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Amazon Worker Pushes Bezos To Stop Selling Facial Recognition Tech To Police (thehill.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the cease-and-desist dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: An Amazon employee is seeking to put new pressure on the company to stop selling its facial recognition technology to law enforcement. An anonymous worker, whose employment at Amazon was verified by Medium, published an op-ed on that platform on Tuesday criticizing the company's facial recognition work and urging the company to respond to an open letter delivered by a group of employees. The employee wrote that the government has used surveillance tools in a way that disproportionately hurts "communities of color, immigrants, and people exercising their First Amendment rights."

"Ignoring these urgent concerns while deploying powerful technologies to government and law enforcement agencies is dangerous and irresponsible," the person wrote. "That's why we were disappointed when Teresa Carlson, vice president of the worldwide public sector of Amazon Web Services, recently said that Amazon 'unwaveringly supports' law enforcement, defense, and intelligence customers, even if we don't 'know everything they're actually utilizing the tool for.'" The op-ed comes one day after Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos defended technology companies working with the federal government on matters of defense during Wired's ongoing summit in San Francisco. "If big tech companies are going to turn their back on the U.S. Department of Defense, this country is going to be in trouble," Bezos said on Monday.

7 of 126 comments (clear)

  1. What else... by Luthair · · Score: 5, Insightful

    is Amazon going to use it for now that they've built it? Sell it to a sleazy retailer who wants to track & identify people entering their stores? This is a discussion that the employees working on it should have had beforehand, are they going to return their salaries or is Amazon the only party who needs to operate altruistically?

    1. Re:What else... by Areyoukiddingme · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Sell it to a sleazy retailer who wants to track & identify people entering their stores?

      They won't. They are that sleazy retailer. They certainly aren't going to give up their competitive advantage of identifying shoplifters the moment they walk in the door. Nor are they going to give up their competitive advantage of identifying the sucker walking in the door that responds well to a cleverly placed electronic coupon on an aisle display screen.

  2. Citation needed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    the government has used surveillance tools in a way that disproportionately hurts "communities of color, immigrants, and people exercising their First Amendment rights.

    Citation definitely needed.

  3. commentsubject by Falos · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Fight it if you want, but brace for impact. You can't uninvent tech.

    On one side of the coin, I get to laugh at the MAFIAAs kicking and screaming against the bias of reality - that data is a contagion, that you can only declare mandates when you have a quantified quarantine, not when it's in the wild.

    On the other side, I have a lot of facerec, voicerec, LPR to look forward to. I can fight the panopticons in my limited domains, but not in the same wilds. They are public grounds. I can't control others making observations, notes. Copies.

    Everyone here, or at least those with servers, is aware of how many billions of bots blindly bump against your sealed doors. Their tendrils are innumerable, nothing exists on the open internet without being probed and examined by them. By their eyes. A single bot, a few lines of code, scans what a thousand human actors could, without rest.

    A camera lens isn't so different.

  4. Re:First Desponders by Brett+Buck · · Score: 1, Insightful

    What kind of a psychopath are we raising in this country, who sits on his dead ass making computer posts, in nearly perfect safety and security, and calling the people in the front lines making it that way a "bad cop"?

  5. Re:First Desponders by LynnwoodRooster · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Especially in Portland, where they stand by while domestic terrorists assault the elderly. Those are bad police.

    --
    Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
  6. Re:Think of the good side of facial recognition by fafalone · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yes and I'm sure that's exactly what they'll use it for. Not tracking everyones movements, tracking who everyones with, what businesses they go to, what protests they attend, who they're with when entering their home at night, etc. And then they definitely won't abuse all the compromising information that would reveal.
    The security benefits just aren't worth the dystopian authoritarian nightmare.