> Emo Phillips once made this joke: The other day a woman came up to me and said, "Didn't I see you on television?" I said, "I don't know. You can't see out the other way." Evidently Amazon has made that joke obsolete.
Like Stallman, I'm so uncomfortable installing a listening device in my home like OK Google, Alexa, Siri, etc.
It creeps me out on a visceral level unlike any other kind of snooping.
Hundreds of very good reasons to fight Amazon's growth as much as possible. We are sacrificing our rights, hurting our society, pushing people to near-slavery for 2 day shipping. It's disgraceful.
I definitely don't think that silly simplistic take on Amazon. Jeff Bezos sounds like a psychopath from his public profiles. He has the right to run his firm as he sees fit of course but never have I considered Amazon to be 'benign.'
As long as I or you can use it to track the coming and going of your Congressman and Senators, at the same price that Amazon charges others, I guess it is okay. That nice townhouse he visited with the attractive blonde who lives there, while his wife was out of town? It's ok for me to track and then publish the info, right?
We're all equal when we are in public view, right?
Cameras facing all entrances and exits of the state capitol would be fed into ALPR and facial recognition software. There are enough photos of elected officials to train facial recognition. It would be easy to identify who is coming and going, what cars they own, who they travel with, and their patterns.
This is a terribly clickbait-y title for HN. Amazon is not tracking people, AWS has a service offered to anyone who wants it which would be useful for large scale surveillance.
Facial recognition services are incredibly close to neutral technologies in my opinion. If we truly want to stop abuse of them, it should be done with legislation. Getting mad and ranty at one of the many offerings (which also includes open source software) because it feels good to beat up a tech giant will have no useful impact.
> Facial recognition services are incredibly close to neutral technologies in my opinion. If we truly want to stop abuse of them, it should be done with legislation.
You're entitled to that opinion. But it's just your opinion.
What I like to ask myself is: given that we know we had a corrupt individual in the highest office of the US government in the last 50 years (i.e. Nixon), how might that have turned out with each new technology that's exclusively under the executive branch's control?
> Amazon’s facial recognition service, Rekognition, is designed to identify and track people going about their daily business. This isn’t hyperbole - a Rekognition spokesperson explicitly mentioned real-time tracking and identification at an Amazon Web Services summit earlier this year. The same spokesperson went on to call Orlando a “smart city,” with cameras everywhere that allow authorities to track persons of interest in real time.
Are people surprised that real-time image analysis has been commodified or that local governments are already applying this technology ahead of policy discussions?
Clarifying edit: I'm not being disingenuous. I may be too close to the technology to grok why this thread is a down-vote minefield. Running OpenCV on an Arduino board is years-old proof-of-concept stuff and now I have an AWS DeepLens sitting on my desk that can name which of my neighbors walked their dog past my house.
> The same spokesperson went on to call Orlando a “smart city,” with cameras everywhere that allow authorities to track persons of interest in real time.
Someone needs to design an AI-powered camera-seeking spraypaint drone.
Facial recognition software isn't particularly new and isn't specific to Amazon. Cato is just trying to sling manufactured mud at Bezos to further a political agenda because that's what they do.
Not a fan of Amazon but this article is directly sponsored by the koch brothers. kind of weird we have transparently political articles like this yet others are banned.
I am in this dangerous situation where I see posts like "X is tracking people online" and just scroll though without even giving it a thought. Help me!
No, Amazon isn't! It's the company/government/whatever that implements a service Amazon is offering to everyone.
All it takes you to do the same is create an AWS account, fill in some info so they can bill you for the services you use, a bit of code and some camera's.
I know it's very popular these days to quickly blame it on the big tech names, and yes they are doing a lot of shady things, but articles like this are simply name calling and not explaining how things really work.
Besides that, this technology is not new. Xovis camera's for example have this ability build in for a long time already. Those camera's are installed in a lot of public places like shopping malls, railway stations, airports etc and they are used to track you. Just because Amazon made a scalable central version of this doesn't make them track you.
People who write articles like this should do some research first ...
Cases like this (where government is the "consumer" for the technology) make me think surveillance tech could be the law enforcement version of military spending on defense contractors.
They deliver stuff to my door within 1 hour to 3 days and save me the hassle of driving 15 minutes each way to Walmart, the closest option for varied purchasing, so... I'm fine with it.
Looking beyond the clickbait-y headline, I think the article takes issue with the use of this technology by government, which fits perfectly well with a Libertarian POV.
I distinctly remember watching the Amazon conference when they demonstrated their facial recognition software. It occurred to me that if this technology was around in Mao's China or Stalin's Russia the twentieth century might have been darker and bloodier than it already was. This technology certainly has a lot of potential for improving, but it also has a huge potential for violating human rights. Kudos to the author for talking about this.
Many governments and large rich organizations already have this... so really AWS is just democratizing it. While I agree that's it's creepy af, it's not exactly new. Perhaps through this widening of access the stakes become more obvious and talked about (shining a light).
Once a thousand startups are using this in a non-secretive way, maybe voters will wake up and demand regulation?
It may be a side-effect, but Kudos to Amazon regardless if it does raise awareness.
Kind of confused why Rekognition continues to be made into the 'bad guy' here. Even if stronger protections are rolled out for this it's become far too easy to make these types of systems to do a great job of keeping them at bay at this point. Most people with programming experience could roll out a reasonably accurate facial comparison/recognition model like Rekognition and deploy it to a Raspberry Pi without expelling too much effort. There are many open datasets for it
>Kind of confused why Recognition continues to be made into the 'bad guy' here.
Because some people respond to a hypothetical better when they can see concrete aspects of it, not just hear a description of the possibility space.
"I could build that if I wanted to" vs. Recognition is a bit like the difference between the black market and dispensaries, a difference of scale is a difference of kind.
Agree that it's a problem that needs to be fixed in more permanent ways, but debatably protesting and slowing down companies like Amazon gives us more time to find a solution.
It's a band-aid, but band-aids are an extremely useful medical tool. They only become problematic if used as an excuse to avoid stitching the wound.
Most people could probably steal from two or three houses without expending too much effort too. Of course, that's illegal because most people don't support allowing random third parties to steal from them. The wider population considers people who do that to be objectively shitty people, and always did, even before there were formalized national codes of laws to forbid it.
[+] [-] sedachv|7 years ago|reply
This is one of those instances where I say to myself, "I wish I had listened to Richard Stallman X years ago": https://stallman.org/amazon.html
[+] [-] CoolGuySteve|7 years ago|reply
Like Stallman, I'm so uncomfortable installing a listening device in my home like OK Google, Alexa, Siri, etc.
It creeps me out on a visceral level unlike any other kind of snooping.
[+] [-] Fej|7 years ago|reply
"Of all sad words
Of ink and pen
The saddest are these:
'Stallman was right again'"
[+] [-] andrepd|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hutzlibu|7 years ago|reply
Not sure if this is the way to get people exited, building on better things.
I also like to read about, what works. What are working alternatives, and this he writes about ... but less so in my opinion.
[+] [-] wavefunction|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patrickg_zill|7 years ago|reply
We're all equal when we are in public view, right?
[+] [-] driverdan|7 years ago|reply
Cameras facing all entrances and exits of the state capitol would be fed into ALPR and facial recognition software. There are enough photos of elected officials to train facial recognition. It would be easy to identify who is coming and going, what cars they own, who they travel with, and their patterns.
[+] [-] em3rgent0rdr|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] thatfrenchguy|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] wepple|7 years ago|reply
Facial recognition services are incredibly close to neutral technologies in my opinion. If we truly want to stop abuse of them, it should be done with legislation. Getting mad and ranty at one of the many offerings (which also includes open source software) because it feels good to beat up a tech giant will have no useful impact.
[+] [-] alexandercrohde|7 years ago|reply
You're entitled to that opinion. But it's just your opinion.
What I like to ask myself is: given that we know we had a corrupt individual in the highest office of the US government in the last 50 years (i.e. Nixon), how might that have turned out with each new technology that's exclusively under the executive branch's control?
[+] [-] hakejam|7 years ago|reply
[1]: https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/
Disclaimer: I work for AWS.
[+] [-] justboxing|7 years ago|reply
Truly creepy.
[+] [-] deleted_account|7 years ago|reply
Clarifying edit: I'm not being disingenuous. I may be too close to the technology to grok why this thread is a down-vote minefield. Running OpenCV on an Arduino board is years-old proof-of-concept stuff and now I have an AWS DeepLens sitting on my desk that can name which of my neighbors walked their dog past my house.
[+] [-] 394549|7 years ago|reply
Someone needs to design an AI-powered camera-seeking spraypaint drone.
[+] [-] touristtam|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] mvanbaak|7 years ago|reply
All it takes you to do the same is create an AWS account, fill in some info so they can bill you for the services you use, a bit of code and some camera's.
I know it's very popular these days to quickly blame it on the big tech names, and yes they are doing a lot of shady things, but articles like this are simply name calling and not explaining how things really work.
Besides that, this technology is not new. Xovis camera's for example have this ability build in for a long time already. Those camera's are installed in a lot of public places like shopping malls, railway stations, airports etc and they are used to track you. Just because Amazon made a scalable central version of this doesn't make them track you.
People who write articles like this should do some research first ...
[+] [-] analyticascent|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spilk|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SN76477|7 years ago|reply
https://cvdazzle.com
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[+] [-] rapind|7 years ago|reply
Once a thousand startups are using this in a non-secretive way, maybe voters will wake up and demand regulation?
It may be a side-effect, but Kudos to Amazon regardless if it does raise awareness.
[+] [-] wonder_bread|7 years ago|reply
EDIT: fixed a spelling error
[+] [-] vinchuco|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HenryTheHorse|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reaperducer|7 years ago|reply
If you ever have children, wait for them to make this same argument. It should happen around the age of five.
[+] [-] finnthehuman|7 years ago|reply
Because some people respond to a hypothetical better when they can see concrete aspects of it, not just hear a description of the possibility space.
"I could build that if I wanted to" vs. Recognition is a bit like the difference between the black market and dispensaries, a difference of scale is a difference of kind.
[+] [-] danShumway|7 years ago|reply
It's a band-aid, but band-aids are an extremely useful medical tool. They only become problematic if used as an excuse to avoid stitching the wound.
[+] [-] Sir_Substance|7 years ago|reply
Sure makes you think...