
Amazon shareholders demand it stop selling facial recognition to governments - pmoriarty
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/amazon-recognition-shareholders-jeff-bezos-letter-privacy-surveillance-facial-recognition-a8405221.html
======
newscracker
After Facebook, Amazon is the other company I wouldn't trust to _not do_ evil.
Even if many more shareholders join in on this, I don't see Jess Bezos caring
about these things. The Amazon stock won't suffer even if he publicly says he
won't listen to such shareholders. On the contrary, the stock may just shoot
up.

The larger question on this topic is, "If the big technology companies do not
sell the technology to the governments, won't somebody else do?" Of course,
the governments would find some domestic or foreign companies to buy such
technology from (or even spend money on developing it). I think that's
inevitable over the course of time. But such pressure on companies _could
possibly help_ shape policy too (added several adjectives to indicate how
difficult this would be).

~~~
salawat
The problem comes down to the engineers and researchers involved.

As an INDUSTRY, we have some very important decisions to make, one of which
is, "will we work on this type of system knowing full well what it will be
used for?"

Yes, everyone has their price, but the fact remains that the tools are nigh
useless without the expertise of the knowledgeable people to integrate and
fine tune the final product. If there is enough ethical backlash by we tech
people, the progress any government makes can be set back decades.

It can't be stopped at this point most likely, as the data and initial
research is out of the bag as it were, but it does"t have to be carried one
inch further.

Personally, I won"t touch it. No benefit is worth the risk of this type of
system being leveraged against a population. I've fully thought through the
security, search and rescue, administrative, etc... applications, and as cold
as it may sound, it is not worth it. The invasion of privacy, the chilling
effects put on public discourse, the enabling of active population social
engineering through ubiquitous surveillance and negation of dissidents is not
a legacy worth having anything to do with.

~~~
jiggliemon
In a lot of these scientific do or don’t debates - people tend to disqualify
that there’s a consequence to not building the technology.

In the H-Bomb example, what would happen if Oppenheimer didn’t help develop
the bomb? Russia most certainly still would have. And the world would be a
different place today.

China, Russia, shit - North Korea are all working on super shady projects that
you not I would want any part of. However that doesn’t stop the technology
from being developed - and in some dire cases - not making the technology
domestically puts us at a disadvantage.

This isn’t me saying that Amazon should continue providing Facial Recognition
software to the Government. This is just saying never doing evil isn’t always
the best solution - on a global scale.

~~~
losteric
Developing an offensive weapon is different than working on domestic
surveillance technology.

Personally, I prefer a world where China has big-brother technology that the
US does not.

~~~
bdhess
Facial recognition isn't exclusively a domestic surveillance technology. For
example, it could be deployed at national borders, with satellite imagery
captured in combat zones, and so on.

~~~
gnode
Nuclear weapons have minimal potential for domestic use, short of a
geographically partisan civil war. Facial recognition conversely has huge
potential for domestic use, and arguably little potential for foreign use in a
major conflict. If anything, I would say it's only potential for use in
conflict would be to improve the ability to quash resistance in an occupation,
which is more destabilising to global security.

------
hn_throwaway_99
A much more accurate title would be "19 Amazon shareholders demand it stop
selling facial recognition to governments." They even wrote a sternly worded
letter!

~~~
jonknee
A much more accurate title than that would be "Shareholders representing X% of
Amazon demand it to stop selling facial recognition". I mean Jeff Bezos and
myself are both shareholders, but his stake is worth mentioning.

Activist funds are able to shake things up with a lot less than 19
shareholders, so the count isn't important at all unless it's giant.

~~~
tomc1985
Yeah but 19 is a much larger number, visually, than 0.25% or whatever

~~~
what_ever
I don't care about larger which is a relative scale vs percentage which is
absolute scale.

------
bcheung
This seems like it is approaching the problem from the wrong angle. This
should be addressed at the government law level.

The problem is where do you draw the line? Any technology can be used for
evil. Do you next ask companies that sell cameras not to sell to the
government? Then ban computers?

Laws that concern themselves with targeting and surveilling people encompass
any technology.

Facial recognition is not a hard problem and this is just a matter of
convenience. Government can just go around and implement it themselves if
nobody provides it to them. At least through Amazon there is some level of
non-government control to shut it off if they end up doing anything nefarious.

~~~
zaptheimpaler
I agree with this in principle, but in the US the intelligence/police don't
really seem to be accountable to the people.

They regularly conduct surveillance on huge scales and no one even knows about
it until we get lucky with a leak like Snowden. Who knows how many dozens of
other secrets like that they still have. The CIA/FBI etc. have a history of
doing this kind of thing for decades, at least since WW2. Then it gets
declassified 50 years later when no one cares.

Surveillance is a case where its good for the government, but bad for the
people the government is meant to represent. Bottom line is they will never
police themselves on this issue. So going after the people making it like
Amazon may be a better idea.

~~~
manigandham
The intelligence and police apparatus _are_ the people. They are not some
alien overlords, you can meet these employees and see what they do, and alter
their course of actions by shaping the government through direct voting.

Trying to change it via corporate proxy is not going to really work.

------
jpalomaki
There's growing number of investors who are looking also at the non-financial
side of business (social responsibility, environmental issues etc). Companies
who ignore these things exclude themselves from the portfolios of these
investors.

Some banks and investors are saying the don't want to be involved with certain
types of legitimate activities. Here's one example: "Deutsche Bank avoids
entering into, or continuing, any kind of business relationship with entities
with clear, direct links to the following types of Controversial Weapons
business [...]" [1]

I'm not saying face recognition is same thing as antipersonnel mines, but
things can change over the years, especially under pressure from public.

[1] [https://www.db.com/newsroom_news/2018/deutsche-bank-
upgrades...](https://www.db.com/newsroom_news/2018/deutsche-bank-upgrades-its-
policy-on-controversial-weapons-en-11582.htm)

~~~
remarkEon
>Companies who ignore these things exclude themselves from the portfolios of
these investors.

Sounds good to me. It seems very unwise to run your business based whatever
pet project "socially conscious" investors are supporting this week.

------
hedora
I get that people are upset with government abuses (I am too!), but stepping
back for a minute, I think it is much more concerning that we’re building a
world where a few tech companies get to decide what computing may or may not
be used for.

The fact that even the government is hitting headwinds gives me an extremely
negative outlook for where the cloud is headed with respect for individual
rights.

------
istvanp
While I applaud this effort, this will not stop the use of the technology. It
will simply steer them to another provider or a custom implementation (on top
of AWS if they so choose to) of this now well-understood technology.

~~~
FartyMcFarter
Sure. But let's be clear - it is good to have as many software developers as
possible steering away from unethical work.

~~~
sonnyblarney
"it is good to have as many software developers as possible steering away from
unethical work."

Is it unethical to track down violent activists?

Is it unethical to check for people crossing the border illegally?

And this thing about the tech being used to single out 'people of colour' I
think we can dismiss that out of hand - the tech won't be used for that ...
though the application of the tech may disproportionately affect some groups
(say the cops create a 'watch zone in S. Chicago' but not elsewhere).

But at least in the former scenarios, it's fairly grey thing.

At border crossings, I can see this could be very reasonable.

Walking down the street in 'wherever USA' tagged for something I can see
ethical problems.

It depends on how it's used ... we need some new laws ...

~~~
bigiain
> At border crossings, I can see this could be very reasonable.

Note that it's also least necessary at border crossings. As a non-US citizen
I'm already required to give my fingerprints and retinal scan to border
control agents.

Like you say it's the "walking down the street" problem - for me at least
perhaps more accurately described as the "done at many orders of magnitude
more scale, in circumstances where you have no option to opt out". If I don't
like border control practices, I have the option of not crossing a border (at
whatever cost to me that implies, but I have _some_ agency there). When this
is deployed on streets, shopping centers, trainstations, and other similar
places - I've lost any agency in being able to choose not to be
involved/identified.

(Note too, that the USA defines "border areas" where I'm legally able to be
stopped and fingerprinted/retina scanned as "anywhere within 100 miles of a
border" which includes pretty much all of California and New York, and
anywhere within 100 miles of each coast or the north/south borders.)

~~~
remarkEon
>Note that it's also least necessary at border crossings.

Says you. It could replace the fingerprint and retinal scan for all we know,
plus you don't have to actually physically interact with the person crossing.
I don't think it will, but it seems perfectly reasonable to deploy this
technology at the border. I see no issue with the definition of "border areas"
either. Seems reasonable to assume that if someone has recently crossed
illegally, that, assuming they haven't gotten picked up by vehicle yet, they
are likely to be found within less than 100 miles.

~~~
bigiain
Sure, I'm speculating out my ass here (it's what everyone does on The
Internet, right?)

Seems to me though, the most recent numbers I've heard for commercial state-
of-the-art facial recognition are barely capable of 99% accuracy. I don't know
the error rates of fingerprint and retinal scans, but I'd put good money of
the combination of passport and fingerprint or passport and retinal scan being
several orders of magnitude more accurate that face recognition we have
available right now.

(And I probably should have left out the "border areas"comment as part of a
different argument - my beef with that is not "how many illegal crossers might
you find within 100 miles of a border", but "is it worth reducing the rights
of everybody, legal as well as illegal, just because they live/work/travel
within 100 miles of a border?" that includes everybody in CA west of a line
thru Sacramento, Fresno and Bakersfield.)

~~~
remarkEon
Why is the accuracy of the technology relevant at all? I think you're assuming
that we already have fingerprint and retinal scans of everyone entering, which
is quite obviously not true. We might, however, have a rough facial footprint
of a known bad actor. I'm fine with this technology being employed in such a
manner.

~~~
bigiain
The accuracy matters (at least it seems to be so to me) because if all you
have is "a rough facial footprint of a known bad actor" and you use a
technology with a 1% error rate - given that there's probably something like
several hundred million airport border crossings a year in the US - _somebody_
is going to have to deal with a million false positives a day, which doesn't
seem like a win given I suspect the number of bad actors for which facial
features are know but cannot be detected with the in-place
passport/fingerprint/retinal crossing system is probably in the single digits
per year...

The aggregated individual cost to the 1% false positives - when deployed
against a population of several hundred million travellers a year - seems
outrageously high to me.

~~~
remarkEon
Easily solved by simply fingerprinting and retinal scanning the positives and
the "unknowns", which is essentially the status quo. Nothing changes except
our confidence level that we are actually engaging the right people. The cost,
to me, is simply in terms of how expensive implementation would be in terms of
dollars.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
I think this kind of “don’t sell technology x to governments” is kind of
misguided for the following reasons.

1) You are saying that you are from be with private entities having access to
this technology, but not public entities? Private individuals and companies
should be able to use facial recognition, but not governments? Throughout
history, governments have typically been the first ones to acquire tech. Of
note is that the major Airplane companies (Boeing and Airbus) have very large
military units.

2) It is likely to be ineffective. All you need is a third company that serves
as the bridge that buys facial recognition from Amazon and resells to the
government.

3) International relationships really are a competition. I am sure Chinese AI
companies are working hand in glove with the government to make sure their
government is able to deploy the latest AI tech. If AI is the gamechanger
people say it is, you have given an incredible leg up to China vs the West.

4) If employees at companies keep on pushing this anti-government, anti-
military thing with AI, there is a good chance that it will get reclassified
as a sensitive technology and heavily regulated.

~~~
merlincorey
> 3) International relationships really are a competition. I am sure Chinese
> AI companies are working hand in glove with the government to make sure
> their government is able to deploy the latest AI tech. If AI is the
> gamechanger people say it is, you have given an incredible leg up to China
> vs the West.

I think this is a really important point, here.

I think the paranoid line of thinking is helpful in this instance:

Who benefits from the US government not having access to AI technologies?

\- The argument on the face of it seems to be that we, the people of this
world and in the US, benefit thanks to keeping these tools out of our
government's hands

\- The unmentioned argument is benefits go to China, Russia, and other
countries whose tech sectors cooperate with the government

I am not suggesting that the article was written by China or Russia to hurt
our government - that certainly sounds like "conspiracy theory"; however, I am
suggesting that it is a valid concern that the US as a country may want to
"keep up".

~~~
int_19h
Your analysis ignores an important point: the only thing that the US
government would need to gain such access, would be to stop doing the things
it is being called out for. It's not that government having such tools that's
inherently the problem, but the way they're going to be used here and now.

------
manigandham
Governments are just people, led by politicians.

It would be far better if efforts were spent on recognizing and electing
qualified and capable people to run the government as wanted instead of this
silly run-around with commercial companies.

~~~
_jal
> Governments are just people, led by politicians

... empowered to do things we lock up, tase, beat, sick dogs on, and/or kill
other people for doing. Kind of an important distinction to make.

If you have reason to think exhorting your peer-proles to 'pick qualified and
capable people' will lead to better outcomes now than it has in the past,
certainly, please continue. Some of us, however, don't see that happening and
prefer to explore other approaches, even if you happen to find our pessimism
'silly'.

~~~
manigandham
Yes, it's called authority. The point of the comment is that we should pick
the proper people to give that authority to, instead of fighting against them
through some strange corporate proxy.

If you want an alternative, why don't you become the qualified and capable
person to join the government to shape it the way you want?

~~~
int_19h
And we're working on that, too. But it's a slow process, and meanwhile there's
damage to mitigate.

~~~
manigandham
Slow doesn't matter if it's effective.

This current approach is rarely that, and usually amounts to nothing more than
noise. The government is not deterred by a single corporation, no matter how
big.

~~~
int_19h
The goal is not to deter them. The goal is to make it more difficult for them
to do what they're doing, and thereby ruin fewer people's lives.

And yes, slow absolutely does matter, if you're one of the people caught up in
the grinder.

------
turdnagel
I understand this is a practical reaction to what most of us would agree is an
egregious use of the tech, but wouldn't it make more sense to stop the problem
at its root? I'm talking about surveillance. Why aren't we complaining about
camera companies selling surveillance equipment?

The gov't already has the data and Amazon's APIs just make this a little bit
easier. But they can go direct to EC2 and get a couple hundred GPU-optimized
instances and do it themselves.

------
bb88
I don't think it matters. Third parties are going to be in this space anyway
(Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and the foreign defense contractors) so it
doesn't make a lot of sense to shut off a profitable segment.

I was just thinking how much I would like an facial recognition API for my
home security system. That way I can give someone's name to the police to make
it easier to track someone down.

~~~
_jal
Me, I've been thinking about ALRs. If this stuff is going to be available, I
think everyone should have it. So this is one of those projects I am just
never going to get around to, but someone else, please do it - it shouldn't be
that tough to build a cheap Raspberry-Pi-ish automatic plate reader anyone can
point out their window to capture every plate going by. With a network of
them, everyone can know this stuff, all the time, for free.

I find that to be a frightening outcome, but I think it is a less frightening
one than only certain people having access. We have to learn how to live with
this tech; far better to not allow it to be a tool of selective control while
we're adapting. And it can be a more honest resource - police and other
official vehicles' movements will be visible to those paying for those cars,
whereas anything official will have official holes.

~~~
bb88
Well, I think the hard part is done here:

[http://www.openalpr.com/cloud-api.html](http://www.openalpr.com/cloud-
api.html)

------
skywhopper
This is interesting. The marketing has certainly been disturbing, reinforcing
the worst uses for this sort of tech and overstating its usefulness for those
cases. But ... unlike Google's contract work with the Defense Department, I'm
not sure Amazon could legally get away with refusing to sell an on-demand
product to a government agency. This service is nowhere close to the worst
thing that's running on Amazon's servers on behalf of governments. The
software exists and could easily be set up to run directly by governments or
their contractors on Amazon's infrastructure (I guarantee that is already
going on far more extensively than Amazon's own specific service will ever
grow to). Ditto for GCP and Azure and everything else.

I sympathize with these investors, truly, but the only solution here would be
to get out of the cloud computing business altogether.

------
ohthehugemanate
I work in a department at Microsoft that does a lot of Machine Learning and AI
work for MS customers. I'm proud that our organization regularly turns down
opportunities because of ethical considerations. We have a concrete set of
ethical standards, and if a project makes it past that review and into your
hands, and you still feel uncomfortable, you are strongly encouraged to flag
it for second review in committee. The whole system is called AETHER, for your
googling - er, Binging - pleasure.

The ground rule that would apply here is, we don't do anything that makes
choices about restricting or injuring humans. So no perp detection systems, no
autonomous weapons of any kind... Not even a camera to disable the ignition if
you're detected as drunk.

------
anonu
This is a perfect example of social governance: stockholders feeling empowered
to control how a company operates. We need to see more of this type of
governance. Ultimately, shareholders should just vote with their dollars. Sell
a stock you dont like or dont invest in the first place.

~~~
TangoTrotFox
I agree with you, but I think we disagree. What I mean is that this article
specifies 19 share holders, without mentioning their share. It's a very safe
bet to assume that it's not even a significant fraction of a percent. In other
words, in 'voting with their dollar' these individuals would have a literally
unnoticeable impact.

When a substantial chunk of society feels something ought be changed, then I
certainly agree they have the right to make such change happen. But we live in
a time where headlines, such as this, are constantly driven by irrelevantly
small numbers. For instance traditional fear mongering was stuff along the
lines of 'video games are driving kids to kill.' What that really translates
to is 'one mentally unstable kid who happened to play a lot of video games
killed another kid, primarily because he was mentally unstable'.

The conflation between the views/actions of society and the views/action of
the individual is counterproductive. If you polled people, proportional to
share of amazon, what percent would agree with the statement 'I demand Amazon
stop selling facial recognition to governments'? On that we can only
speculate, but I imagine it would probably be quite small.

------
derEitel
I'm starting to think we have the need of something like the ICAN for facial
recognition (FR), promoting the regulation of FR worldwide. There a little
valid systems where FR is truly helpful. Most of todays applications are
around things like "access control" and "tag your friends here", i.e.
banalities which are either unnecessary or can be solved with simpler tech.

On the other hand the risks are incredible, FR in combination with AR systems
could completely eradicate privacy. Autocratic governments could use it for a
new levels of surveillance. Military usage could perfect the use of autonomous
weapons etc.

It's just not worth it and should be internationally outlawed. Just like
A-bombs and chemical warfare.

------
skybrian
Preventing facial recognition techniques from spreading would seemingly
require some attempt at keeping them secret. But aren't AI techniques often
openly published in scientific papers? And it seems likely that there is also
open source software available?

------
FooHentai
In the past 24 hour cycle of news I have seen:

\- Microsoft catching heat for their deal to allow ICE to use their
capabilities

\- Amazon catching heat for their deal to allow government to use facial
recognition

\- A photo of Satya Nadella, Jeff Bezos and Trump sitting next to each other
and shaking hands

What's the play here?

~~~
TangoTrotFox
Money.

\- Companies making money by developing and licensing software.

\- Media making money by creating sensationalistic headlines.

------
PenguinCoder
Time for Amazon to divest this division into a wholly owned subsidiary!

~~~
amelius
Yeah, but Facebook's software could contain tagged data of actual people.

------
m3kw9
What percentage is a group of share holders?

------
whack
It's weird that we have so many people directing their protests towards the
tech companies, and not the government itself. The whole premise of capitalism
is that profit-motivated-corporations will inevitably succumb to evil
temptations. That it's the government's job to regulate corporations, and
police their moral behavior.

Instead, we have the complete opposite. Americans _expect_ the
government/military to engage in morally unacceptable behavior, and are
looking to corporations to "enforce" morality instead, by denying the
government specific services.

Not that there is anything wrong with tech companies and workers doing their
part. But when we see corporations as the best catalyst for pro-social
outcomes, and not the government itself, there's something very wrong with our
political system.

------
bcheung
Can't find the actual letter. Anyone have a link?

------
anonnel
Too. Late.

------
mankash666
The only effective way to achieve this is getting a majority of the board to
vote for this. Everything else is mere virtue signalling without effect.

~~~
confounded
> _Everything else is mere virtue signalling without effect._

By that definition, isn’t almost every form of non-decisive influence “virtue
signaling”? Virtue itself? Marching against a war? Voting for a candidate you
like the policies of, but who doesn’t have good media coverage? Declining to
purchase unethical goods?

~~~
intopieces
Yes. That’s the objective behind the term “virtue signaling” - to call into
question the motives of anyone and everyone who claims to care about something
so that it becomes deeply uncool to care about things so that they’ll stop
trying to make the world a better place.

Even if you presented a 100-step well funded plan for changing the status quo,
prepare to have it leveled by the sneer of “you’re just virtue signaling.” You
can never prove your sincerity to anyone who uses this term, because it will
never be enough.

~~~
mankash666
How's legitimacy relevant here? I'm not trying to place doubt, trying to make
an honest observation that a result needs the majority of the board to vote
for the measure.

------
dsfyu404ed
Good. "We don't want you doing shady things that damage the brand's reputation
in order to make a buck" is the kind of message shareholders should be sending
to all companies.

Edit: Apparently I'm wrong and shareholders should be pushing for profits
regardless of means?

I know Amazon isn't exactly known for treating people well but they're no
Monsanto or Blackwater either. Amazon sells to consumers and is therefore
dependent on public opinion to make sales. With the increasing public
awareness of just how pervasive consumer tracking is it's becoming a touchy
subject. If Amazon wants to keep expanding its market share for home goods
then anything that risks associating its brand with government tracking is a
very high risk. That would make me uncomfortable if I had Amazon shares.

~~~
philwelch
The US government is a huge customer of AWS, and AWS has deliberately built
entire regions to cater to them:
[https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/announcing-the-
new...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/announcing-the-new-aws-
secret-region/)

[https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/](https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/)

