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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?
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.
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?
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?
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.
I'd agree if they took the "creepy surveillance state is evil and bad for everyone" angle, I find it interesting that instead they went with the "this affects non-whites more so it's evil and bad!" argument, in that line anyways. I think that it reveals a lot about the author.