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Comment by pravinva | Hacker News Reader

Don't they understand their own platform? AWS is self service. Anyone with a credit card can set up an account and consume Rekognition or any other service. It's not as if it has to be sold to the police by a sales person under some licensed/contract. No special software is being developed for ICE or the Orlando police.Forbes recently put together a face recognition system using AWS components under 30 dollars. WTF are these employees on about. Anyone is free to build on AWS. What's next? Ban police from purchasing stuff on Amazon retail? If you disagree with your govt, go tell your congressman instead of irritating everyone at work

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Right.

But, as we found out with Signal[0], in addition to the UI and the law, there's a whole other world of what is and isn't possible with AWS, called policy.

Anyone with a credit card can get an AWS account, but it's against the ToS to use it to offend the DMCA, host a crawler (whoops!), run an open mail relay, or store bestiality, for the simple reason that Amazon have decided that they don't want that to happen on AWS.

Mass surveillance of the population via facial recognition is an offensive proposition to a great many million Amazon Prime members!

[0]: https://signal.org/blog/looking-back-on-the-front/

Er, explain how the law enforcement is violating any terms and conditions. Domain fronting is illegal. Mass surveillance is what the NSA does for a living. If it is offensive to prime members, they have found the wrong tree to bark up

> ... explain how the law enforcement is violating any terms and conditions

I’m not saying that they are, just that Amazon are within their right to stipulate that there are certain uses of their technology which they just don’t like, as they see fit.

> Domain fronting is illegal.

First I’ve heard. Where? Why?

> ...NSA... If it is offensive to prime members, they have found the wrong tree to bark up

This story is not about the NSA. The Rekognition controversy arose regarding local police departments, who are very much not tasked with mass surveillance. Amazon used local police departments as example deployments, and for marketing copy as an idealized use-case.

I would personally stop shopping at a local store, if by supporting them I was supporting their objectionable side-business. Consumer boycotts are pretty common, as are changes to corporate policy due to the bad press boycotts generate.

The police cannot do any mass surveillance with AWS Recognition. For that they need access to huge amount of video feeds.IF they already have access to such video and use primitive techniques to sift through them for identifying criminals, then Rekognition makes it cheap and value for money for the taxpayers. Sifting through data to identify people is police work. Why hobble it by mandating that they use expensive outdated slow technology? If the police has no access to streaming video feeds on a mass scale, the tool can't help. If they are accessing the feeds illegally, then they are breaking laws - AWS can terminate accounts. Any proof that they are doing this illegal activity?

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