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Amazon Worker Pushes Bezos To Stop Selling Facial Recognition Tech To Police (thehill.com) 126

Posted by BeauHD from the cease-and-desist dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: An Amazon employee is seeking to put new pressure on the company to stop selling its facial recognition technology to law enforcement. An anonymous worker, whose employment at Amazon was verified by Medium, published an op-ed on that platform on Tuesday criticizing the company's facial recognition work and urging the company to respond to an open letter delivered by a group of employees. The employee wrote that the government has used surveillance tools in a way that disproportionately hurts "communities of color, immigrants, and people exercising their First Amendment rights."

"Ignoring these urgent concerns while deploying powerful technologies to government and law enforcement agencies is dangerous and irresponsible," the person wrote. "That's why we were disappointed when Teresa Carlson, vice president of the worldwide public sector of Amazon Web Services, recently said that Amazon 'unwaveringly supports' law enforcement, defense, and intelligence customers, even if we don't 'know everything they're actually utilizing the tool for.'" The op-ed comes one day after Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos defended technology companies working with the federal government on matters of defense during Wired's ongoing summit in San Francisco. "If big tech companies are going to turn their back on the U.S. Department of Defense, this country is going to be in trouble," Bezos said on Monday.
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Amazon Worker Pushes Bezos To Stop Selling Facial Recognition Tech To Police More

Amazon Worker Pushes Bezos To Stop Selling Facial Recognition Tech To Police

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  • What else... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Luthair ( 847766 ) on Tuesday October 16, 2018 @05:39PM (#57488932)
    is Amazon going to use it for now that they've built it? Sell it to a sleazy retailer who wants to track & identify people entering their stores? This is a discussion that the employees working on it should have had beforehand, are they going to return their salaries or is Amazon the only party who needs to operate altruistically?

    • Re:What else... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Areyoukiddingme ( 1289470 ) on Tuesday October 16, 2018 @05:49PM (#57489002)

      Sell it to a sleazy retailer who wants to track & identify people entering their stores?

      They won't. They are [slashdot.org] that sleazy retailer. They certainly aren't going to give up their competitive advantage of identifying shoplifters the moment they walk in the door. Nor are they going to give up their competitive advantage of identifying the sucker walking in the door that responds well to a cleverly placed electronic coupon on an aisle display screen.

  • Reminds me of the Einstein that was going to blackmail Batman [youtube.com]

  • Send us their picture and we will look in to it.

  • That technology is going to get in the hands of LEO's anyway.

  • Citation needed (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 16, 2018 @06:11PM (#57489070)

    the government has used surveillance tools in a way that disproportionately hurts "communities of color, immigrants, and people exercising their First Amendment rights.

    Citation definitely needed.

    • Re: Citation needed (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I thought facial recognition was much more accurate for people of European descent.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Well, there was that time that the police put up CCTV only in majority Asian areas of Birmingham, but not the others... Or when they used the facial recognition cameras on UK roads to stop and harass people travelling to London to join a protest.

      More generally things like facial recognition systems tend to affect already marginalized groups more because they are more likely to be in the system. Their photos get taken during the immigration process or when arrested or when registering for services.

      Then there

    • Is the EFF still considered a credible source on Slashdot? https://www.eff.org/press/rele... [eff.org]

  • Think of the good side of facial recognition (Score:3)

    by AHuxley ( 892839 ) on Tuesday October 16, 2018 @06:23PM (#57489128) Journal
    Visa and passports would be more easy to reconcile as a person legally entered and later departs the USA.
    A persons face would have to match the application in a US embassy, their arrival and their return to their own nation.
    People who lie to the USA about their "holidays" and travel to nations to support banned groups.
    Over stay and the USA knows who is not in the USA legally. Later detection is then possible so that person in the USA illegally can be returned to their own nation.
    The tracking of all illegal migrants all over the USA who thought some state granted ID card would ensure access to state and federal gov services.
    The tracking of any illegal migrant who attempts to access gov services.
    A deeper way to connect a citizens face to more city, state and federal databases to ensue citizens get the gov services they need.
    No using different personal ID by different people, no getting extra support and services many times under different ID.
    No more creating a fake ID and using that to access real ID.
    Accessing education? Work? Government supporting that education in your state? Time to find out if that person is a citizen and can be approved for such gov support.
    Criminals using a fake ID to create a new future by entering the education system under a new fake name.
    No easy way to create a state ID and then access the gov as an illegal migrant.

    To make cities safe again. Less crime and no way for criminals to stay hidden in their supportive communities.
    The tracking of every person in an illegal tent city.
    The ability to track people who use city streets for their waste and drug use.
    A new tool for police to track criminals. Criminals in any existing city/federal/state database. Friends of criminals who may not yet be in a database.

    Supporting the mil on missions. Find out who is wondering around all the mil camps, bases, ports and forts.
    Why is a person outside a mil fence line with a camera? Who is that person? Have they been to other US mil sites?
    Anti war protester? Person doing another First Amendment audit? Spy?
    Facial recognition technology will provide the US mil with a way to quality sort out who is spying and who they later report to.
    Cult and faith members trying to get into gov/mil work while supporting banned groups in other nations.
    People supporting banned groups/criminals trying to enter US police forces.
    Long term political activists trying to enter the US mil/gov/a mil contractor as new staff.
    People with security clearances in the US gov/mil who want to meet with political activists, banned groups, cults, faith groups, other nations spies to give/sell US secrets.

    Facial recognition at all transport centres so criminals and people with fake ID cant move around to create a new ID in another state.
    Facial recognition of drivers and passengers along road networks. Near all rail, ports, airports to look for illegal migrants and criminals.
    Fake ID and a lack of citizenship will become more difficult to hide.

    • Re:Think of the good side of facial recognition (Score:4, Insightful)

      by fafalone ( 633739 ) on Wednesday October 17, 2018 @01:45AM (#57490604)
      Yes and I'm sure that's exactly what they'll use it for. Not tracking everyones movements, tracking who everyones with, what businesses they go to, what protests they attend, who they're with when entering their home at night, etc. And then they definitely won't abuse all the compromising information that would reveal.
      The security benefits just aren't worth the dystopian authoritarian nightmare.
    • All of these depend on how you define the enemy. If a state defines a protester as the enemy, then all these positive examples are just as easily turned into negative examples.

      For example:
      "The tracking of all illegal migrants all over the USA who thought some state granted ID card would ensure access to state and federal gov services."

      becomes:

      "The tracking of all protesters all over the USA who thought some state granted ID card would ensure access to state and federal gov services."

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Friends of criminals who may not yet be in a database.

      Doesn't stuff like this just send chills down your spine?

      Even if you don't think the government will abuse it (in which case I suggest you buy a 20th century history book), do you think the government is competent enough to wield that power?

  • And it scales negatively (Score:3)

    by davecb ( 6526 ) <davecb@spamcop.net> on Tuesday October 16, 2018 @06:30PM (#57489154) Homepage Journal

    If you have a 1% chance of a false positive or negative per comparison, and you try to compare 50 people to one another, you end up making (50 * 49) comparisons, for an overall error rate of 50 * 49 * 0.01 = 25%

    The German Federal Security service reportedly identified someone grandma as a member of the Bader-Meinhof gang ("the red army factor") and dropped my employer's facial recognition system like a hot potato.

    Therefore, buy only if you don't care about arresting innocent people, and, conversely, letting guilty ones walk free.

    • You don't arrest because of a facial recognition match. Facial recognition is merely partly replacing and partly augmenting the human based facial recognition process. Facial recognition is just a first level of screening, and what is the human error rate of this first level of screening? The computer or the human kicks out a first level of match, you don't move to arrest, you move to the next level of investigation or match, for example a second round of facial recognition by a more experienced / capable h

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by davecb ( 6526 )

        You don't arrest because of a facial recognition match. Facial recognition is merely partly replacing and partly augmenting the human based facial recognition process.

        Mostly augmenting, at the risk of adding a larger margin of error than one would expect. In the case I mentioned, it was people being directed to extra screening by humans, who were appalled at the number of false positives. They had expected a quite small number of dangerous characters, and got a stream of innocent bystanders. The last straw was reputedly a person who really did look rather like one of the dangerous folks, but was the wrong sex and age group.

        And yes, they really didn't understand what

  • commentsubject (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Falos ( 2905315 ) on Tuesday October 16, 2018 @06:31PM (#57489162)

    Fight it if you want, but brace for impact. You can't uninvent tech.

    On one side of the coin, I get to laugh at the MAFIAAs kicking and screaming against the bias of reality - that data is a contagion, that you can only declare mandates when you have a quantified quarantine, not when it's in the wild.

    On the other side, I have a lot of facerec, voicerec, LPR to look forward to. I can fight the panopticons in my limited domains, but not in the same wilds. They are public grounds. I can't control others making observations, notes. Copies.

    Everyone here, or at least those with servers, is aware of how many billions of bots blindly bump against your sealed doors. Their tendrils are innumerable, nothing exists on the open internet without being probed and examined by them. By their eyes. A single bot, a few lines of code, scans what a thousand human actors could, without rest.

    A camera lens isn't so different.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Fight it if you want, but brace for impact. You can't uninvent tech.

      We quite successfully restrict all kinds of tech, e.g. biological weapons and needles (of the kind used to inject things). It's not perfect but it's fairly effective at preventing most people using those things.

      If we simply banned the use of facial recognition by government and by retailers it would cut out a lot of abuse immediately.

  • Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • hahaha good luck! (Score:3)

    by p51d007 ( 656414 ) on Tuesday October 16, 2018 @07:35PM (#57489422)
    He's going to do, whatever makes him the most money. Unless 100% of their employees WALK OUT he will continue. Even if they did, he'd just replace them anyway. Wouldn't slow down him a bit. If the "police" use the tech, it won't impact him, so what does he care?
  • First off, there is no inherent violation of anyone's rights in being identifiable or identified. That claim is just plain silly. Nor is demanding your employer not sell facial recognition tech to the government a sensible or effective course of action. The government will just get it from someone else. If you're worried about how the government would use facial recognition, there is only one route for dealing with it - the Law. Advocate for legislation to restrict how the government can use it, and ta
  • Yes, absolutely. Don't sell stuff to law enforcement. They might use it to enforce the law, or keep the peace, or something. We need to get car companies to stop selling them police cars, and gun manufacturer's to stop selling them guns, and clothing companies to stop selling them uniforms. And don't even get me started on all those immoral manufacturers selling ladders and hoses (and GPS navigation tools) to fire departments!
  • I've got this strong hunch that many of these employees that are speaking up now only initially joined these organizations because they had this strong impression no doubt given to them by the companies themselves that they were working to make the world a better place. They need only finish drinking the rest of the cup of kool-aid and they'll be ready to get back to work.
  • Sounds like that person wants to be put on a PIP so they can take the severance pay.
  • Considering Bezos is CEO and primary investor of https://www.mark43.com...a/ [..a] police specific records management system and computer aided dispatch...i highly doubt he will listen to this employee.

  • If only there were some vehicle by which the use of such technology could be regulated. Some way the average citizen could influence how such technology were used. Maybe a system in which a citizen could register their voice with some ruling body that could hand down some form of edict or guideline that could reflect said citizen's preferences. Nah... that's just crazy talk. There's no way for an average citizen in the United States to affect change in our rules and regulations.

  • There are, no doubt, Amazon employees that have ALL KINDS of views about any given subject. "Amazon employee has an opinion about what Amazon does." Now there's a headline!

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