
Amazon Execs Addressed Concerns About Rekognition/ICE at All-Hands Meeting - minimaxir
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/daveyalba/amazon-all-hands-facial-rekognition-ice
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smurfysmurf
I watched the all hands today. I just want to comment on the journalism here.
For one, whoever this employee is that email buzz feed news is taken as
representative to general feelings for all of Amazon employees which is
ridiculous. Also the article makes this assertion "Though the company-wide Q&A
was not meant to only address concerns about Amazon’s facial recognition deals
with law enforcement, it was a major topic on employees’ minds.", which it has
no data to back up. One question at the tail end of a 90 minute all hand does
not make it a major topic.

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zaru27
News should only be taken with a grain of salt in 2018

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JauntyHatAngle
More like, news from certain sources should be taken with a grain of salt.

There are plenty of good journalists with high reputation that you can
certainly take more than a pinch of salt with.

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thesagan
Even reputations are hotly debated in this climate. I think a good habit is to
read from as many sources as possible, including controversial ones, and
making a private determination as to how to weight reporting.

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solveit
There are enough sources supporting any worldview that there's a real risk
that you'll just end up supporting whichever one you started with. I have no
idea how you can do better though.

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thesagan
I struggle with confirmation bias, myself.

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vorpalhex
> we feel really great and really strongly about the value that Amazon
> Rekognition is providing our customers of all sizes and all types of
> industries in law enforcement

Translation: "We are making so much money that we have entirely sold our
ethics and will continue doing whatever makes us more money."

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CobrastanJorji
I mean, yeah. Amazon's been doing that for a long time.

Back in the day, Amazon was very fond of repeating over and over that customer
trust and customer loyalty was the very most important thing. Customers
absolutely had to know that if they ordered something on Amazon, the right
product would arrive on time. A data leak would be seen as an existential
crisis. Shipping the wrong product was a customer service emergency.

Then Amazon found out how much money it could make from being a third party
marketplace and mostly just giving up on quality control. Now nobody has
nearly the confidence that the thing they're buying is a real thing. Is that
USB-C cable gonna work with your phone? Who knows? Amazon doesn't. But they'll
be happy to sell it to you.

Turns out that whole "customer first" thing was more of a temporary tactic
more than it was any sort of moral grounding. It was a great tactic. It got
Amazon to #1 from an era where nobody trusted eCommerce. But they dropped it
once they didn't need it.

Remember, Amazon's the place that kicked a political organization off of their
cloud with no notice because Senator Lieberman placed a quick phone call to
Jeff Bezos and suggested it'd help him win GovCloud if he did.

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notyourwork
This generalization is a bit over dramatic. Not everyone has problems just
because hackernews has articles about mixed lots and other quality concerns.
If it was as bad as you say they would not be pulling in the amount of revenue
they are.

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jedberg
I agree with Andy. It's not up to the company to protect civil rights through
limiting the use of their product -- that's the job of the government. If
Amazon stopped allowing law enforcement to use their products, someone else
would literally just resell their products, because there is no way you can
enforce every use, and you've just kicked the can down the road.

If Amazon really wanted to take a stand on this, they would use their massive
size and lobbying power to lobby the government to put in new rules and laws
about the use of facial recognition technology.

Not only would that help everyone at once, but it would also protect their
profit margins because then every company has to play by the same rules, thus
allowing them to justify the expense to their shareholders. It's a win all
around.

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bootlooped
> It's not up to the company to protect civil rights through limiting the use
> of their product -- that's the job of the government.

People and companies have a responsibility to behave ethically, whether the
law specifies that or not.

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nlarew
Is there anything inherently unethical about facial recognition technology or
does the concern lie in the potential for misuse and profiling by law
enforcement?

AFAIK Rekognition just takes in a face and spits out an ID that you can use to
identify an already known face. This doesn't seem inherently bad to me. Any
misuse or profiling in this case is designed, managed, and implemented by law
enforcement and the moral responsibility lies with those who create the
policy, not a tool that they use to enforce it.

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hcg
First off, I disagree. Any scientist should be aware of what they are
building.

Second, they actively market to law enforcement.

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jryle70
So marketing to law enforcement is unethical? What about all the database
vendors that sell to law enforcement -- Oracle, Microsoft, or Postgres? Can't
you see the nuances in that?

Law enforcement is the tool designed by the society to maintain the law. That
inevitably lead to conflict with civil rights and abuse of power. A healthy
democracy needs to protect human rights while giving the law enforcement the
tools they need to effectively do their job. Constitution, legal framework,
and freedom of expression are essential.

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hcg
> So marketing to law enforcement is unethical?

Yes. The police state is unethical and doing anything to further it is
unethical.

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thrower123
It's bizarre how many people pick ICE as their hill to die on.

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bootlooped
It shouldn't be that surprising given the family separation fiasco.

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bradleyjg
ICE != CPB

I'd expect people so fired up about this issue to at least understand the
basic facts.

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craftyguy
Both of them are under "Homeland Security", and their 'mission' often
overlaps, sooo perhaps it's more accurate to say 'homeland security.'

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oliverx0
I for one think Andy's response is articulate and well explained. The
technology does have a lot of potential to do good, and it seems that everyone
is focusing on the bad side of it.

"Rekognition is actively been used to help stop human trafficking, to reunite
missing kids with parents for educational applications, for security and
multi-factor authentication to prevent theft."

Can it be used for evil? Yes. Should Amazon do its best to prevent it? Sure.
But at the end of the day that is the responsibility of the government.

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function_seven
Who's the marketing genius that chose to spell it with a "k"? That just
screams authoritarian dystopia to me.

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CobrastanJorji
"Let's call it 'Cloud Vision.' Oh, shit, somebody took that? Fuck, that was my
big idea. Okay, no worries, we'll call it 'Image Recognition.' What, IBM has
it AND it's a generic term? 'Cloud Sight'? No? Shoot, the meeting is in 10
minutes. Let's just go with Recognition, but, like, make it different.
eRecognition? No, recognitionly? No. Re:cognition, like thinking! Yeah, now
we're cooking! Josh, we're naming it Re:cognition!"

10 minutes later, Josh gets his kerning wrong in PhotoShop, and Re:cognition
becomes rekognition.

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tbyehl
I don't get why everyone is so riled about Amazon's service. At this stage,
the tools to do it are widely available and have been simplified to the point
that building a rudimentary facial recognition system is a novice programmer
project.

It's too late to put this technology genie back in the bottle. Legislation
would be our only salvation.

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saagarjha
> “I don’t think Amazon leadership addressed the concerns brought up in the
> question, and I don’t think a Q&A session at an all-hands meeting is enough
> or suitable for addressing the concerns appropriately,” an Amazon employee,
> who requested anonymity, told BuzzFeed News in an email.

The response given by Jassy during the all-hands meeting doesn't really answer
the underlying question, which is "how are you going to stop this technology
from being abused". It starts off with "oh, but look at all the good it can
do; of course we can't just stop" and then just drops the issue and says "the
ToS will fix it".

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arthurcolle
I just searched for Rekognition and found it interesting that two days ago BI
wrote this post:

[https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-workers-confront-
jeff...](https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-workers-confront-jeff-bezos-
facial-recognition-software-2018-11)

> ... preparing to confront Jeff Bezos

Sounds like that went quite swimmingly.

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Sleaker
> There is no way to hold leadership responsible in comparison to, say, a
> letter or email from HR to all employees where a statement is written and
> more concrete

Wouldn't the answer be to just leave your job? Don't support the company if
you don't like what they are doing...

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callalex
While I don't want to back up this terrible buzzfeed tabloid article, your
argument holds absolutely no water. If the answer to all company injustices
was to "just leave your job" why do we need any worker protections/wage
regulations? In the real world many, many, many people don't have that option.

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hcg
> He added that he thought it was the government’s responsibility to help
> specify regulations around the technology.

That's true but it doesn't absolve them of responsibility. They are choosing
their actions willingly, and with full knowledge of the potential
consequences.

This sort of behavior is inexcusable. It's just wrong.

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bitrrrate
What a non-issue. Snore...

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writepub
If the intersectionalists had it their way, they'd ban Amazon from selling any
and all services to _all_ agencies and people whose politics they disagree
with. They're yearning to stop serving Republicans and conservatives - almost
50% of the population.

That's OK, just as long as these intersectionalists are the first to go when
revenue declines from their extremist philosophy stops supporting Amazon jobs.
I think they should take their activism to it's logical conclusion and start
cannibalizing both revenues and operations with their manufactured outrage and
activism - only then will this reach fever pitch and force management to
openly call this group's hypocrisy out.

We really need center of the aisle, common sense to be popular again in this
country

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jahewson
The logical conclusion of your arguments basically Fascism - putting profit
above people, which isn’t remotely close to common sense. Nor is labelling
those who oppose locking children in cages as “extremists”.

Shouldn’t businesses be free to serve who they want to?

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shard972
> The logical conclusion of your arguments basically Fascism - putting profit
> above people

Fascism is about putting profit about people? I thought Fascism was commonly
associated with National Socialism which doesn't sound very pro profits.

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bradleyjg
On the contrary the entire philosophy was built around the idea that every
sector of society -- business, labor, churches, and so on should serve the end
goals of state and more abstractly the nation/race. But today ignorant people
use the term "fascism" to mean "something I don't like". It's a _shanda_.

