
Amazon’s Disturbing Plan to Add Face Surveillance to Your Front Door - octosphere
https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-technology/surveillance-technologies/amazons-disturbing-plan-add-face-surveillance-yo-0
======
Santosh83
It is not the technology that is dangerous but the scale and manner of its
deployment. Patented, opaque, closed source, championed by mega-corporations
closely allied with powerful governments, entirely beyond the analysis or
oversight of the vast majority of citizens, completely connected realtime to
various other systems, automated, eternally slurping up data for indefinite
storage... these are the real concerning factors.

After all, a good old security guard also does 'face recognition' of everyone
passing by, but with a human there are obvious limits and a person to
confront, charge or circumvent. With ubiquitous, tiny robots all over the
place, society will get sharply stratified into the 'watched' and the
'watchers' and the latter will get access to nearly limitless data and power.
That's not good.

~~~
bilbo0s
> _society will get sharply stratified into the 'watched' and the 'watchers'
> and the latter will get access to nearly limitless data and power..._

Don't kid yourself, even the 'watchers' will be 'watched'. The people bringing
all these systems together will not be your local yocal Barney Fifes. They
will be professional and highly intelligent technical teams whose members have
likely studied little other than security and intelligence gathering for their
entire professional lives. These are not the type of teams that carelessly
leave obvious security holes like that laying around.

Taken as a whole, the technologies coming out today will enable surveillance
regimes the likes of which even the UK and China never previously would have
dared to dream up.

~~~
gaze
Why do you think this? Who are these elites that never leave security holes in
things? The snowden leaks show they don't work for the NSA. They don't work in
consumer electronics... the deeply flawed copy protection schemes in most
video game consoles show that. They don't work for the FSB. What gives you the
impression that these people even exist?

People seem to not understand the asymmetry in difficulty between offence and
defense. For something to be broken, there just needs to be one fuckup, or a
few tiny fuckups that can be linked together. Smart people are not infallible.
Everything is exploited eventually. The only foolproof thing to do is not to
build the infrastructure in the first place.

But yes, I agree with your last point. There's no privacy anymore.

------
jbigelow76
_Likewise, homeowners can also add photos of “suspicious” people into the
system and then the doorbell’s facial recognition program will scan anyone
passing their home._

This has to be the worst part of it, if you've ever been part of a suburban
neighborhood that uses NextDoor as a community tool you'll know that Ring
doorbell videos of "others" crank the pearl-clutching paranoia of bored
homeowners up to 11. The comment sections will go from "Did you get a license
plate?" to "Hurry, add his face to the database before he comes back to rob
and murder us all!"

~~~
whoisjuan
I get why this could be problematic under the wrong context.

But if I have video footage of someone approaching my door, not knocking and
just looking aroud to then leave; and I'm given the option to track if that
person shows up again in future video footage, you bet I would use that
option.

This is not because I'm paranoic and I think right away that anyone showing up
to my door will murder or rob me, but because said person already exhibited
suspicious activity around my private property.

Why would I take for granted that this person was simply lost or innocently
looking around? If that's the case, then my camera would never see them again.
But if they show up a second time, I want to know that.

~~~
daveFNbuck
So under this system if I walk up to your door mistakenly before realizing I'm
at the wrong place, the police will be alerted any time I walk past a house.

~~~
richrichardsson
Ring their doorbell. When they answer, tell them "Hi, this isn't the house I
was looking for, but you've got that surveillance system in place, so I don't
want to be registered as 'suspicious'. OK, sorry not sorry for wasting your
time, goodbye."

~~~
Klonoar
...for every house? I don't go up to random houses and ring their doorbells to
begin with, because nobody does that anymore.

~~~
ilikepi
Nobody? Where I live (suburbs, New England, USA), it's pretty common to be
visited in person by local political candidates and/or volunteers during
campaign season. I doubt this is in any way unique to my neighborhood.

~~~
Klonoar
Campaign season is an outlier, and I've had that happen... well, I can count
the number of times on one hand, since a decade ago.

------
nonamechicken
In my state Kerala in India, police seems to have started using face
recognition. There was a huge protest recently in a famous temple called
Sabarimala. Police had installed 12 cameras in the temple compound. If I
understood correctly, the system compares live video feed against a database
and alerts the police if anyone in the database was caught in the camera.

Quoted from the below link:

>"The cameras are equipped with artificial intelligence (AI). They can
recognise people, who are among a crowd, by identifying faces. To ensure
safety, the photographs of wanted people will be uploaded on the system.
Whenever a person who is in the wanted list appears before the camera it will
detect the person and send popup notifications to the three control rooms at
Sabarimala," said IG Manoj Abraham, Cyberdome nodal officer.

[http://www.newindianexpress.com/states/kerala/2018/oct/14/no...](http://www.newindianexpress.com/states/kerala/2018/oct/14/now-
facial-detection-cameras-to-catch-crooks-in-sabarimala-1885170.html)

While I dont know the specifics, police used this system to arrest 200 known
protestors by preparing a database of 1500 people and had the system go
through over 800 hours of footage.

If that is not enough, now they are planning to use drones with facial
recognition as well.

[http://www.newindianexpress.com/specials/2018/sep/17/kerala-...](http://www.newindianexpress.com/specials/2018/sep/17/kerala-
police-plans-to-add-facial-recognition-systems-on-drones-1872892.html)

I thought the plans to use face recognition in airports was scary, but they
are taking it to an entirely different level altogether.

~~~
ep103
NYPD was using this during Occupy. Everyone complained that Occupy lacked
organization.

But what was happening on the ground was that the NYPD was identifying who
potential leaders were by using face recognition technology and (we believed)
cell phone tracking to identify people who consistently showed up to different
meetings.

They would then use the same face identification technology to pick these
people out of crowds, and arrest them before or when major events occurred, so
they would be in holding during the event.

Eventually the individuals would either be charged for resisting arrest, or
let go since they were arrested without reason. Which dovetails into the other
NYPD/LAPD tactic during mass protests of , in their words: "arrest people now,
end the protest now, pay the civil liberties fines 10 years later."

~~~
SCHiM
I have never heard of this, do you have references to this?

If this is true, and even if you (or someone) made it up but it is a practical
possibility, then it has truly horrific consequences for social organization
and the peaceful transition of power (democracy).

I've written about that before:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15110645](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15110645)

This is bad.

If you take away more and more ways to (relatively) peacefully protest
something (for example by arresting the leaders as you say). Then the
frustration will just continue, and grow and grow until the only way is
violence, say what Marx had in mind.

~~~
cronix
> New York City Police Department documents obtained by The Verge show that
> police camera teams were deployed to hundreds of Black Lives Matter and
> Occupy Wall Street protests from 2011–2013 and 2016. Originally acquired
> through a Freedom of Information Law request by New York attorney David
> Thompson of Stecklow & Thompson, the records are job reports from the NYPD’s
> Technical Assistance Response Unit (TARU) that document over 400 instances
> in which the unit’s video team attended, and sometimes filmed,
> demonstrations. More important than the records the NYPD turned over,
> however, are those that it claims it cannot find: namely, any documents
> demonstrating that legal reviews and authorizations of these surveillance
> operations took place.

[https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/22/15016984/nypd-video-
surve...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/22/15016984/nypd-video-surveillance-
protests-occupy-black-lives-matter)

~~~
haidut
The MUCH bigger story is FBI standing ready to kill protestors with snipers
"if deemed necessary". All of these disruption tactics articles are just
"soft" news to gently irritate the public and convince it that the truth is
known, is regularly leaked and the press will keep the public informed. The
real truth (the planned murder of activists MLK-style) is mostly NOT known,
virtually no news outlets write about it, and FBI refused to declassify it.
The truth is this: If somebody is a real threat to established order they get
killed, plain and simple. This should be the discussion, not "disruption"
tactics of the police and how allowable/legal they are.

------
bluetidepro
"Amazon’s Disturbing Plan..."? Come on. I agree this is scary and
"disturbing", but doorbell cameras have been around for awhile. It's not like
Amazon is the first to do this. Phrasing like that always makes me immediately
distrust the article's intent, even if at face value what they are saying is
something I agree about. Just because they are openly saying it in a patent,
doesn't mean the other companies weren't already doing it in some other
sketchy way.

With all that said, what did you think would happen when people openly started
allowing listening/video devices on the inside/outside of their homes? Of
course people (law or others) are eventually going to want a way to utilize
that data if it's useful to them. The same way that I'm sure
Facebook/Twitter/etc. work with law enforcement with their data.

~~~
empath75
Did you even read the article. It’s a patent for sending facial and biometric
recognition results to law enforcement.

~~~
bsenftner
...and it is an extremely late patent. Patents for this type of innovation
first appeared 25+ years ago when IP video was first happening. In fact, the
lateness of this filing smells like it is purely for the creation of outrage
articles such as what we are discussing.

~~~
PavlovsCat
> In fact, the lateness of this filing smells like it is purely for the
> creation of outrage articles such as what we are discussing.

Amazon filed this patent now, instead of earlier, purely for the creation of
"outrage articles"? Can you walk me through the logic here?

------
mosselman
News messages such as these are increasingly scary and alarming. They paint a
picture of a very nearby dystopian society that, until now, was the stuff of
fiction.

The news is successful in scaring us, but what can we do against this type of
thing? What can I as an individual do? I can install ad-blockers, etc on my
PC, but how can I prevent the technology described in the article from
impacting my life or that of my children? I don't want them to grow up in a
1984 or Brave New World scenario. What can I do today to stop from, at the
very least, my country from going down a path where this is considered normal?

~~~
CalRobert
Well, you can:

* Push your politicians to support GDPR-style legislation

* Donate to your politicians so they actually listen

* Run for office

* Try some weird tech solution like dazzle clothing (this won't work most likely)

* Take inspiration from Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, and emigrate to a place with governance that more closely reflects your own values. A place covered by the GDPR would be a good start. _Presumably_ if your country loses enough talented people it will work to retain them. But, that's a pretty long-term approach and I have doubts about it's true efficacy (My homeland is hardly building great bike infrastructure since I left, and that was one of the biggest motivations)

* (Also pretty extreme and of dubious efficacy long-term) live off-grid somewhere remote and not walk by people's houses.

Probably a lost cause, though. I find it infuriating that my voice is being
listened to by Alexa, etc. when I'm in other people's homes, but they don't
seem to care. Maybe civilization will collapse and render this a moot point.

~~~
mosselman
Thanks for the suggestions. They follow some of my own thoughts.

> Push your politicians to support GDPR-style legislation

Luckily I live in the EU, only 'luckily' might be an overstatement with
regards to privacy if you look at the article 13 issue. Apart from that, at
least to what I perceive, privacy carries at least some meaning here still.

> Donate to your politicians so they actually listen

I do not have enough money to make politicians listen I think.

> Run for office

This seems like one of the only conceivable routes to take that could have
some real impact. I don't want to run for some political office, but at some
point I might have to.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I think Nietzsche thought that we shouldn't give
power that those who want it. Right now there are a lot of people in power who
want that political power and use that to advance themselves in life, rather
than helping society. Not only in politics however; Amazon's developers who
work on these intrusive technologies are just as guilty. I would not work on
this type of technology because I can't justify this to myself as a person,
but apparently many people leave the person they are at the door when they go
to work, developers and politicians alike.

> ...emigrate...

I could consider this at some stage, but that would be to protect myself and
my family against imaginable changes to political situations with regards to
privacy, not as much as a way to force government to change their views.

> ... live off-grid

This sounds like a great way to draw attention to yourself. Besides, I don't
want to live in the woods, I want to live in society without my privacy being
violated constantly by advertisers, other companies and government. Because
everybody has a right to their thoughts staying their own.

~~~
CalRobert
"This sounds like a great way to draw attention to yourself. Besides, I don't
want to live in the woods, I want to live in society without my privacy being
violated constantly by advertisers, other companies and government. Because
everybody has a right to their thoughts staying their own. "

Yeah, it just means you won't have to walk by the doorbells. I wasn't really
serious about it. And between cheap drones, IR cameras, etc. if somebody wants
to find you, they will.

At this point I think your only real hope is finding a place that aligns with
your values, moving there, and working to keep it good. Effecting real change
is 99% luck and places heading towards dystopia have a lot of wealthy forces
arrayed against you.

------
imgabe
This article is needlessly histrionic. Companies will patent anything they can
just so they can have the patent and not somebody else. Jumping from that to
"Amazon's plan to bring about a nightmarish dystopia" is a bit much.

 _Could_ this bring about a police state? Yes absolutely. But the technology
is possible to build, so someone will build it, or at least patent it. There's
no preventing the technology from existing.

We don't prevent a police state from happening by freaking out about the
technology that enables it. We prevent it by voting for responsible leaders.
So let's just assume that the technology for government oppression is going to
exist and make sure we structure our government in such a way that it doesn't
oppress us.

------
gdulli
I got this creepy recruiting email from Amazon.

"Amazon PeopleTech’s mission is to re-invent ways for our employees to connect
with one another. You will work closely with our team of engineers in
designing a strategy for new projects like our new Facial Recognition
technology for Amazon’s Time and Attendance systems"

I love connecting with people!

------
jf-
Have you heard of those handy online tracking companies, the ones that build
profiles of you based on as much data they can scrape, steal or buy, mainly
for advertising, but occasionally for more dubious purposes? Well, now thanks
to Amazon Ring® powered by Rekognition™, you can have that same privacy
invasion experience in real life! Not carrying your mobile device? Not to
worry! Advanced facial recognition technology means that never again will you
need to worry about going anywhere without being surreptitiously tracked!
Every location, every purchase, and with optional amazon echo, every
conversation. Amazon - total surveillance, today.

My point is, I don't like it, and this is actually where we're heading with
this crap. The same tracking we currently have online, but in the real world.

------
mc32
I'll tell you what:

1\. No question this raises concerns about the system pinging authorities as
someone who has been flagged in the system is detected.

2\. This will sell like hotcakes with people who are on NextDoor. Everyday
there is an alert about a burglary, stolen packages and people snooping around
their properties. These people are very likely to approve sending any
images/video of interest to police. (Right now it's very mechanical, scroll
through video, capture and send --people will put out requests for footage
very often).

I think the only thing we can do is call for strict regulation on its use.
It's gonna get deployed and it's gonna get used.

------
LinuxBender
Has anyone trolled Amazon yet with video loops of bad things happening? i.e.
webm's from 4chan and such. I'm sure it would violate their ToS. Would it
break any laws?

I could imagine selling a service that multiplexes video cameras and only
sends Amazon devices live video when there is really motion and not just when
they say there is motion. Meaning, put the security control back on the home
owner.

------
yalogin
Ring automatically enrolls you into a community program and you don't have an
option. In fact you cannot even use Ring without signing up with your address
and signing up for the community feature. They suck up your data by force. You
know its amazon, they don't have any qualms and reservations about how they
use it.

------
floatingatoll
I don't welcome "general facial recognition", but I do welcome this specific
and single use case. As someone with an active stalker for the past two
decades, I really appreciate the value provided by a device that watches
specifically for the person that's sent me death threats.

------
throwawaysea
In my neighborhood, we are impacted by constant property crime - burglaries,
car break-ins, mail theft, porch pirates, you name it. After being a victim
myself, I can say that it does indeed cause an increase in anxiety, especially
the sense of helplessness that comes with it. The police department here is
woefully understaffed and has been ordered to not focus on property crime
because their staffing only leaves room to focus on violent crime. The under-
staffing is in part due to the anti-cop sentiment of the far-left activists.
This leaves law-abiding residents to largely fend for themselves.

I have always felt it would be very useful to be able to identify people in
videos who may have committed a crime locally or elsewhere in the city, to
learn of their movements, where they might live, what other crimes they
committed, etc. This would help police prioritize some non-violent crime
effectively, get a high return on the time they spend investigating property
crimes (actually catching criminals), which would then in turn serve as a
deterrent that is outright missing right now. I would gladly contribute my
video to that cause, as would almost everyone in my neighborhood.

A word on the commenters here going on about 'pearl-clutching': that's just
the latest in pejoratives that are nothing but empty stereotypes. Most people
on NextDoor in my city are reasonable, but are regularly unfairly
characterized by the far-left progressive cabal in this manner. Caring about
the safety of yourself, your loved ones, and your property is not a bad thing.
We work and live in part for those very things. If you disagree, then try
outlawing door locks. It is unbelievable to me that the rights of criminals
are more important to commenters here than the rights of those who want to
protect their own. And worse yet, the conspiracy-theory notion that we are
about to be taken over by a tyrannical government because of doorbell
recordings. If this was a topic they disagreed with, those same commenters
would readily call this a "slippery slope fallacy".

A further aside: The ACLU has been wrong a lot on this topic - for example
when they called AWS's Rekognition service a "facial recognition service"
instead of what it is, a generic object recognition service. They also did not
seem to understand how false positives/negatives are managed and why it is
fine to use an imperfect object recognition service as a first-pass filter.
And they are wrong again here - people are allowed to film on public property
and share it with whomever they want. They're allowed to perform whatever
analysis they want and share it with whomever they want, period.

~~~
someguydave
Completely agree. I’ve seen several legitimate instances of theft and porch
piracy on my local Nextdoor and the government police seem to do little about
it. Something like this would support private policing which is desperately
needed in many areas of the US

------
JohnFen
That's not surprising. Amazon is actively working to create a dystopia, and
this would be a logical next step.

------
helloworld2212
I'm quite surprised here to not have seen anyone point out the way these
patent games typically work inside of a big company.

Often a company is motivated to increase their IP portfolio. In turn they
motivate their engineers by offering lucrative bonuses for each patent filed.
At my last company we played this game and it was roughly $3k per patent. In
general, out of the huge number of patents that get filed in a big company,
very few---if any---have any hope of ever seeing the light of day as an actual
invention.

While I agree that the technology itself is somewhat alarming and I personally
disagree with the idea of anyone building it, let's maybe save the outrage
until they announce that they are actually going to build this thing and
deploy it in the real world?

~~~
JohnFen
"let's maybe save the outrage until they announce that they are actually going
to build this thing and deploy it in the real world?"

Perhaps enough outrage now would prevent it from being deployed, or would get
them to engage in at least a tiny amount of mitigation of the worst aspects of
it.

------
xg15
Ok, now you just have to combine the cameras with a social-credit-as-a-service
ecosystem to keep your suspicious people list up to date and one or two of
these guys [1] mounted on every front porch for automatic suspicious people
deterrence - and we can get a nice Black Mirror style scenario where you will
be physically incapable of entering certain parts of the city if you pissed
off the wrong algorithm.

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/9ys1e...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/9ys1e4/automatic_sprinkler_test/)

------
choult
Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

------
wemdyjreichert
There's a solution: make it inadmissable in court. That roves a huge
incentive. And get rid of the fisa and other administrative kangaroo courts
held to different standards of evidence, preponderance thereof, and due
process.

------
PavlovsCat
"Jeff, it's much easier to pave the way for Cthulhu when you pretend to be
kind. Still a shitty thing to do, but easier."

------
sizzle
Anyone else immediately think of the all seeing 'telescreen' from 1984? What a
time to be alive...

------
vbuwivbiu
The Circle

