
Amazon defeated Rekognition shareholder revolt by a large margin - LinuxBender
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48422321
======
ve55
The solution to this is not "regulate Amazon's facial recognition". It's just
"regulate all facial recognition".

While that's obviously challenging, targeting Amazon specifically doesn't
actually improve the status quo in a lasting way.

~~~
sambull
Agreed, where do a I sign up. With the proliferation of license plate readers
and other surveillance cameras in the last 5 years it's a matter of time
before this creeps out to full algorithmic 'risk scores' for when you have
encounters with enforcement. For some that may mean just getting shot [0],
while they think someone risky might be in the vehicle, based on association.
Or other harassment.

[0] [https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-no-charges-
lapd...](https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-no-charges-lapd-
shooting-newspaper-delivery-women-dorner-manhunt-20160127-story.html)

~~~
tastygreenapple
It sounds preferable to calculate risk scores deterministically rather than
rely on Law Enforcement's discretion.

Risk scores are computed for every traffic stop, wouldn't you want to take
that process away from the office and give it to a computer?

~~~
lotu
It really sounds preferable to me, even if the initial versions of these
algorithms are biased. They will provide a concrete thing against which to
test for bias and improve against. It is easily verifiable if your changes to
an algorithm have removed the bias you are worried about. Conversely it is
basically impossible to tell if your training on a human has changed their
biases in the field, sort of just having them do their job again and see if
they are biased.

~~~
acct1771
> It is easily verifiable if your changes to an algorithm have removed the
> bias you are worried about.

Please never enter politics.

~~~
pathseeker
Yeah, god forbid we have audit capabilities in law enforcement.

~~~
acct1771
Until we can enforce use of/non-deletion of footage from body cams, I think
policing and governing with AI is a tick out of our depth, as a society.

------
multibit
> The tech firm had said it was aware of civil rights concerns but had not
> received any reports of law enforcement clients misusing its Rekognition
> tool.

This really depends on their definition of "misuse", which can be molded to
suit their financial goals. Eventually reports of questionable law enforcement
use will come in, and I have serious doubts that any large corporation would
willingly cut off sales to a large set of existing government clients. This
area desperately needs regulation.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
> I have serious doubts that any large corporation would willingly cut off
> sales to a large set of existing government clients.

Barret stopped selling to CA government agencies after CA banned "regular
peasants" from owning Barret's flagship product.

That said, this situation is very different politically. People aren't going
to stop using AWS en-masse because Amazon is helping enable the police state.

~~~
Blackthorn
Same for New York now that we can't own them there either. Nice to have
someone stand up for us at least, as opposed to all those that will still
happily sell to law enforcement.

------
Abishek_Muthian
I had used Amazon Rekognition in our dating product extensively for moderation
till Aug 2018, it was in-accurate for people with darker skin often with wrong
gender and age identification.

I had contacted them regarding these issues and was told that they are working
with new models. I haven't tested it recently to see if the situation had
improved.

I didn't use the Face Recognition API for privacy reasons, I assume that would
be the most used API by law-enforcement; but if it is anything like my
experience then I would be very worried for some innocent to be wrongly tagged
by the system.

~~~
JohnFen
> I would be very worried for some innocent to be wrongly tagged by the
> system.

You should. Law enforcement in particular doesn't think that false positives
are that big of a deal (after all, they argue, all that would cause is a cop
to talk to the wrong person). They prefer to accept more false positives if
that means fewer false negatives.

I disagree entirely with that.

------
oldjokes
Is this really a valid test anymore with 50%+ of outstanding shares being held
by index funds? Who actually controls the companies when shareholders don't
really exist like they used to?

What does shareholder primacy even mean anymore?

~~~
maest
You're right - index funds voting really hurts the process, largely because
index funds don't ask their investor base how they should vote. Instead, they
default to following corporate recommendations and voting down any shareholder
proposals.

So really, all those shares are voted according to what corporate management
wants, not to what the original retail investors want. It's distorting the
power balance in a really perverse way.

It's hard to say at the moment, because the data isn't available yet, but I
bet index funds voted >95% against this proposal - that's the historical
average. We'll know for sure what the stats are once the fund providers
disclose their voting, which happens yearly.

~~~
devit
Why do they do that instead of abstaining?

It seems like their duty to the index fund owners is to vote like other
shareholders (which is most easily achieved by abstaining) and not like
management.

~~~
maest
They legally have to vote their shares.

Individuals are exempt for that.

It's interesting to think about index fund providers incentives:

(1) track the market (2) do it very cheaply

Voting shares is a cost center with no benefit towards the business. Fund
providers don't want to spend time and money to do research on individual
proposals, that would be too expensive. So they do the cheapest thing possible
and default to following corporate recs.

(That's actually a simplification, what happens in practice is, they use third
party proxy voting advisors, but the end results is mostly the same, except
that they vote down really egregious proposals, e.g. crazy CEO pay in the
context of a free falling share price)

~~~
mushufasa
Why not simply allow their beneficial owners to vote on what they should do?

I've building a startup for that -- you can support petitions like
[https://www.yourstake.org/ask/vanguard-demand-companies-
disc...](https://www.yourstake.org/ask/vanguard-demand-companies-disclose-
political-activity/)

------
nwsm
Even a proposal "requesting a report on the impact of government use of
certain technologies" lost 94k to 239k. Source in the same SEC filing
mentioned in the article.

------
asdfasgasdgasdg
Most surprising thing in that was that the request to generate a report on the
management of food waste reached a support level of 25%! I am really surprised
that this is an important issue to Amazon shareholders.

~~~
tclancy
We are going to metric each other to death: I'll make you worry about food
spoilage in the fridge at your work and you harp on water usage in the
restrooms at my work until we are all enslaved by our own 401ks tied up in
index funds!

------
mruts
I’m not sure how I feel about facial recognition. On one hand, I think code is
just information and no piece of information should be illegal to possess. I
also think we need to protect our rights with math and code not laws.

But I’m not sure that would help against the very real and dystopian future
that seems just around the corner. Facial recognition is probably the key
cornerstone of said future and I’m not sure what we should do.

Banning facial recognition also feels wrong to me, and violates the
aforementioned axiom about information.

Moreover, many cities are already blanketed in thousands of government cameras
and facial recognition doesn’t seem like anymore an abridgement of our privacy
than the cameras alone.

Maybe we should just ban police cameras on streets? But the ship has probably
already sailed on that one.

~~~
eloff
Human rights are not a mathematical or computer science concept, they are in
fact a law concept. I know it's tempting for computer people on hackernews to
want to solve problems with the tools of their own domain - but law is exactly
the place where rights need to be protected, not code.

~~~
mruts
If you don't have axiomatic beliefs, then where do your beliefs come from?
Some abstract feeling? Whatever "feels" right?

Clearly (to me at least), you need a system of axiomatic beliefs. If your
axioms don't form a coherent system (i.e you can prove a contradiction), then
you really don't believe anything at all.

It's surprising to me that very few people think about morality this way.
Everyone has a different view of morality of course, but you should at the
very least try and distill it into an elegant system that is a) consistent and
b) has sufficient predictive power to be useful.

An example of a system that fulfills a) but not b) would be something like:
There's no morality anyone can do anything they want. That's only one axiom
and pretty elegant as systems go. The problem with it is that it's so trivial
that it can't assign value judgements to anything at all, rendering it all but
worthless.

The system that I tend to follow has three primary axioms:

1) There are two kinds of things in the world: people and property.

2) People own property and they can do anything they want with said property
as long as it doesn't violate the rights of others to do the same. Moreover,
the person himself is property and thus is solely owned by himself.

3) By violating the axioms above, one forfeits his right to the above axioms.

While not perfect, this system is internally consistent and also has
sufficient predictive power:

If someone punches me, he's violating my property of myself (2), and therefore
can be sent to jail (3). If I break into someones house, same thing: violates
(2) and therefore can be punished by (3).

There are some things that the system can't assign judgements to, however:
What are children? What rights do they have? What about abortion? What exactly
violates someone else's property? Does air pollution can't as violation? What
about the environment? What rights to animals have (the system says they're
property, but some people might have a problem with others torturing animals,
for example)? Where does the government get it's legitimacy? Can the
government levy taxes? etc etc etc

In truth, the things it can't make judgements about are probably than the
things it can. But I personally haven't found a better or more elegant system
to frame the world in, so I generally stick with it while being aware of it's
limitations.

~~~
techsupporter
> If you don't have axiomatic beliefs, then where do your beliefs come from?
> Some abstract feeling? Whatever "feels" right?

The answer to your first question is "oftentimes, yes" to the second two.

There is this pervasive myth held by people who tend to gravitate towards
"functional" fields like ours--that is, technology, math, the logical
sciences, and so on--that the human existence can be distilled into a series
of logical statements that can be evaluated at different times and, given the
same inputs, will always produce the same outputs. (It's the same origin as
the myth of the "perfectly rational actor" in economic systems that makes a
lot of assumptions that are invalid in the context of how people truly
function.) This myth misses a key thing about humans: thinking animals are not
computers.

What feels right or what beliefs someone holds can and usually do change over
time as someone's existence progresses and new experiences are had. This is
where some of our greatest benefits, like the ability to experience art in new
and different ways depending on the context or situation or even just our
mood, and some of our greatest tragedies, like holding one set of people to be
negatively different based on an arbitrary criteria, originate. Saying that if
someone's beliefs can't be reduced to "code" causes them to be invalid is
against the human condition.

------
k__
Maybe masks become a thing again? Venecian style.

~~~
rapind
Won't work. You'll be matched on gait, the way you carry yourself. This scares
the shit out of me, but what scares me more is that it doesn't also scare the
shit out of everyone else.

~~~
k__
What changes your gait? A heavier mask?

~~~
philwelch
Put a pebble in your shoe.

------
scarejunba
SuperRecognizers plus facial recognition bans makes me think of Dune-style
people as computers. Instead of a computer running the program we just have
the guys in Room 901 do it.

~~~
crankylinuxuser
Youre looking for the word "Mentat" (Dune human 'computers'. They were used
after the AI war that turned computers against humans. When the humans won,
they banned all forms of machine learning.)

And that's how facial recog is legal. Its legal to put people in public and
write down who they are. So its legal for a computer to do it.

And I even wrote my own for a 2015 maker convention and deployed this. No GPU,
no internet. CPU bound and worked very well:
[https://hackaday.com/2015/03/04/face-recognition-for-your-
ne...](https://hackaday.com/2015/03/04/face-recognition-for-your-next-con/)

Aside lawmakers restricting law-upholders (hah), we've got a snowballs chance
in hell in solving this.

FaceRec is here to stay. :(

------
Causality1
Considering the hellscape that is working in an Amazon warehouse I'm amazed
anyone thought it was going to pass. A company that makes its employees piss
in bottles doesn't give a damn about the slow erosion of American privacy
rights.

~~~
sigkrieger
No offense here, just giving my thoughts.

Americans haven’t had privacy rights in a while and while the technology is
new and fancy, American citizens haven’t been as free as they think they are
in a while considering PRISM, border control checks that include your
fingerprints and have the right to demand access your personal devices...

~~~
guuhv
So like in European countries, only that in European countries you have to
give up your fingerprints when you turn 14, and it's mandatory.

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skykooler
I'm surprised to see content from such a high-profile site as the BBC with
typographical errors: "The Bloomberg news agency and CNBC are bother reporting
that"

~~~
acct1771
Wait until you start reading multiple sources for each and every story, and
start to see the (lack of) consistency of larger media fact-checking.

