
Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People - hudon
https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/yes-amazon-tracking-people
======
sedachv
> When most people think of the tech giant Amazon, they think of an
> innovative, consumer-friendly company responsible for affordable deliveries.

This is one of those instances where I say to myself, "I wish I had listened
to Richard Stallman X years ago":
[https://stallman.org/amazon.html](https://stallman.org/amazon.html)

~~~
CoolGuySteve
> Emo Phillips once made this joke: The other day a woman came up to me and
> said, "Didn't I see you on television?" I said, "I don't know. You can't see
> out the other way." Evidently Amazon has made that joke obsolete.

Like Stallman, I'm so uncomfortable installing a listening device in my home
like OK Google, Alexa, Siri, etc.

It creeps me out on a visceral level unlike any other kind of snooping.

~~~
ma2rten
I don't understand why so many tech-literate people have an issue with that.
As I am sure you know, those devices only record your voice and send it to the
server when they hear their hotword. The hotword detection has to be done on
the device itself for technical reasons (battery and data usage).

Theoretically it's possible that the companies that build those devices lie
and actually record you other times. But the same applies to any internet
connected device that has a camera and/or microphone, such as pretty much
every laptop and mobile phone.

~~~
andrepd
>As I am sure you know, those devices only record your voice and send it to
the server when they hear their hotword.

HAH. Says who?? Are you seriously going to trust companies with a terrible
track record and every incentive to do this, are you going to trust them not
to use their always on listening device to listen to you? I swear I don't say
this to derail the conversation but I literally cannot fathom in my head how
you can think like that unless you're a paid shill.

~~~
thudrs
It is in the hardware. You can take one apart and see for yourself. These
devices will not activate unless they at least think they hear the hotword.
Once activated though, nothing is stopping them from staying on. Although Im
sure you can just watch their internet traffic to prove if its listening in
the moment.

~~~
mercer
You'd have to do that 24/7 though, if I understand correctly, because these
devices can be updated at will.

------
patrickg_zill
As long as I or you can use it to track the coming and going of your
Congressman and Senators, at the same price that Amazon charges others, I
guess it is okay. That nice townhouse he visited with the attractive blonde
who lives there, while his wife was out of town? It's ok for me to track and
then publish the info, right?

We're all equal when we are in public view, right?

~~~
atomical
Imagine license plate readers all over town committing license plate numbers
to a blockchain.

~~~
krick
What do you mean by "committing license plate numbers to a blockchain"?

~~~
Latteland
Probably that the records are preserved in some way that they can't be
redacted or removed later.

~~~
krick
What records? I don't understand what this is supposed to describe. Just
writing every plate number some device has seen to the append-only DB? Is that
it? What's value in that?

~~~
stilldavid
I think the value would be with recording a location and time with the plate
number, not just that a plate exists.

------
wepple
This is a terribly clickbait-y title for HN. Amazon is not tracking people,
AWS has a service offered to anyone who wants it which would be useful for
large scale surveillance.

Facial recognition services are incredibly close to neutral technologies in my
opinion. If we truly want to stop abuse of them, it should be done with
legislation. Getting mad and ranty at one of the many offerings (which also
includes open source software) because it feels good to beat up a tech giant
will have no useful impact.

~~~
alexandercrohde
> Facial recognition services are incredibly close to neutral technologies in
> my opinion. If we truly want to stop abuse of them, it should be done with
> legislation.

You're entitled to that opinion. But it's just your opinion.

What I like to ask myself is: given that we know we had a corrupt individual
in the _highest_ office of the US government in the last 50 years (i.e.
Nixon), how might that have turned out with each new technology that's
exclusively under the executive branch's control?

~~~
candiodari
Can we please, for once, make this not a "Trump is evil" thread ? Besides,
yes, Trump is evil, but among the general US population there are far worse
people than him, and despite what you probably think, together they have far,
far more control over your life than Trump does. Private individuals are
already implementing something worse than China's social credit score all over
America. [1] Currently they're limited somewhat by technology, and I mean that
in the worst possible way: they're more limited by what they think the
technology can do, more so than by what is actually possible.

Building webcams that asses creditworthiness of store customers and the
likelihood of returns is possible today. How long until it happens ? How long
until we discover that badly dressed black people are often flagged by
whatever tool comes out ?

Tracking people by their faces ? Been done, easy now (hell, opencv comes with
it built in, so does YOLO). Tracking/identifying people by their movements
(and I mean by how they walk, how they grab things, ...) ? Been done. Tracking
people by the proportions of the limb lengths ? Been done. Taking a bad human
tracker, feeding it into an LSTM and get vastly better performance when
presenting it with video ? Been done.

And it gets much worse: outsmarting most of the human race ? Been done (let's
be honest: humans have lost the Turing challenge. AIs are better at chatting
up humans than other humans are). But no worries : humans still beat AIs at
specific problems, and indeed humans still beat AIs ... well not at making AIs
actually (genetic algorithms seem to beat everything else here). But humans
still beat at "full system" AI architecture. For now.

And let's go further: how long until you can no longer talk to another human
being ? Because that's exactly where voice recognition will lead. The 2030
version of Google Duplex : [2]

And of course, that makes the technology itself evil, not it's use by the
executive branch per se. I'm sure they'll abuse it, but I guarantee they won't
be the worst of your worries.

And it's MAD. Machine learning has joined the set of technologies that we must
make sure we have. Otherwise, a conflict with, say, China is going to be
thoroughly unpleasant (which would make them a lot more likely to start it as
well). So we can't skip that.

And yet in this thread, nobody is talking about outlawing machine learning
itself. And there certainly is no international effort to do that. Without
that option, we might as well stop talking about measures we can take since
they'll be absurdly ineffective.

You can "do no evil" but fact of the matter is since 1970 (and really since
1870) humans have been competing by robots. Humans can effectively no longer
needlepoint, because they can't do so usefully, profitably, effectively,
whatever you want to call it. Systematically the realm of humans is moving
from everything to a niche.

Today, AI is a mostly-invisible salesperson making you purchase more stuff on
Amazon.com, making you watch more advertisements on
Microsoft/FB/Youtube/Google, and so on. It's literally choosing what to
present to you in order to accomplish that, just like that friendly
salesperson did when you walked into bed bath and beyond in 1995.

There is no solution here that is anywhere close to even being discussed.

[1] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-
surprisi...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-surprising-
return-of-the-repo-
man/2018/05/15/26fcd30e-4d5a-11e8-af46-b1d6dc0d9bfe_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.0cc2b2d1a516)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flLoSxd2nNY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flLoSxd2nNY)

~~~
ams6110
My local Kroger is now taking video of the faces of every customer as they
check out. To their credit they make it obvious by having a display screen at
each register where you can see what they are recording, but I stopped
shopping there for that reason.

~~~
candiodari
Great. Do you think it matters ?

For example, to give some vague indication of just how pervasive it already
is:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=index+of+public+webcams](https://www.google.com/search?q=index+of+public+webcams)

I guarantee you there's 5000 private webcams and non-web cams pointed at the
street for everyone listed there. 100 government ones.

Stopping shopping is not an effective punishment, and will not lead to
stopping progress on machine learning. I would just ignore it. Besides, at
this point, it's probably just a security cam. 24h and your video is gone
(assuming the store wasn't attacked).

------
hakejam
Rekognition is a public service and not specific to law enforcement use[1].

[1]:
[https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/](https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/)

Disclaimer: I work for AWS.

~~~
frgtpsswrdlame
>Rekognition is a public service

When this is used to track/recognize my face in a crowd what service is it
that I'm receiving?

~~~
chadmeister
Targeted Social Engineering Services :)

~~~
eecc
Using batons and castor oil

------
justboxing
> Amazon’s facial recognition service, Rekognition, is designed to identify
> and track people going about their daily business. This isn’t hyperbole - a
> Rekognition spokesperson explicitly mentioned real-time tracking and
> identification at an Amazon Web Services summit earlier this year. The same
> spokesperson went on to call Orlando a “smart city,” with cameras everywhere
> that allow authorities to track persons of interest in real time.

Truly creepy.

~~~
pjc50
I wonder what the GDPR implications of this are.

~~~
tajen
If a European goes there, he’ll have to sign a GDPR agreement? but if the city
grew tired of that, they could forbid access to Europeans altogether. Which
I’m not surprised would happen one day, perhaps not under this form, but
becausr of our overprotected status.

~~~
hbosch
Sorry sir, we can’t let you through customs until you Accept the U.S. Terms of
Service and Privacy Policy.

~~~
paxys
Sounds funny, but this could actually happen. By entering the country you
agree to give up your EU rights, or turn around and get back on the plane.

~~~
njarboe
Yes, this is what happens. National sovereignty still exists. Maybe, since
Europeans have a supra-national entity above their countries, they don't quite
grok that everywhere else a country is the top giver of the law.

~~~
ben_w
I doubt it’s particularly different to Americans having trouble with the idea
that not everyone has the first or second amendments. Or, even, an explicit
constitution.

~~~
oneplane
It's the same with many europeans having trouble with the idea that you can't
safely drink tap water, have no public health guarantee and education isn't
equal for everyone in the US ;-)

On a more serious note; stuff like the US amendments is often already included
in the base law (the generic name for constitution) as they are much older
than the US. The times where the base law was somewhat more moldable (like
before widespread literacy) made that possible. For example, freedom of
religion is pretty universal, except in countries where a ruling religion
exists which inherently to the religion bans all others. Arms are usually
removed from base laws a few hundred years in as they directly conflict with
the laws that ban killing people.

------
LinuxBender
Does this service exclude children under the age of 13?

------
all_blue_chucks
Facial recognition software isn't particularly new and isn't specific to
Amazon. Cato is just trying to sling manufactured mud at Bezos to further a
political agenda because that's what they do.

~~~
wwweston
Isn't Cato about "a political agenda" here in the same way the same way the
EFF has political agendas?

This issue is political in the sense that it's very much about _social
policy_... and it's just possible that it's bad social policy to let people
perform/offer surveillance-at-scale as a service.

(It _is_ kindof funny to see Cato discover one significant limit of a general
philosophy of private market freedoms, though.)

~~~
analyticascent
Specifically, they take issue with the _government_ creating demand for
surveillance technology. Nothing unusual for a public policy organization that
has Cato's perspective.

------
oculusthrift
Not a fan of Amazon but this article is directly sponsored by the koch
brothers. kind of weird we have transparently political articles like this yet
others are banned.

~~~
analyticascent
Under what conditions should financial support from people who share an
organization's thesis disqualify what that organization has to say on an
issue?

------
lazybreather
I am in this dangerous situation where I see posts like "X is tracking people
online" and just scroll though without even giving it a thought. Help me!

~~~
gordaco
This kind of bad news fatigue is a very real (and frequent) phenomenon. And
it's really, really scary when you think about it. We are so accustomed to
having less and less privacy (among many other things) that moving downward at
the usual speed of the last decade is just the new normal.

Even worse, knowing about this phenomenon seems to do very little to stop it.
At least that's what I'm feeling.

------
mvanbaak
No, Amazon isn't! It's the company/government/whatever that implements a
service Amazon is offering to everyone.

All it takes you to do the same is create an AWS account, fill in some info so
they can bill you for the services you use, a bit of code and some camera's.

I know it's very popular these days to quickly blame it on the big tech names,
and yes they are doing a lot of shady things, but articles like this are
simply name calling and not explaining how things really work.

Besides that, this technology is not new. Xovis camera's for example have this
ability build in for a long time already. Those camera's are installed in a
lot of public places like shopping malls, railway stations, airports etc and
they are used to track you. Just because Amazon made a scalable central
version of this doesn't make them track you.

People who write articles like this should do some research first ...

------
analyticascent
Cases like this (where government is the "consumer" for the technology) make
me think surveillance tech could be the law enforcement version of military
spending on defense contractors.

------
spilk
I guess we will all have to wear a full face of juggalo makeup to remain
anonymous in public from now on.

~~~
SN76477
Shadowrun was right.

[https://cvdazzle.com](https://cvdazzle.com)

------
ryanmercer
They deliver stuff to my door within 1 hour to 3 days and save me the hassle
of driving 15 minutes each way to Walmart, the closest option for varied
purchasing, so... I'm fine with it.

------
_bxg1
"asleep at the wheel" is extremely generous.

~~~
zaroth
It’s the hoi polloi they are hoping are asleep in this case.

But IMO no amount of hand wringing will stop this inevitable total
surveillance short of a constitutional amendment.

~~~
DenisM
We might just need to work on that.

I imagine a high-profile incident with privacy violations will turn up one day
and make the public interested. By the time that happens it would be
beneficial to already have a privacy amendment proposal.

------
closetohome
I'm a little surprised that a Libertarian think tank is taking issue with a
private company going about its very profitable business.

~~~
heelhook
Looking beyond the clickbait-y headline, I think the article takes issue with
the use of this technology by government, which fits perfectly well with a
Libertarian POV.

------
briga
I distinctly remember watching the Amazon conference when they demonstrated
their facial recognition software. It occurred to me that if this technology
was around in Mao's China or Stalin's Russia the twentieth century might have
been darker and bloodier than it already was. This technology certainly has a
lot of potential for improving, but it also has a huge potential for violating
human rights. Kudos to the author for talking about this.

~~~
rapind
Many governments and large rich organizations already have this... so really
AWS is just democratizing it. While I agree that's it's creepy af, it's not
exactly new. Perhaps through this widening of access the stakes become more
obvious and talked about (shining a light).

Once a thousand startups are using this in a non-secretive way, maybe voters
will wake up and demand regulation?

It may be a side-effect, but Kudos to Amazon regardless if it does raise
awareness.

------
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.

~~~
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.

~~~
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...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/22/amazon-rekognition-
facial-recognition-police)

