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Amazon Worker Pushes Bezos To Stop Selling Facial Recognition Tech To Police (thehill.com)
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.
"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.
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?
Reminds me of the Einstein that was going to blackmail Batman
Send us their picture and we will look in to it.
Not necessarily disagreeing with you, but one thing to keep in mind is that the world's richest man became such due to the ability of Amazon's workers bee to "execute", which includes the drive to design and build.
When the working bees lose the drive - well, Sears is a good example recently in the news.
(And yes, I use the term rather widely, in this case it includes the middle management.)
BookDetective.net - book search engine and ranker I donate my skills to.
That technology is going to get in the hands of LEO's anyway.
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
Citation definitely needed.
Visa and passports would be more easy to reconcile as a person legally entered and later departs the USA.
A persons face would have to match the application in a US embassy, their arrival and their return to their own nation.
People who lie to the USA about their "holidays" and travel to nations to support banned groups.
Over stay and the USA knows who is not in the USA legally. Later detection is then possible so that person in the USA illegally can be returned to their own nation.
The tracking of all illegal migrants all over the USA who thought some state granted ID card would ensure access to state and federal gov services.
The tracking of any illegal migrant who attempts to access gov services.
A deeper way to connect a citizens face to more city, state and federal databases to ensue citizens get the gov services they need.
No using different personal ID by different people, no getting extra support and services many times under different ID.
No more creating a fake ID and using that to access real ID.
Accessing education? Work? Government supporting that education in your state? Time to find out if that person is a citizen and can be approved for such gov support.
Criminals using a fake ID to create a new future by entering the education system under a new fake name.
No easy way to create a state ID and then access the gov as an illegal migrant.
To make cities safe again. Less crime and no way for criminals to stay hidden in their supportive communities.
The tracking of every person in an illegal tent city.
The ability to track people who use city streets for their waste and drug use.
A new tool for police to track criminals. Criminals in any existing city/federal/state database. Friends of criminals who may not yet be in a database.
Supporting the mil on missions. Find out who is wondering around all the mil camps, bases, ports and forts.
Why is a person outside a mil fence line with a camera? Who is that person? Have they been to other US mil sites?
Anti war protester? Person doing another First Amendment audit? Spy?
Facial recognition technology will provide the US mil with a way to quality sort out who is spying and who they later report to.
Cult and faith members trying to get into gov/mil work while supporting banned groups in other nations.
People supporting banned groups/criminals trying to enter US police forces.
Long term political activists trying to enter the US mil/gov/a mil contractor as new staff.
People with security clearances in the US gov/mil who want to meet with political activists, banned groups, cults, faith groups, other nations spies to give/sell US secrets.
Facial recognition at all transport centres so criminals and people with fake ID cant move around to create a new ID in another state.
Facial recognition of drivers and passengers along road networks. Near all rail, ports, airports to look for illegal migrants and criminals.
Fake ID and a lack of citizenship will become more difficult to hide.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
If you have a 1% chance of a false positive or negative per comparison, and you try to compare 50 people to one another, you end up making (50 * 49) comparisons, for an overall error rate of 50 * 49 * 0.01 = 25%
The German Federal Security service reportedly identified someone grandma as a member of the Bader-Meinhof gang ("the red army factor") and dropped my employer's facial recognition system like a hot potato.
Therefore, buy only if you don't care about arresting innocent people, and, conversely, letting guilty ones walk free.
davecb@spamcop.net
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.
"The employee wrote that the government has used surveillance tools in a way that disproportionately hurts "communities of color, immigrants."
Perhaps they should stop committing a disproportionate amount of crime.
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"?
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!
He's going to do, whatever makes him the most money. Unless 100% of their employees WALK OUT he will continue. Even if they did, he'd just replace them anyway. Wouldn't slow down him a bit. If the "police" use the tech, it won't impact him, so what does he care?
Please enlighten everyone rather than just calling the post stupid and wrong. It is with facts, not name calling, that you make your point the more valid one.
Quit and get a new job instead of committing career suicide, idiots.
Yeah, workers should just stay quiet and nod, do what they're told, never give feedback.
Give feedback on how to improve the company's products, on how to find new customers, on how to operate the company more efficiently, on how to improve worker productivity, etc.
Not feedback on how the company should only engage in activities that match the employee's personal political ideologies.
Facial recognition is a valid, reasonable and moral tool for the military and law enforcement. That it can be abused does not mean you ban the tool. Facial recognition is one thing, over surveillance is a different thing.
A flashlight can be abused by law enforcement, shall Amazon stop selling those?
When the working bees lose the drive - well ...
... they are replaced by a new worker bee. There is no shortage of software developers who understand the legitimate uses of facial recognition by the military and law enforcement. The worker bee without drive is falsely conflating facial recognition with over-surveillance. You don't address over-surveillance by eliminating a technology that also has legitimate uses by law enforcement.
So you lose your right to protest as soon as you got paid to work on the project? (and of course, not all of those complaining actually worked on the project, but that's another point you blissfully ignore via intellectual dishonesty)
What a boot licker you are. So quick to find reasons to ignore the messenger rather than discuss the message.
The real intellectual dishonestly is conflating facial recognition with over-surveillance. Two different things, the latter only one use of the former. And no intellectually honest developer of facial recognition technology was not aware of potential abuses of the technology; abuse by government, abuse by companies, abuse by individuals. However they understood the pluses outweighed the minuses in each of those categories.
A psychopath not nearly as bad as the psychopaths leading us down the road to an ever worse police state by letting cops treat the population as a military enemy and routinely stomp on civil rights, simply because they also sometimes arrest real criminals who broke legitimate laws? Arresting an armed robber one day doesn't excuse backshooting an unarmed fleeing suspect the next. Cops who form a circle around a guy laying still and kick the shit out of him while yelling 'stop resisting!' don't get a pass because yesterday they busted some MS-13 killers.
How's that boot taste? Ultra-authoritarian nutters like you just won't see the consequences of police civil rights abuses until the boot is suddenly on your neck, having convinced yourself that never could happen.
Plus I'm personally of the view that destroying someones life over some victimless malum prohibitum bullshit 'crime' is fundamentally evil, and since at some point almost all cops have done that, almost all cops are bad, though they also do some good things. The Nuremburg Defense of 'it's the law and I was following orders' isn't any more acceptable here.
You don't arrest because of a facial recognition match. Facial recognition is merely partly replacing and partly augmenting the human based facial recognition process. Facial recognition is just a first level of screening, and what is the human error rate of this first level of screening? The computer or the human kicks out a first level of match, you don't move to arrest, you move to the next level of investigation or match, for example a second round of facial recognition by a more experienced / capable human.
In your RA grandma scenario, what does "grandma" have to do with anything? Of course a female member of the 70s/80s RA might be an elderly grandma today. Does grandma happen to coincidentally resemble the RA member? Is the "error" one of matching two similar looking people or two dissimilar people? If a human screener were looking at the 70s/80s photo and grandma's recent photo how often do they find a match? And when a match is found, either computer or human, what happens? Not an arrest but further investigation. Unless the GFS are complete and utter idiots which tells us nothing about the technology.
All you have demonstrated is that GFS folks involved in the evaluation don't understand the technology. The technology is to augment, supplement, not replace humans.
Until the governments enstate and practice policies that ensure they aren't abusing the people, knowingly supporting them in any way is aiding and abetting. If you know that I plan to offend someone with a tool, you are morally obligated to not sell me the tool.
No, they should quit, you hypocritical, boot-licking coward.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
First off, there is no inherent violation of anyone's rights in being identifiable or identified. That claim is just plain silly. Nor is demanding your employer not sell facial recognition tech to the government a sensible or effective course of action. The government will just get it from someone else. If you're worried about how the government would use facial recognition, there is only one route for dealing with it - the Law. Advocate for legislation to restrict how the government can use it, and take the government to court if you think it's violating one of the only two amendments facial recognition could be used to violate, the 4th and 5th. Not the first, in no way can facial recognition violate the first.
And if there is, so what? Keeping the government in line is what the Constitution is for. That's the foundation of our entire Republic - keeping the government in check.
what i find funny is that this should make false positives less of a problem so his complaint (that is disproportionately affects (insert special group here) should become less of a problem
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Yes, absolutely. Don't sell stuff to law enforcement. They might use it to enforce the law, or keep the peace, or something. We need to get car companies to stop selling them police cars, and gun manufacturer's to stop selling them guns, and clothing companies to stop selling them uniforms. And don't even get me started on all those immoral manufacturers selling ladders and hoses (and GPS navigation tools) to fire departments!
I've got this strong hunch that many of these employees that are speaking up now only initially joined these organizations because they had this strong impression no doubt given to them by the companies themselves that they were working to make the world a better place. They need only finish drinking the rest of the cup of kool-aid and they'll be ready to get back to work.
No, they should quit, you hypocritical, boot-licking coward.
Exactly. Once Amazon all of a sudden has no employees available working on said project, then maybe they will change their tune. Otherwise, Bezos will basically tell them "don't let the door hit you in the a** on the way out"....
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
Until the governments enstate and practice policies that ensure they aren't abusing the people, knowingly supporting them in any way is aiding and abetting. If you know that I plan to offend someone with a tool, you are morally obligated to not sell me the tool.
And what if the tool is mostly used appropriately? What if the tool legitimately contributes to public safety? Things are not as simply as you suggest, facial recognition is not solely used for over-surveillance. You ill-informed path has a human cost.
Sounds like that person wants to be put on a PIP so they can take the severance pay.
Considering Bezos is CEO and primary investor of https://www.mark43.com...a/ police specific records management system and computer aided dispatch...i highly doubt he will listen to this employee.
If only there were some vehicle by which the use of such technology could be regulated. Some way the average citizen could influence how such technology were used. Maybe a system in which a citizen could register their voice with some ruling body that could hand down some form of edict or guideline that could reflect said citizen's preferences. Nah... that's just crazy talk. There's no way for an average citizen in the United States to affect change in our rules and regulations.
There are, no doubt, Amazon employees that have ALL KINDS of views about any given subject. "Amazon employee has an opinion about what Amazon does." Now there's a headline!