for instance. You have set up a false dichotomy wherein you are either in a state of 'privateness' or in a state of 'publicness'. In reality most of our lives are spent in between.
If you are really OK with being IDed through facial recognition, any time you are in public, then you ought to be OK with random stops to produce your identity papers too. No ID papers? Then you get arrested for not having your papers.
This is the problem with a police state, and the problem with your argument. Also, what gives the police the right to ID everyone at a rally or protest? AFAIK there is no such right or authority, so right there that is the police overreaching. I imagine they can demand ID if they have arrested someone, but to demand ID merely for attending a public gathering? I don't think so. Even a 'best efforts ID' would be going too far, which at least removes the element of coercion. But who's kidding who, the police like to imply they have authority even when they actually don't.
was the correct religion to follow.
The problem isn't facial recognition, or Amazon; it's the police and self-appointed (yes, 'wider society' appoints them, blah blah) groups with a monopoly on coercive force. Oh yeah, and the mindset which would lead someone to join this type of group.
Requiem for the American Dream
Every tech company goes through the same arc.
They start out with the best intentions of providing the most awesome products and/or services that they can; of truly caring for their users. Then, after realizing how easy it is to make shit-tons of money, they sell their souls to the highest bidder. Then, after they lose out to the latest fad company, they setup shop in India and push Big Data, AI, or whatever the buzzword tech of ten years ago was.
Except for Facebook. They are the one tech company that never pretended to give a fuck about their users. I guess in that way, they are the most honest of all the tech companies.
That really should be the new Silicon Valley slogan. "We'll fuck you up the ass so hard, you'll love us for it."