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Comment by nemothekid | Hacker News Reader

Almost every day on HN I read that multiple flavors of "FB/Palantir/Google/MS engineers who do nothing while Zuckerberg/USG/China invades more and more of our privacy are complicit in the cog that is Zuckerberg's ambition", but when it comes to race relations, suddenly engineers should be allowed to work in silence.

I understand there's nuance, but I only hope the hivemind considers this nuance the next time they pile on Amazon engineers who decide to build facial recognition databases for the NSA.

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HN is not a uniform group of people speaking with one voice. It's a group of different people with different opinions on different subjects who speak up at different times.

It's tempting to personify things that are too complex to grasp in detail, but this roads lead nowhere.

There is a difference. They tell you to quit your job usually, not harass your coworkers into becoming your loud speaker for the cause.

If the Recoil project were contributing to racism in the US, I think we all agree that would be a problem.

Connecting facial recognition software and racism seems to be earning you downvotes here.

While racism is the hot button topic right now, widespread governmental and corporate (or indeed, private) use of facial recognition software is problematic for many reasons. Erosion of privacy, sexual and non-sexual harassment and stalking, racial profiling, gender profiling, profiling for membership of any other kind of group, cute Facebook apps tied to shadowy political organizations, even crazy dystopian inventions like the Chinese social credit scheme. This tech needs to be very strongly regulated, and soon.

Anyone working in this field, and creating this type of software for companies with a historically weak moral compass, _should_ think deeply about their involvement.

Facial recognition may not work reliably if there is training data bias, which can be disadvantageous if you want it to work.

And as you note it can also be used for reducing privacy at scale in a way that humans can't normally do on their own, for example personally identifying thousands of people in a crowd at a sporting event or political rally.

Recoil isn't facial recognition software, it's a React state management library. That's why the employee's conduct was so toxic here; the project he demanded a statement from just has nothing to do with racism in the first place.

How does this even apply when it’s employees on the same company and team having disagreements?

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