Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/yes-amazon-tracking-people

by hudon • 8 years ago

326 190 8 years ago

justboxing• 8 years ago

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.

394549• 8 years ago

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.

Someone needs to design an AI-powered camera-seeking spraypaint drone.

plasticchris• 8 years ago

This would be pretty easy at night, just seek after ir lights.

pjc50• 8 years ago

I wonder what the GDPR implications of this are.

tajen3• 8 years ago

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.

krick3• 8 years ago

First of, law exists (i.e. "means anything") only if you have the means to enforce it, like armed squads to terrorize the population or a leverage of some other kind. Like, for example, Amazon (wherever it's located) probably has to abide to GDPR as long as it wants to sell to EU customers. Orlando city, located in the US under US jurisdiction, and not trying to sell anything to anybody in the EU doesn't give a fuck about European laws, even if they stated that Orlando should.

Second, it seems to be a popular misunderstanding, that GDPR affects Europeans everywhere they go and you need person's confirmation to store his data. It affects people currently located in Europe, and there are listed multiple very vague excuses for storing user's data without explicit consent, like "in order to protect the vital interests of the data subject or of another natural person", with which global tracking by law enforcement agencies could be easily justified.

deleted_account2• 8 years ago

Are people surprised that real-time image analysis has been commodified or that local governments are already applying this technology ahead of policy discussions?

Clarifying edit: I'm not being disingenuous. I may be too close to the technology to grok why this thread is a down-vote minefield. Running OpenCV on an Arduino board is years-old proof-of-concept stuff and now I have an AWS DeepLens sitting on my desk that can name which of my neighbors walked their dog past my house.

Zarath• 8 years ago

No, but I'm sure many of the people working on it will continue to deny that they are simply building tools of control. That, or they don't care, or think it's a good thing.

hudon• 8 years ago

I believe it's the latter, given the last two paragraphs of TFA:

In order to protect civil liberties without hampering innovation, lawmakers should require public input before surveillance tools are deployed and ensure that facial recognition databases are purged of data related to law-abiding people.
lawmakers should ensure that real-time facial recognition capability is not merged with police cameras, whether they are dash cams, CCTV cameras, or body cameras. Facial recognition may well be a valuable investigatory tool, but outfitting police with real-time facial recognition capability will only increase the likelihood of needlessly contentious and violent confrontations between police officers and members of communities across the country.

sizzle• 8 years ago

On track to achieving real life "1984"

walrus01• 8 years ago

as implemented in China: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fq1SEqNT-7c

touristtam• 8 years ago

Funny how there is a debate in France about the exact same topic: https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2018/03/22/la-cnil-def... (FR)

_bxg1• 8 years ago

"asleep at the wheel" is extremely generous.

zaroth• 8 years ago

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• 8 years ago

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.

wonder_bread• 8 years ago

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

HenryTheHorse• 8 years ago

The scale at which Amazon operates is obviously different from a weekend hackathon project. The potential for misuse is much higher.

vinchuco• 8 years ago

Companies do it at scale, though. And motivated by profits, not regard for 'good guy' or 'bad guy' status.

darawk9• 8 years ago

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.

notheguyouthink• 8 years ago

I've never understood why I care who does it, honestly. Companies? The government? A person stalking my wife? The negatives are obvious, do I really care who is doing it? These discussions often feel like tax law debate to me. We're debating whether or not X person is bad for legally avoiding tax, instead of talking about restricting tax laws.

Likewise, we're sitting here focused on Amazon for implementing facial recognition instead of focusing on changing laws and government "culture" to make such an act against its own citizens far from accepted. I don't like what Amazon is doing either, but attempting to stop people from advancing facial recognition seems fruitless at best. Facial recognition is here, and it's only going to get easier, better and faster.

Can we focus on finding ways to prevent/identify/etc bad actors? Because facial recognition is coming, regardless of Amazon, and bad actors aren't loyal to amazon.

Sir_Substance• 8 years ago

Most people could probably steal from two or three houses without expending too much effort too. Of course, that's illegal because most people don't support allowing random third parties to steal from them. The wider population considers people who do that to be objectively shitty people, and always did, even before there were formalized national codes of laws to forbid it.

Sure makes you think...

finnthehuman• 8 years ago

Kind of confused why Recognition continues to be made into the 'bad guy' here.

Because some people respond to a hypothetical better when they can see concrete aspects of it, not just hear a description of the possibility space.

"I could build that if I wanted to" vs. Recognition is a bit like the difference between the black market and dispensaries, a difference of scale is a difference of kind.

reaperducer• 8 years ago

Your argument is that because other people can do it, that makes it OK for Amazon to do it.

If you ever have children, wait for them to make this same argument. It should happen around the age of five.

donarb2• 8 years ago

Here on Hacker News I’ve read the opposite. Whenever any new technology product is offered by Amazon the refrain is always “that can be replicated with x, y, z”.

danShumway6• 8 years ago

Agree that it's a problem that needs to be fixed in more permanent ways, but debatably protesting and slowing down companies like Amazon gives us more time to find a solution.

It's a band-aid, but band-aids are an extremely useful medical tool. They only become problematic if used as an excuse to avoid stitching the wound.

hakejam2• 8 years ago

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

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

Disclaimer: I work for AWS.

frgtpsswrdlame• 8 years ago

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• 8 years ago

Targeted Social Engineering Services :)

lostlogin• 8 years ago

If you are a celebrity:

“Celebrity recognition

You can quickly identify well known people in your video and image libraries to catalog footage and photos for marketing, advertising, and media industry use cases.”

It’s even named with a 1984esque style.

darawk9• 8 years ago

You're receiving enhanced public safety.

zachm0• 8 years ago

You could make a drone that will follow your friends/enemies around and spray them with a super soaker. Use your imagination, the first person to figure out a good answer to your question will probably make a lot of money.

eeZah7Ux• 8 years ago

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

Fixed that for you.

ljw10012• 8 years ago

It may be available to be licensed for use in the private sector, but it is hardly a "public service." Without exaggeration, I think it would be closer to the truth to call it a "public menace".

fisherjeff• 8 years ago

I think they may have meant something more like “publicly available service”

Spooky232• 8 years ago

That’s a little dramatic, don’t you think?

With the exception of public figures, they aren’t sharing facial recognition datasets. This is a service that a moderately skilled team could implement with off the shelf and free software or an individual could do with a raspberry pi.

Law enforcement has been doing this for a long time in many areas. If there’s an ethical issue here, it’s with machine learning and camera surveillance in general, not Amazon.

hakejam2• 8 years ago

"public service" was a bit of a misnomer. The article states:

"Amazon is providing police departments in Orlando, Fla., and Washington County, Ore., with powerful facial recognition technology."

Rekognition is SaaS (software as a service). Anyone can pay for running Rekoginition on their data sets (within Amazon ToS). Rekognition was not created directly for the police departments in FL or OR.

zBard• 8 years ago

I believe the parent probably meant service as in the 'service' in SOA.

phyzome• 8 years ago

So? It's enabling dystopia.

ceejayoz3• 8 years ago

The facial recognition cat is out of the bag.

If AWS is "enabling dystopia", so are Linux and Ethernet.

oneplane2• 8 years ago

So are people in general, doesn't mean we're gonna kill everyone does it?

For everything there is a use that could enable any dystopia, doesn't mean that it will actually enable it.

mtgx• 8 years ago

It looks like law enforcement was definitely one of their let's say top 3 target markets when they built Rekognition, though.

Do know what gives it away? The fact that Amazon is actively pursuing that market and isn't just "allowing anyone to use it freely and equally".

No, they're going to law enforcement and showing them Powerpoint presentations, demos, and everything.

gowld5• 8 years ago

That reflects where the funded customer base is, not Amazon's preferences. That may be the result of a social reality of what this tech is good for and who is funded to make use of it.

bpchaps• 8 years ago

Er, read the article. It links this, where the AWS speaker explicitly mentions it's use for law enforcement.

https://youtu.be/sUzuJc-xBEE

ams61105• 8 years ago

s/disclaimer/disclosure/

Sorry, pet peeve.

closetohome• 8 years ago

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

jessaustin• 8 years ago

If even the libertarians are complaining, maybe there's a problem here?

heelhook• 8 years ago

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.

spilk• 8 years ago

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

SN76477• 8 years ago

Shadowrun was right.

https://cvdazzle.com

sambull• 8 years ago

If you haven't noticed, we've been outlawing the ability to obfuscate yourself from these systems as we've been building them.

LinuxBender• 8 years ago

Does this service exclude children under the age of 13?

patrickg_zill• 8 years ago

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?

driverdan• 8 years ago

I've long wanted to setup a system like this.

Cameras facing all entrances and exits of the state capitol would be fed into ALPR and facial recognition software. There are enough photos of elected officials to train facial recognition. It would be easy to identify who is coming and going, what cars they own, who they travel with, and their patterns.

gowld5• 8 years ago

NYT did it.

https://open.nytimes.com/how-the-new-york-times-uses-softwar...

deleted_account2• 8 years ago

That just sounds like journalism to me, so: "Yes, it's ok."

gowld5• 8 years ago

Says you. But will the police/FBI/DA agree, or say it's terroristic stalking?

thatfrenchguy• 8 years ago

But why do you care ?

atomical• 8 years ago

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

imaoreo2• 8 years ago

California is already rolling out "smart" licence plates, so not far off.

krick3• 8 years ago

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

ShorsHammer• 8 years ago

Add MAC addresses passing through major intersections and you've got some quality data to work with.

em3rgent0rdr2• 8 years ago

Politicians should have less right to privacy than us citizens.

mirimir2• 8 years ago

Everyone with substantial power should have less privacy. Politicians should have almost none.

all_blue_chucks• 8 years ago

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• 8 years ago

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.)

analyticascent3• 8 years ago

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

sedachv• 8 years ago

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

CoolGuySteve• 8 years ago

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.

ehnto2• 8 years ago

I am honestly very surprised at how comfortable people are with them. I think the smartphone paved the way and normalized it. I remember friends and family being terrified that their SMS messages were being read. Now people often don't give it a second thought.

ma2rten2• 8 years ago

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.

Crontab• 8 years ago

I've actually told my partner that we will have no such devices in our home. Luckily we are in agreement because this is a hard line for me.

magnetic• 8 years ago

I am uncomfortable about it too (and haven't installed any in my home), but I'm not sure what to do about the exact same issues from smart phones that we carry with us all the time: they can easily listen in on our conversation, in addition to knowing when that conversation happened and where.

The home pods are a bit of a drop in the bucket when you think about "smartphone coverage around the world".

What options are there?

wavefunction• 8 years ago

I definitely don't think that silly simplistic take on Amazon. Jeff Bezos sounds like a psychopath from his public profiles. He has the right to run his firm as he sees fit of course but never have I considered Amazon to be 'benign.'

ams61105• 8 years ago

Most CEOs are somewhere above average on the psychopath/sociopath spectrum.

andrepd3• 8 years ago

Jeff Bezos sounds like a psychopath from his public profiles.

Then maybe he is.

He has the right to run his firm as he sees fit of course

No. If he is harming society then we the people should stop him, fuck his "right" to do what he pleases.

mercer2• 8 years ago

why does he have that right?

Fej• 8 years ago

I'm going to repost a poem I saw a while ago:

"Of all sad words

Of ink and pen

The saddest are these:

'Stallman was right again'"

hutzlibu• 8 years ago

Hm, just browsed his page a bit again ... well, it seems still centered around, "this is bad and that is bad" "and this is wrong.. "

Not sure if this is the way to get people exited, building on better things.

I also like to read about, what works. What are working alternatives, and this he writes about ... but less so in my opinion.

andrepd3• 8 years ago

Hundreds of very good reasons to fight Amazon's growth as much as possible. We are sacrificing our rights, hurting our society, pushing people to near-slavery for 2 day shipping. It's disgraceful.

wepple2• 8 years ago

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• 8 years ago

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?

candiodari2• 8 years ago

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...

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

wepple2• 8 years ago

yeah I think I agree, we should look at potential negative use cases of new technology to society.

I just think that positioning it as Amazon or Google or whoever doing a bad thing is misdirection. OPs article even seems to end up coming to a conclusion of needing policy to keep this under control. Someone will supply it to law enforcement, so it’s use more than its supply should be regulated because it does have myriad positive use cases also.

oculusthrift• 8 years ago

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.

dredmorbius• 8 years ago

Noted, and I'm very much notafan of Cato or the Kochs.

(Or, for that matter, Amazon.)

Regardless, the issue is real and concerning.

analyticascent3• 8 years ago

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

briga• 8 years ago

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• 8 years ago

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.

lazybreather• 8 years ago

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• 8 years ago

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.

fghtr• 8 years ago

Become a member of EFF and FSF, so that even if you cannot think about it anymore, some people will (I did just that).

mvanbaak• 8 years ago

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 ...

ryanmercer• 8 years ago

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.

analyticascent3• 8 years ago

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.

Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

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