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Comment by justboxing | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

I'm honestly not sure how I feel about the expectation that employees and corporations act with some (or any) kind of morality beyond "make money legally".

Philosophically I would rather laws and social norms are enforced by law and not corporations or individuals with disproportionate influence.

Are they not citizens? Surely a person has a duty above personal wealth. Past generations certainly thought that way.

I’m not sure about you but my personal identify is not wholly made up of my employment.

My comment is clearly about the danger of imposing morality through corporate influence.

I did not say that a person’s entire responsibility is to enrich themselves. I said that is the responsibility of an employee. People can and do have complex and sometimes conflicting interests and responsibilities.

There's not enough upvotes for this comment. This what the Silicon Valley mindset leads to. This is what the attitude that even if technology isn't good and empowering, it's inevitable, leads to. This is what the "whatever it takes to make money" mindset leads to. This is what all these brave young engineers going out there to "change the world" and make it a better place have done.

Totalitarianism, forever. Take solace, though, citizen: it's not just the government tracking everything you do, it's everyone!

It makes me sick. I wish I had never gone into CS. I too am a collaborator. If it were up to me, we'd destroy the machines in a Butlerian Jihad. The road we're going down is dystopia with no way out. The tools of control will be total, all-encompassing, omniscient.

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.

Who decides what's law abiding? Is it just felonies? Felonise + certain misdemeanors? Jay walking? What if I broke the law 10 years ago but have been a model citizen since? This kind of language worries me.

> lawmakers should require public input before surveillance tools are deployed

Again, what does that mean? Input is not the same thing as saying the public can veto it. Even if it does required explicit approval from the public is that really a great solution? The public has made a lot of shitty political decisions recently. Furthermore, who counts as part of the public? If you're a convicted felon who served his time do you count as part of the public?

This shit reeks.

Exactly, look what's happening in China and try to convince yourself that we are not starting to walk down that road.

> 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.

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

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)

I wonder what the GDPR implications of this are.

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.

I could become a “Canary Clause”: you know a jurisdiction doesn’t abuse privacy or doesn’t deploy warrantless ubiquitous surveillance until the GDPR compliance clause disappears

But it is the us government in us territory. Does gdpr even apply to other governments?

Sorry sir, we can’t let you through customs until you Accept the U.S. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

Sounds funny, but this could actually happen. By entering the country you agree to give up your EU rights, or turn around and get back on the plane.

Yes, this is what happens. National sovereignty still exists. Maybe, since Europeans have a supra-national entity above their countries, they don't quite grok that everywhere else a country is the top giver of the law.

I doubt it’s particularly different to Americans having trouble with the idea that not everyone has the first or second amendments. Or, even, an explicit constitution.

It's the same with many europeans having trouble with the idea that you can't safely drink tap water, have no public health guarantee and education isn't equal for everyone in the US ;-)

On a more serious note; stuff like the US amendments is often already included in the base law (the generic name for constitution) as they are much older than the US. The times where the base law was somewhat more moldable (like before widespread literacy) made that possible. For example, freedom of religion is pretty universal, except in countries where a ruling religion exists which inherently to the religion bans all others. Arms are usually removed from base laws a few hundred years in as they directly conflict with the laws that ban killing people.

That was a past station years ago:

https://www.lufthansa.com/us/en/Data-collection-for-the-USA

https://www.dw.com/en/eu-us-strike-deal-on-sharing-transatla...

And all in the name of combating terrorism.

Doesn’t apply if you aren’t standing in the EU

GDPR applies if you are a European citizen visiting a website while on holiday in USA, for example. It doesn’t seem to me that GDPR stops when crossing a border. Which is why it has so much worldwide reach.

That is not a commonly held interpretation of the law, especially if the entities collecting & processing the data are not in the EU.

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.

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

On track to achieving real life "1984"

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