[tidepod12]

I don't really see how selling facial recognition tech is "rather creepy". Facial recognition has legitimate uses, and the CIA/FBI using it to track criminals seems to be a legitimate use case to me. The article you linked seems to be making a hypothetical leap to "well what if they choose to use it nefariously in the future??" And to their credit, Amazon at least seems to be interested in trying to limit its use to good causes: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/10/amazon-bans-police-use-of-fa...

And of course, Microsoft, Google, and others have their own facial recognition software and they all have large contracts with government entities, too. This article mentions the CIA using AWS, but the CIA also has multi-billion dollar contracts with GCP, Azure, and even IBM and Oracle: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/cia-awards-multib...

[jtdev]

Yeah, that's all incredibly troubling to me. I'm shocked that so many people fail to see the parallels to historic misuse of technology by states, e.g., IBM and the holocaust as outlined above:

"Mankind barely noticed when the concept of massively organized information quietly emerged to become a means of social control, a weapon of war, and a roadmap for group destruction." [0]

Is it unreasonable to desire that your dollars don't go to organizations involved in war, oppression, corruption, etc.?

[0] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/bl...

[tidepod12]

There are legitimate use cases for technology like facial recognition, and I see nothing wrong with using it in that way. Of course society should be cautious about unwarranted uses of such technology. But decrying all uses of it, even legitimate ones, because of a hypothetical "what if someone in the future uses facial recognition to start another holocaust?" is just a slippery slope fallacy.