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Comment by Pfhreak | Hacker News Reader

Amazon, and AWS in particular, sure seems all in on building technology for the military and police.

Anyone else experience some cognitive dissonance in "the world's most customer centric company" also someday powering the facial recognition systems used by customs, border patrol, police, and military systems?

It seems ripped straight of a cyberpunk novel to me.

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I, as a single person working on a maker conference thing, did a facial recognition system that relied on no GPU or internet anything. I did this in 2015.

That's just a lone hacker doing shit outside of work... And my solution can go through directories of images, realtime video stream, videos, and ipcams.

So yeah the cat is out of the bag. The bag was shredded, and the cat has had 3 litters of kittens.

Any video system could be retrofitted as a facial recognition system... Or even process videos after the fact.

Personally, I don't see any problems with providing services (including facial recognition) to government and it's structures.

disc: I'm Amazon employee, not working in any of the facial recognition. I'm also an immigrant, ~5 years in USA

Sure. I think that's a valid position. It's just not what comes to mind first when I think about Amazon as a retail company. (I worked for AWS for quite a while as well.)

The vast majority of the general public has no idea that Amazon is a logistics company (I'm including AWS in that definition) that also happens to do retail stuff. It's similar to how GM was for a long time a finance company that also happened to make cars.

Police are great ways to get into government business as the paramilitary structure allows decisions to be made.

The software is going to be written anyway, I'd rather they rely on existing services and infrastructure to reduce taxpayer costs.

Right now it's not super scary, but in 10 or 20 years it's conceivable that Amazon becomes effectively a state-run entity like the telecoms are now, and then you could start imagining all sorts of awful cyberpunk storylines.

Its not that far fetched of an idea IMO, considering there is talk in the government about braking AMZN up, buddying up to the GOV might be a good defense against that.

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