Ring’s Ukraine arm appears to be working on facial recognition technology | Hacker News Reader

Ring’s Ukraine arm appears to be working on facial recognition technology

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50 pointss_Hogg12 comments

I don't see whats the problem here.

A company has an international market. In one country, where they probably don't have a law against facial recognition, does research on facial recognition in their product.

In their home market, they are asked if they do Facial Recognition in their product, which probably meant in the USA, and they rightfully said they don't. The most likely scenario is that the spokesperson is not even aware that on one market they do facial recognition _research_.

Seems like a manufactured outrage over nothing.

>Beginning in 2016, according to one source, Ring provided its Ukraine-based research and development team virtually unfettered access to a folder on Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service that contained every video created by every Ring camera around the world.[1]

Is that why Ring has it's RnD in Ukraine, to be away from US and EU privacy laws?

[1]https://theintercept.com/2019/01/10/amazon-ring-security-cam...

Any privacy regulation that could be circumvented by simply transferring the data offshore surely wouldn't be worth the paper it's written on. The GDPR certainly doesn't allow this.

Thing I don't get is, why tell on yourself like that? Why make such an explicit job title?

Where I work there is a policy of no org charts ever because it just tells other companies who to poach.

Do you get paid a lot of money?

Because I wouldn't want to work somewhere for years whilst being unable to talk about what I've worked on.

This is a company-wide thing, so if there's no HR diagram then it's hard to poach both sales staff and tech people. I'm an ML guy and my title is ML Lead, but that's still a long way from "ML Lead working on this one specific problem".

Are you allowed to have a LinkedIn account with your title?

And company, description, roles etc?

This just seems fundamentally anti-labor. Don't you want to be poached, if the opportunity is right?

Are you also banned from linkedin?

Also relevant: https://theintercept.com/2019/01/10/amazon-ring-security-cam...

So what? I welcome facial recognition as an additional enhancement to home security systems, especially if it can work across the network of other customers’ cameras to help track criminals’ movement and if it helps lead to their capture. Property crime is rampant here in Seattle and goes entirely unpunished - making it cheap to solve these crimes using this technology would be a huge benefit to quality of life. I really don’t understand the backlash against Ring and others - it just seems like the latest outrage for people to be irrationally upset about.

Isn't that sort of what you would expect from a doorbell maker? Using facial recognition as part of the unlock? It's almost too obvious an idea.

>Isn't that sort of what you would expect from a doorbell maker?

Call me a dinosaur, but no.

I expect doorbells to make a sound when someone pushes a button, and that's all. I don't expect a doorbell to recognize the person ringing the bell and share that data with third parties, and then potentially decide whether or not to unlock the door for them.

>It's almost too obvious an idea.

I can't argue that Ring itself isn't a billion dollar idea... and in the context of the concept itself, facial recognition makes sense.

But please let's not pretend this is just what anyone would expect from a "doorbell maker," and potentially push the Overton window even further in the direction of ceding personal autonomy and liberty to third parties for the sake of convenience. Ring doesn't make doorbells, they run a social network and video content distribution platform that monetizes people's front porches and faces, for which a doorbell is just a gimmick.

It's an obvious idea for Ring but I still find the entire premise of smart doorbells and smart locks to be a dark pattern in the IoT.

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