"at the end of the day if amazon doesn't do this someone else will"
"If Amazon doesn't fuck over people someone else will, so who cares" is a shit argument.
"If Amazon doesn't fuck over people someone else will, so who cares" is a shit argument.
yeah i said that.
"so who cares"
no i didn't say that.
I said the best defense isnt the benevolence of corporations willing to say no to gov contracts on principal. the best defense is a populace able to subvert these technological systems of oppression. For facial recognition this means adversarial patches. for Internet censorship this means VPNs. in other cases it means encryption and cryptocurrency.
Your point does make a lot of sense. It sucks we live in this world where we have to operate as if our own government is an adversary. Technologically its very sound to operate in this way, but at best that means citizens in an arms race vs. an all-powerful government with infinite money and resources. In the long run, we will lose that race. For example:
Use masks/patches to circumvent facial recognition? Govt. outlaws those, builds better tech.
Use cryptocurrency? Govt heavily monitors crypto exchanges, ties them back to your identity (this is already happening! - coinbase requires SSN and identity verification), defeating the point.
The only way to really win then is to demand our government, which is supposed to have its citizens interest at heart, actually does. No amount of tech can beat the govt because the govt eventually gets access to that tech & talent too, plus a police force and authority to make laws. The only solution is to have them on OUR side.
So in that sense, yes, they'll keep looking and someone else absolutely will. As someone pointed out below, the real solution is to have them lobby the US Government to give up their pursuit, anything else is just a delaying tactic.
[1] their tech would most likely be much inferior, and when the likes of Google/Amazon/Facebook/etc. have to choose between getting kicked out of countries or providing their tech to authoritarian governments, then they usually pick the latter.. because profits is more important than the imprisonment and death of millions.
Even dumber than the "Hey, why should we care about the environment since a few countries can decide not to"