
Amazon Rekognition updates face detection, analysis and recognition capabilities - ydereky
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/amazon-rekognition-announces-updates-to-its-face-detection-analysis-and-recognition-capabilities/
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bhhaskin
I went to a concert the other night, and they where scanning driver licenses
and running facial recognition on everyone entering. It was very
disconcerting. It is clear to me that we need new laws to protect against the
misuse of this technology. Laws that apply to everyone without exceptions for
law enforcement. If we don't I fear we are headed towards a 1984 type of
future.

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btown
That’s... actually a reasonable way to combat ticket scalping.

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michaelt
Oh, absolutely. Great way to ensure sure the door staff are actually checking
the ID against the ticket sales records 100% of the time.

The problem is, night clubs ain't developing this stuff in-house. And whoever
develops this stuff and sells it to nightclubs will discover they can make
more money if they sell the machines to nightclubs _and_ the data to the
adtech industry.

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Jyaif
They already have the data from the ticket sale.

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dawhizkid
I played around with Rekognition a few months ago and frankly wasn’t that
impressed with what it could do. As far as I can remember it could sort of
compare if the same person was in two photos (definitely false negatives with
various photos of myself I compared), basic OCR of text off images, and not
very accurate recognition of certain things/objects.

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pupdogg
Based on OP's incident and your expereience, I think that AWS Rekognition is
currently in its consumption/learning stage. Give it a few months to
adequately digest that data and then try!

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sys_64738
Everybody should be able to copyright their likeness in images and file for
monetary damages if they believe their copyright is being infringed.

Legally, this is the only way to destroy these big brother obsessions that
creepy companies like Amazon have.

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m1sta_
That's not what copyright is for.

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AJ007
[http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/using-name-or-likeness-
anoth...](http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/using-name-or-likeness-another)

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singlow
Not sure if you meant to refute the parent, but the linked article describes
two means of protecting the use of a name or likeness which are not related to
copyright.

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metildaa
Woo, better facial recognition for all kinds of nefarious purposes!

Edit: Dead serious, how will Rekognition positively affect the common person?
All I see is a myriad of possible ways government, corporations and
individuals have abused camera footage today, and emboldened with better
technology these problems are likely to get much worse.

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ohthehugemanate
There are tons of benign/helpful use cases for face ID. Your car can recognize
you and automatically set your preferred radio stations, seat position etc.
Your computer can log you in without a password. Border control can be "scan
your passport here and keep walking". An airplane boarding card can be "take a
picture with your webcam during check-in and just walk on the plane." Your
phone can automatically "press the shutter" for a family picture when everyone
is smiling, instead of guessing at that timer thingie. Your makeup mirror can
turn on special lights when a face is in front of it. You can pre-set mood
lighting for your apartment for when you bring a new date home vs football
night. Your front door can unlock itself for a handful of trusted people, even
when you're out of town and forgot to feed the cat. Or it can set an alarm
when your mother in law comes over. You can search your entire media library
for just the right picture: "with Phil, but not Gina, where we're having fun
and in cat costumes."

Face identification has become the lightest weight authentication method
available. So anywhere you would otherwise use something you know (password)
or something you have (a transit pass), you could consider using something you
are (your face) instead. It's not right for EVERY authentication scenario, but
it should be considered for many of them.

Not everything AI is creepy or privacy invading. Especially when you consider
running it locally.

That said, Rekognition as a product specifically targets law enforcement and
federal agencies, and most of their use cases are NOT good IMO. We do need a
strong product preference for open source, or products with AI ethics
oversight.

Bias: I work for Microsoft helping big companies implement latest edge tech
like this. MS has an ethics board filtering all its AI work, the Azure face ID
product doesn't keep user data, and we often implement local-only face id in
what I consider non-creepy scenarios. So that defines a lot of how I think
"responsible implementation" looks.

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yc-kraln
There are tons of benign/helpful use cases for guns, for knives and for
explosives. This attitude is purposefully ignorant.

When developing new technologies, you need to ask not just "what good can this
do" but most importantly "how can this be misused". Sometimes the bad stuff
that you can do is way, way, way worse than the good.

Great that Microsoft has an ethics board. Facebook has an ethics board. How's
that working out for the ethnically cleansed people in Asia?

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oh-kumudo
It is not like that if Amazon didn't build it, other government agencies will
stay there in vain.

Facial recognition service is very easy to build these days, provided that
sufficient data is presented, and government has plenty of such data.

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kjar
If the governments using these these sorts of technologies are democratic,
responsive, self regulating, have an informed populace, and lack of incentive
problems. This is fine, but that’s a long chain of ifs.

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murukesh_s
I wonder why would anyone pay for the cloud services when they can build it
locally? Is it more economical?

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awirth
Is this something that is considered easy to build locally? When I last looked
at the open source options a few years ago it was basically all researchware
grade stuff. Amazon is offering this is a production service with SLAs.

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ALittleLight
I've never built any such system, but I've done some image recognition work,
and my intuition is that if you're the kind of organization that needs this
service building it yourself will not be a technological challenge.

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singlow
I was able to use Rekognition to build a custom family photo album for a
wealthy family. It allowed them to upload event photos and automatically tag
them with the names of relevant family members as well as keywords related to
objects in the photo for easy searching. It was mostly a database for building
slideshows and selecting publicity photos. Very wealthy family but not such
that they would have funded building the technology from scratch. The service
made it just about an 80 hour consulting project and most of that was just UI
and image gathering.

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mohi13
Here is a comparison we did between APIs from Microsoft Vs Amazon Vs Kairos
for face detection. Kairos came out to be much better overall.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15903490](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15903490)

