Amazon Rekognition updates face detection, analysis and recognition capabilities | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Rekognition updates face detection, analysis and recognition capabilities

aws.amazon.com

51 pointsydereky55 comments

I went to a concert the other night, and they where scanning driver licenses and running facial recognition on everyone entering. It was very disconcerting. It is clear to me that we need new laws to protect against the misuse of this technology. Laws that apply to everyone without exceptions for law enforcement. If we don't I fear we are headed towards a 1984 type of future.

Where was this? I would have refused entry and demanded a refund.

Also don't go to concerts that do this.

It’s not like this is listed on the ticket. You don’t know how the venue is going to enforce until you’re there for the first time.

No no they turn around once they get to the front of the line and see what theyre doing

Then post a warning on Waze as part of their civic duty, alongside a last minute ticket sale

You're not going to do that if you're with a group of friends who aren't as riled about it as you are, it's a band you really like, and it's a big event that you paid a lot of money for.

Everyone sticks together and leaves and immediately confirms the first friend’s warning on Waze, so people know its legitimate

Everybody does this that must be partially why it is so easy to get real scalper tickets at the venue, because so many people cant agree to the terms and conditions if entry

Especially facial recognition using Amazon Web Services, since it might be uploaded to China

Or when in China people are worried it might be uploaded to America

But dont worry about the relative morality, the point is people have to take a stand! And thats how they do it!

You completely sidestepped my point about your friends not being as riled up about it as you.

Its the rule, everyone goes in or nobody goes in

and having a unified front on Waze if one friend posts the warning on it, everyone has to post confirmations on the warning and leave

Its friend code to leave, but they just have to not invite you next time if they secretly disagreed

It's pretty obvious that @gammateam is being sarcastic here (in this post and the follow up responses to yours). You may want to quit responding.

It really should be disclosed when purchasing.

That’s... actually a reasonable way to combat ticket scalping.

Its also a ridiculous invasion of privacy.

Oh, absolutely. Great way to ensure sure the door staff are actually checking the ID against the ticket sales records 100% of the time.

The problem is, night clubs ain't developing this stuff in-house. And whoever develops this stuff and sells it to nightclubs will discover they can make more money if they sell the machines to nightclubs _and_ the data to the adtech industry.

They already have the data from the ticket sale.

> reasonable

That's debatable.

The "reasonable" claim is made here without considering all factors. If I have the guarantee that the driver license & facial recognition data are not uploaded or kept beyond the required time frame (which should be less than a couple of hours) and are not integrated into other datasets, then this solution may be "reasonable". But that's a big assumption. Is there information on where the collected data goes and what happens with it?

I played around with Rekognition a few months ago and frankly wasn’t that impressed with what it could do. As far as I can remember it could sort of compare if the same person was in two photos (definitely false negatives with various photos of myself I compared), basic OCR of text off images, and not very accurate recognition of certain things/objects.

It is always a couple versions behind the build that the NSA/CIA has on their AWS account.

Based on OP's incident and your expereience, I think that AWS Rekognition is currently in its consumption/learning stage. Give it a few months to adequately digest that data and then try!

Everybody should be able to copyright their likeness in images and file for monetary damages if they believe their copyright is being infringed.

Legally, this is the only way to destroy these big brother obsessions that creepy companies like Amazon have.

That's not what copyright is for.

http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/using-name-or-likeness-anoth...

Not sure if you meant to refute the parent, but the linked article describes two means of protecting the use of a name or likeness which are not related to copyright.

Woo, better facial recognition for all kinds of nefarious purposes!

Edit: Dead serious, how will Rekognition positively affect the common person? All I see is a myriad of possible ways government, corporations and individuals have abused camera footage today, and emboldened with better technology these problems are likely to get much worse.

all this FUD around facial recognition being bad for everyone feels eerily similar to the FUD that strong encryption is good for terrorists

FUD aside, I'm with the GP on a question that you might have an answer for: How will Rekognition positively affect the common person?

Outside of facial recognition, the service will allow online marketplaces and dating sites to stay safer. They all have a problem where spammers and fraudsters post images with content meant to deceive or abuse site policies.

With facial recognition, app developers can build services like the ones tgat Google and Apple have built in their phones; the ability to look at your photos to see which ones have you or others that are close to you, organize those, etc. Who knows what else Devs will come up with.

I cannot think of a single way facial recognition will really truly help either of those “stay safer”.

I find Google and Apple’s photo recognition features to be of extremely limited usefulness to begin with. Don’t really except other devs to come up with other compelling use cases.

Facial recognition is a technology without a killer app. Unless that killer app is over-the-top, oppressive Big Brother-like security.

I was responding to the OPs question about how the overall service of Rekognition can be useful. The question did not have a safety theme to it, although I gave an example that does. Note the service has other features and uses outside of facial recognition.

The types of sites I reference are frequently targeted by phishing attempts via text on image. Rekognition can help thawrt that.

Small edit

i see a big opportunity in home security.

domestic abuse, alert in case your abuser is at your home. and automatically lock your door.

restraining order? add their face and do the same. i see a future where getting a face scan is a requirement of every restraining order

this tech can save lives

Doors and locks only keep out the honest people. These use-cases have some political appeal but are absolutely impractical.

you clearly don’t know anyone with a restraining order or the fear that comes with your personal safety being threatened. there is nothing impractical with uploading someone’s face to your hole security system when you know that personal is a threat and should be no where near you at any time

Isn't this solely an appeal to emotion? How is facial recognition going to help in this case, where, if the tech were to gain some traction, bad actors would be aware of it and could take easy steps to defeat it? And even if the tech were difficult to thwart, at what point would the rate of false positives make it viable?

I am aware of an active use case to catalog mobsters who shake down retailers and identify them to others in the network.

Seems like a stretch to invent hypotheticals for how a common person might benefit. I am curious what the usage stats are for it and what reflections that has on society.

Off the top of my head, there will be positive usecases in assistive technology for the visually impaired. Also, if the computer knows where I am looking, it may enable some productivity tools.

That said, I agree with you that these potential positive uses do not outweigh the negative ones you allude to.

I'm sure it will be used for nefarious things too however,

Programs involving photography, yes the big dogs have their own solutions already but this lowers the bar for us hobbyists.

Photo affects (Blurring the background and not the face), sorting images by labels (search for trees and get your photos with trees), searching by people.

Potentially things traffic monitoring, foot traffic in a mall, security systems (record a photo of all customers in the case of theft), automating tracking objects in videos.

It’s quite hard to do this randomly. You need a substantial data set to train the machine to recognise your targets face. You can’t just upload 5 or 6 blurry social media photos.

This will catch lots of criminals. That is a good thing.

I work in tele-medicine and we use rekognition to see if users are following the instructions correctly. E.g. you have to be at a certain distance from the screen, close an eye, take your glasses off, etc.

Also, things like virtual try-on for glasses use facial recognition tech. This allows you to map frames on your face so you can buy them online.

These applications don't use facial recognition to identify users, but to be smart digital assistants. They can function anonymously and don't have to store sensitive information.

There are many good applications.

Border control. Unlike many other privacy infringing solutions this will have little impact on regular people and big on criminals.

Huh? Has it not been implemented for like decades?

Identifying victims of kidnapping/human trafficking or persons of interest in large crowds/checkpoints.

I remember that in China they deployed such technology in a region to track social activists and dissidents, or to monitor entire ethnic groups.

Yep, found a link pretty fast: https://www.theepochtimes.com/dissident-in-china-facial-reco...

Technology is not inherently good or bad, it all depends on how it is used.

There are tons of benign/helpful use cases for face ID. Your car can recognize you and automatically set your preferred radio stations, seat position etc. Your computer can log you in without a password. Border control can be "scan your passport here and keep walking". An airplane boarding card can be "take a picture with your webcam during check-in and just walk on the plane." Your phone can automatically "press the shutter" for a family picture when everyone is smiling, instead of guessing at that timer thingie. Your makeup mirror can turn on special lights when a face is in front of it. You can pre-set mood lighting for your apartment for when you bring a new date home vs football night. Your front door can unlock itself for a handful of trusted people, even when you're out of town and forgot to feed the cat. Or it can set an alarm when your mother in law comes over. You can search your entire media library for just the right picture: "with Phil, but not Gina, where we're having fun and in cat costumes."

Face identification has become the lightest weight authentication method available. So anywhere you would otherwise use something you know (password) or something you have (a transit pass), you could consider using something you are (your face) instead. It's not right for EVERY authentication scenario, but it should be considered for many of them.

Not everything AI is creepy or privacy invading. Especially when you consider running it locally.

That said, Rekognition as a product specifically targets law enforcement and federal agencies, and most of their use cases are NOT good IMO. We do need a strong product preference for open source, or products with AI ethics oversight.

Bias: I work for Microsoft helping big companies implement latest edge tech like this. MS has an ethics board filtering all its AI work, the Azure face ID product doesn't keep user data, and we often implement local-only face id in what I consider non-creepy scenarios. So that defines a lot of how I think "responsible implementation" looks.

There are tons of benign/helpful use cases for guns, for knives and for explosives. This attitude is purposefully ignorant.

When developing new technologies, you need to ask not just "what good can this do" but most importantly "how can this be misused". Sometimes the bad stuff that you can do is way, way, way worse than the good.

Great that Microsoft has an ethics board. Facebook has an ethics board. How's that working out for the ethnically cleansed people in Asia?

It is not like that if Amazon didn't build it, other government agencies will stay there in vain.

Facial recognition service is very easy to build these days, provided that sufficient data is presented, and government has plenty of such data.

If the governments using these these sorts of technologies are democratic, responsive, self regulating, have an informed populace, and lack of incentive problems. This is fine, but that’s a long chain of ifs.

I wonder why would anyone pay for the cloud services when they can build it locally? Is it more economical?

Is this something that is considered easy to build locally? When I last looked at the open source options a few years ago it was basically all researchware grade stuff. Amazon is offering this is a production service with SLAs.

I've never built any such system, but I've done some image recognition work, and my intuition is that if you're the kind of organization that needs this service building it yourself will not be a technological challenge.

I was able to use Rekognition to build a custom family photo album for a wealthy family. It allowed them to upload event photos and automatically tag them with the names of relevant family members as well as keywords related to objects in the photo for easy searching. It was mostly a database for building slideshows and selecting publicity photos. Very wealthy family but not such that they would have funded building the technology from scratch. The service made it just about an 80 hour consulting project and most of that was just UI and image gathering.

Here is a comparison we did between APIs from Microsoft Vs Amazon Vs Kairos for face detection. Kairos came out to be much better overall.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15903490

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