[wonder_bread]

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

EDIT: fixed a spelling error

[vinchuco]

Companies do it at scale, though. And motivated by profits, not regard for 'good guy' or 'bad guy' status.

[notheguyouthink]

I've never understood why I care who does it, honestly. Companies? The government? A person stalking my wife? The negatives are obvious, do I really care who is doing it? These discussions often feel like tax law debate to me. We're debating whether or not X person is bad for legally avoiding tax, instead of talking about restricting tax laws.

Likewise, we're sitting here focused on Amazon for implementing facial recognition instead of focusing on changing laws and government "culture" to make such an act against its own citizens far from accepted. I don't like what Amazon is doing either, but attempting to stop people from advancing facial recognition seems fruitless at best. Facial recognition is here, and it's only going to get easier, better and faster.

Can we focus on finding ways to prevent/identify/etc bad actors? Because facial recognition is coming, regardless of Amazon, and bad actors aren't loyal to amazon.

[danShumway]

I suspect if this stuff was more widely democratized we might see more progress in that area, but that's not really what Amazon is doing. Amazon's tech is (ostensibly) not available to bad actors, and is designed to dismiss any public concerns like "how will stalkers use it?"

Tech like this is designed and deployed in such a way as to discourage people from thinking it's a problem that needs a fundamental solution. If people realize it's a problem at all they assume it will be solved with just a few laws or a company protest.

If there was a public website you could go to where anyone without authentication could monitor every street in your town, maybe that would spark more citizen-controlled solutions, in the same way that browser extensions intercepting Facebook logins at coffee shops sparked https adoption.

The problem of democratizing surveillance is that many laws prevent neutral actors from building these systems (what's your state's 2-party consent law for audio and video in public spaces?) As a result, the only people doing widescale recording are exempt institutions and companies that people are trained to think aren't a problem, or criminals that people think are rare or limited because their results aren't widely broadcast.

It's like social security numbers. If a company started just publicly releasing them en mass via its Twitter account, we would quickly figure out an alternative way to authenticate that prevented them from doing that. But if instead a company just leaks them to the black market, well that's just a security breach and the system doesn't need to change - even though the practical effects are very similar.

It's trivial to secretly monitor people via facial recognition. It's not trivial to publicize or demonstrate how easy it is in a dramatic way that will spark public attention.

[darawk]

This doesn't really matter. You can do it at scale too, just spin up your NN on any of the cloud platforms available. Instant scale. The fact that amazon offers this recognition lowers the barrier hardly at all.

[jolux]

>just spin up your NN on any of the cloud platforms available

"just"...

Amazon marketed it to police explicitly, I'm pretty sure the open source team working on TensorFlow isn't going around suggesting you plop a model on Linode and use it to catch criminals. This isn't something that police departments have the ability or skill to discover and implement on their own, setting the menial bits up for them and suggesting a solution is half the battle with government stuff like this.

[donarb]

Police departments have started to get smart about technology.

The Seattle Police Department now has a division focusing on data analysis. This came out of a consent decree with the Justice Department to study compliance for use-of-force incidents, but is now being used for other things to quantify how well the police are using resources in different neighborhoods. Recently they sponsored a hackathon sprint for local developers to come up with ways to quickly anonymize police body cam footage so that citizens who were not the subject of an investigation could not be identified, but still provide requested footage in a timely manner.

https://statescoop.com/seattle-police-department-launches-da...

[darawk]

> Amazon marketed it to police explicitly

I don't see that in the article. Can you provide a source for that?

> This isn't something that police departments have the ability or skill to discover and implement on their own, setting the menial bits up for them and suggesting a solution is half the battle with government stuff like this.

It's something I have the ability to do on my own. Any police department could hire someone like me.

[jolux]

"Amazon marketing materials promoted the idea of using Rekognition in conjunction with police body cameras in real time"

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/22/amazon-re...

[bcassedy]

Sure you can spin up unlimited servers. But an individual doesn't have the resources to collect data from across the city at all times, which is where we really start getting into invasion of privacy.

[HenryTheHorse]

The scale at which Amazon operates is obviously different from a weekend hackathon project. The potential for misuse is much higher.

[reaperducer]

Your argument is that because other people can do it, that makes it OK for Amazon to do it.

If you ever have children, wait for them to make this same argument. It should happen around the age of five.

[donarb]

Here on Hacker News I’ve read the opposite. Whenever any new technology product is offered by Amazon the refrain is always “that can be replicated with x, y, z”.

[finnthehuman]

>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.

[danShumway]

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.

[Sir_Substance]

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.

Sure makes you think...