A one-year moratorium on police use of Rekognition

Their coffee is just as hot nowadays and to lower the temperature to the degree to where the effect on Stella would have been meaningfully different would result in lukewarm, under-extracted coffee that fewer people would be interested in. Further, the sheer quantity of Mcdonalds coffee moved every year without incident implies user error, rather than product error.

Yes, I know what the jury said and how they divided up the blame. I disagree with their conclusion.

But its also true that responses, like the one you linked to are also often one-sided. And what would you accept from an association of lawyers who make money launching such suits?

The truth is, its not as simple as either side tries to make it out to be. I think the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau..., does a good job of presenting pertinent details from both sides.

The ACLU would not take the Skokie case today’: https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/02/14/the-aclu-would-not-...

Former ACLU board member Wendy Kaminer:

The ACLU Retreats From Free Expression: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-aclu-retreats-from-free-exp...

to complaints of sexual violence. We will continue to support survivors.”

The ACLU Declines to Defend Civil Rights: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/11/aclu-devos...

> McDonald’s operations manual required the franchisee to hold its coffee at 180 to 190 degrees Fahrenheit.

> Coffee at that temperature, if spilled, causes third-degree burns in three to seven seconds.

They might also be interested to know it was composed primarily of dihydrogen monoxide, a lethal chemical agent known to be the proximate cause of hundreds of deaths each year. They are describing boiling water.

Even if McDonald's did the wrong thing, it is a frivolous lawsuit. I serve boiling hot tea to all my guests, it isn't negligence. The case as described seems to be that McDonald's should be civilly liable for serving a hot beverage in a styrofoam cup to a customer who asked for a hot beverage and could easily detect it was in a styrofoam cup.

Bringing up Stella Liebeck makes me feel irrationally hostile; I've had a negative reaction to people "busting the myth" of that lawsuit on the internet for probably 20 years.

I certainly believe that suing corporations with deep pockets is a reasonable and moral way to deal with medical bills in a country without universal health care. It's not a good system, but if you can get away with it, why not?

And I know well that on average, the scourge of frivolous lawsuits against corporations is a myth, because I've worked in the legal industry and have a perspective based on many other lawsuits.

And if McDonald's served coffee without a properly secure lid, or some other defect then they should be held responsible for every penny of damages.

However, I am irritated by anyone who may insist that it is a "fact" that serving coffee which is hot (but less than 212 deg) is negligent in itself. And if I continue to see this "myth busted" or "fact checked" for the next 20 years, it's not going to change my opinion, because assuming I live that long, I'm going to be boiling water for coffee on my stove almost every day.

https://medium.com/@CitationsPodcst/episode-107-pop-torts-an...

I was going to post the same in anticipation of the partisan downvotes that you're receiving. Without going into specifics, this sums it up nicely:

>It’s not that the left shouldn’t have opportunities to speak up against the president’s agenda -- of course it should. But the ACLU shouldn’t be its political bullhorn. The organization’s legal independence gave it special standing. By falling in line with dozens of other left-leaning advocacy groups, the ACLU risks diminishing its focus on civil liberties litigation and abandoning its reputation for being above partisanship

One issue in particular is the ACLU's interpretation of the second amendment, which they do not fight for with the same fervor as the first.

1.https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/02/08/the_ac...

Trans women are women. These schools are denying this with this idea, so it seems like a good use of the ACLU's resources to me. Morality aside, I don't know about the legal aspects of defending that principle in the US, but presumably the ACLU have some ground.

>, so that those sports are competitive and fair.

[drifting off the OP topic, but...] shouldn't school sports be about inclusion? what is your ideal of fairness here? For me, the pursuit and rewarding of certain idealised body types selected by narrow athletic criteria reminiscent of pageantry has never been 'fair' for anybody..

School sports ought to focus on inclusive physical self-improvement, help kids develop cooperative skills, resolve conflicts and work together for a common goal, that sort of thing.

Just because you share the bias doesn't make it unbiased

As for the test, you say it's not a fair test. The point / conversation right now seems to be about the choice of parameters used by the ACLU. As far as I see / understand, the ACLU used the default parameters (and/or those recommended in the documentation / articles that are still up today with those same non-99% values).

What would have been a better / fairer test?

I'm deeply troubled by the text I've seen here implying this threshold is some accuracy percentage or positive predictive value percentage. Unless God is working behind the scenes at AWS they can't make any claim about the accuracy of the model on an as yet unseen population of images.

That's even before getting to the more esoteric map vs territory concerns like identical twins, altered images, adversarial makeup and masks, etc.

Presumably you'd also use the same techniques as used by humans today to narrow down further, like taking into account location, time, etc of match

Now ask if my neighbor looks like any random person on the street, sure, it's small. But that chance we find two people somewhere that look very similar is incredibly high.

If I increase the population I test to include any warm body, eventually I'll end up with more false positives than real positives.

If you are looking for one male suspect and comparing them to all the male faces (let's assume it gets gender correct) in the us, with a 99.9999% (six 9s) accurate algorithm you would get something like:

1 true positive 182,499,818 true negatives 182 false positives

Broad scale facial recognition is just an outright stupid thing to do as a sole measure of identification without the use of other information.

This seems like a clear example for why facial recognition is a technology that is just not 'solved' yet. The appearance of people's faces, especially from similar ethnic backgrounds, is just too similar for a ML model to parse out with any confidence.

I have noticed this in real life. As I get older, I notice it more and more. I'm sure many of you all have too. There are very distinct patterns, or 'buckets', that human faces tend to fall in. I think our brains tend to naturally categorize them accordingly.

It is probably subconscious. I might not be able to articulate it, or put a definite 'name' on a group. But I know I am constantly seeing patterns of faces in public. People I don't know, and have never met, but they remind me of other random people I have seen in public. Or maybe they remind me of a popular celebrity that everyone knows.

Either way, something goes off in my head. I can't help but think to myself, they must have some sort of similar lineage, or genetic background. I subconsciously categorize them into a bucket with others I've seen.

I imagine this is similar to how Rekognition, and other models work. I thought the blog post from the parent commment @bko, is a fantastic example of this. It is actually amazing, when you think about it, that the ML model can match these faces up as well as it does.

To the naked eye, it is clearly not the same person. Rightly so, considering all the images were in the range of 70-80% confidence. But many are remarkably close. I think this illustrates, the concept I am trying to describe. You can notice it, even with the naked eye.

All of this rambling is to say, I agree with Amazon's moratorium on Rekognition.

As impressive as the technology is, it should probably not be used to try pin-point specific individuals yet, or whatever else folks might be erroneously trying to use it for. If we are to trust facial recognition to identify specific individuals, it should probaly be approaching near 100% confidence, and I imagine that level of confidence is a long ways off.

This of course means that there are doppelgangers or near doppelgangers all over the place. Even funnier, when i first moved back here from the U.S I was staying at a place in which there was this guy who looked exactly like one of my friends from the U.S, even down to facial expressions and mannerisms (maybe that was because he was always extremely stoned).

Take DNA testing. We all know that given two samples the odds of a false positive are incredibly low. So DNA testing is a great too for eliminating people who might otherwise be suspects or further evidence against the guilty.

The problem is that given this DNA database, someone decided "let's find our suspect by looking for a match". With 1 in a billion chance of a random match and 100M samples, your chances of getting a false positive are really high.

The problem is that there are instances where a DNA match alone is used to prosecute or even convict people.

In recent years this problem has gotten worse due to the rise of familial DNA matching. Given two samples, we used to only have the ability to say if they were a match or not. Now we can say how much of a match they are. How much of a partial match is enough? What's more, you may be implicated by the stored DNA is relatives.

Facial recognition is far more imprecise than DNA. So yeah I fully expect this to get abused by prosecutors and law enforcement.

There is already a whole slew of dubious methods[1] (bite mark analysis, blood splatter analysis, fibre comparison) being used to put people in prison/to death, these things are known to be bullshit, but they are still being used. I really think we as technology-literate people should fight as hard as we can against the introduction of facial recognition in the justice system because once it becomes common place it will be really hard to undo it.

[0]: https://www.innocenceproject.org [1]: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-humes-forensic-e...

Yay, we have an algorithm judging people, but is it fair to Canadians? Completely off...

You're using the strawman and whataboutism logical fallacies, but you're not actually making a point.

Technology can address biases but we need to make sure that they are addressed sufficiently, so that we do not end up causing more problems than we solve.

I personally feel it's wrong but that's one thing I've always got hung up on in building a critique.

This has nothing to do with machine learning. It is a simple correlational situation.

If African Americans have, on average, poorer credit ratings, then correlational models will begin to equate race with poor credit ratings, which will impact their ability to get credit and hence feeding back on that mechanism.

...of course RACE isn't allowed to be factored into financial applications, so the applications will often use other data points, like zip code, that end up having a correlation to bad credit as well as race. ...often producing the same result.

The problem isn't with the models - it's with reality.

The author famously said "Math is Racist". It's hard to get over such stupidity.

Well, that is categorically wrong, given the history of computing.

But anyway, the implication in the previous comment was that IBM were built on the business of exterminating Jews, which is frankly ridiculous given that they started business 30 years before the Nazi party even came to power.

Note, I'm not claiming IBM didn't get involve with the nazis. The German subsidiary certainly did business with the Nazis, including with their processing of Jews and minorities. Thomas J Watson even received an award from them. But, IIRC, he realised he'd been set up as a publicity stunt and gave it back. Once the war started, the German subsidiary bought themselves out and became independent.

It should be noted that IBM in the US has a history of introducing policies ensuring equality and diversity in employment that precede similar federal legislation, sometimes by decades.

And yet it's only the Nazis thing everyone brings up.

Note that this is a one way relationship, corporations must comply with laws, but can also do other things.

People in the armed forces need to be put in the same boat I'm in.

Don't like the Big Tech corporate surveillance state? Write better laws regulating them. Don't like the people writing laws currently? Vote and run against them. Still not heard? There are yet more avenues for recourse.

The idea that technology is going to fix these problems holds no basis in reality.

If you do truly hold the belief that governments are "the definition of independent", and that all governments act solely in the best interests of their own citizens...well, to borrow some words from Public Enemy: Can't do nuttin' for ya man.

We're literally talking about the government using facial recognition with no oversight and little public debate and no consent from the public, so you wouldn't have an excuse for coming out with this "government is all of us working together" lorem ipsum even if you were born 30 seconds before the article was posted and didn't know anything about the way that governments actually behave in practice.

You come so very close to getting it, in that you acknowledge that this isn't how governments work in reality, and then you're like "well neither is anything else though" as if that is somehow an argument for a strategy that you kinda-acknowledge cannot work.

And FWIW: I agree, it's fucked, it needs to stop, both in the public and private sector, and anyone that works on such tech should be shunned. But your assumptions are false to fact.