
U.S. blocks Amazon efforts to stop shareholder votes on facial recognition - pseudolus
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-facial-recognition/u-s-blocks-amazon-efforts-to-stop-shareholder-votes-on-facial-recognition-idUSKCN1RG32N
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k2enemy
A little bit of background that might be helpful--

Shareholders that meet pretty minimal criteria are eligible to include a
proposal on the proxy statement and to be voted on at a company's annual
meeting. As part of this, the shareholder or a representative must be present
at the annual meeting and gets a few minutes to stand up and present their
proposal.

In order to avoid this becoming a platform for every special interest group to
gain an audience for their pet cause, the SEC has a list of criteria that
proposals must meet. If the company believes that the proposal does not meet
these criteria, they can petition the SEC for an exclusion, which if granted,
lets the company ignore the proposal:
[https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/17/240.14a-8](https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/17/240.14a-8)

Most shareholder proposals have no hope of passing and are a tool to raise
awareness and get publicity for an issue. My guess is that this proposal has
zero chance of passing, but that Amazon both wanted to exclude the proposal 1)
because they want to exclude all shareholder proposals as a matter of course
and 2) that they do not want to give this issue publicity.

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TaylorAlexander
That does make it feel like they want the benefits of being a publicly traded
company without being held accountable by the public. And hey, I get it - I
hate being held accountable for things. But I hope Amazon loses and it at
least goes to vote. Surveillance is a serious public concern and we should
have an actual debate about it, not stifle discussion.

~~~
okr
Another way is to sell the stocks, in my opinion. That is the tool by which
the invested public can express, that they no longer trust in the future of a
private company.

Another tool is to go into politics and change the law, that forbids
surveillance technology to be sold to governments. Which then influences the
future of Amazon.

And a third way, do not work for companies, that you do not see a future in.
Either by your own moral standards or ideas or simply because of long term
outcome.

But maybe that is old fashioned, non collective me. :-)

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kbenson
_According to correspondence posted on the SEC website, Amazon had sought the
regulator’s permission to skip the proposals as being insignificant to its
business, among other things, but was turned down on March 28.

Amazon then took the unusual step of asking for a reconsideration of that
decision, but was again rebuffed in a April 3 letter from the agency._

I think if you feel the need to ask again, because you really don't want to
let them vote on it, that works against the idea that it's insignificant to
your business...

~~~
FakeComments
To me, it is a perfectly coherent argument that the topic is insignificant to
your business, but that the associated politicking at your meeting might be
disruptive (particularly if you expect it to be based on inaccurate
information).

We don’t know if Amazon is honestly arguing from that position, or being
dishonest as you imply.

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vertline3
If it was insignificant then there would be no fight over it, Amazon would
drop it. The fact that Amazon does not drop it, means there is significance.

It's a catch 22

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hjk05
Let’s do a quick substitution and see if you argument holds if we insert
something we can hopefully both agree would definately be insignificant.

Let’s assume someone scheduled a vote to force Bezos to get a hair transplant
or quit his position. Could we agree then that this would be insignificant to
Amazons business? Could we agree that it would still be insignificant even if
Amazon fought to drop that vote? I’d think so.

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killjoywashere
Last I checked Jeff's hair wasn't a critical element in the chain of events
leading to automated means of global social control.

~~~
ctvo
You're trying to stop a tidal wave by standing in front of it instead of
addressing the root problem: you have no trust in our systems to not abuse
this technology, including law enforcement and the federal government.

Stopping Amazon's poorly implemented facial recognition system won't stop the
N start-ups in the space who are doing it better. It won't stop the Chinese
government, which is already using much more advanced versions of this
technology to police a significant portion of the human population.

Let's say you do manage to stop Amazon from offering this service. Do you
think the problem is resolved? Will police departments in the US stop trying
to use this technology or will they likely source it from somewhere else with
less publicity?

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michaelmrose
Someday you will die why are you bothering to eat a hearty breakfast now?

Our world is the sum of countless factors. Giving up issues large and small
will on net make the world worse to larger or smaller degrees.

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dsfyu404ed
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that a business who's biggest
customers are the general public (amazon.com) and techies (AWS) stands to lose
a heck of a lot if it develops a brand image as big brother's right hand. Then
there's the whole politics/regulation situation, do you really want to risk
becoming the poster child for why the tech giants should be broken up?
Amazon's facial recognition business is minuscule, why wouldn't they kill it
to save face?

~~~
chrisweekly
+1 for "save face" \-- nice. :)

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matt4077
This is as good a time as ever to point out that it’s a misconception that
companies are somehow legally bound to maximize shareholder value at all
costs.

Only some juridiction actually have any law to (broadly) that effect. In
practice, corporate officers have extremely wide latitude to decide what’s in
the long-term interest of the company. That’s why companies can support
charities, or not engage in warfare, or innovate in recycling, or taking the
lead in privacy, or leave China due to censorship without any legal risk. One
can argue that such efforts are in the shareholders‘ interest for PR reasons,
but then one has essentially given up the argument, because anything can be
framed as an excersize in PR. I have also witnessed countless acts of charity
that never became public, such as donating leftover goods or keeping employees
in personal crises on the payroll.

The only successful challenge along this line of argumentation I am aware of
is Craigslist, and that required the founder to explicitly state their
intentions to harm the company for rather esthetic considerations.

A shareholder-above-anything philosophy is also just not good policy. While
capitalism has been a stellar success in harnessing selfishness for the common
good, that is not evidence to suggest attempts to go beyond-and-above what’s
legally required are actively harmful. Capitalism works well because bottom-up
decision-making works best. Centrally (top-down) enforcing selfishness is
bound to be just as detrimental as Moscow deciding what to plant this spring.

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craftyguy
They aren't legally bound to maximize profits, but they are extremely
motivated to.

~~~
jlarocco
The part you're leaving out is that it's the shareholders who instigate that
motivation. If enough shareholders want the company to do something else
instead, then there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.

The underlying problem is that almost everybody buys stock as an investment,
not to take active roles in running companies or make political statements.

~~~
craftyguy
Well, yea, that was kind of implied...

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kkarakk
>Civil liberties groups have raised concerns including findings by researchers
that Amazon’s technology struggles more than some peers’ to identify the
gender of individuals with darker skin, prompting fears of unjust arrests.
Amazon has defended its work and said all users must follow the law.

am i missing something or is that last line really weirdly phrased?

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JulianMorrison
It's disingenuously phrased, the potential worst users write their own laws.

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tjpnz
Is this an attempt by Bezos to establish some kind of precedent? I cannot see
a vote on this specific issue going against Amazon.

~~~
matt4077
I cannot see this product being more than a rounding error in Amazon‘s
revenue, ever. In such a light, I am surprised they keep at it despite the bad
PR it has already caused.

Maybe they have dug in for purely emotional reasons now, and need some
shareholders to set them straight. Or maybe there even are enough shareholders
that value behaving ethically more than money. There’s no law of either
governments, physics, or human behavior that prohibits that.

I guess there is a tradition of deference to corporate leadership, especially
among institutional investors. But there have been cracks in that consensus,
with for example Blackrock (the largest of them) making more noises wrt such
issues (trade in weapons, climate change, etc).

~~~
FakeComments
Facial recognition is key to some of their projects — say, verifying who uses
a security badge or (possibly) things like the Go store to match you with your
account.

It’s also ignoring the generally silent shareholders who want Amazon to
develop such technologies, who want them to have government contracts, etc. Or
who view Amazon managing such a service in the open and where we can discuss
it as superior to someone like Palantir doing the same, and don’t believe it’s
possible to restrict all companies from developing that technology —
particularly those less open to public pressure or oversight.

You’re assuming a vocal cohort of anti-American, uninformed activists
represent the majority of Amazon shares — and I don’t think they do.

Frankly, if BlackRock drops weapons trade, I’ll drop my iShares: that would be
them failing to represent me as my fiduciary.

~~~
michaelmrose
Amazon has no real future in physical retail and facial recognition would be
crap at ensuring the security of your premises. You would be better off paying
a person to verify a badge with a picture. Fewer false positives and not
fooled by changes in facial hair.

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bsenftner
So much noise for a dog of a product. Amazon's FR is nowhere in the hierarchy
of respected facial recognition providers, and their expense it one of the
highest. They are a non-player in the industry, and really only exist in the
industry in the general consumers eyes only. If a potential client mentions
Amazon's FR, we know we're dealing with a complete outsider. (FR lead
developer here of a real product in this space.)

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ojilles
I read your last line as:

"FR lead developer here of a real product in this space, likely to be acquired
over the next few years, possibly by Amazon."

There's no telling what small thing today will look like in a few years down
the road.

