SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
At the Private Internet Access Blog, Glyn Moody writes how Amazon and US schools are following in China's footsteps to normalize automatic facial recognition and constant surveillance. Materials gained Freedom of Information Act requests by the ACLU have documented that Amazon has been marketing in its hosted "Rekognition" products to both police forces and schools to facilitate mass surveillance inside the US and to inure the coming generations to it.
Amazon has developed a powerful cloud-based facial recognition system called "Rekognition", which has major implications for privacy. It is already being used by multiple US police forces to carry out surveillance and make arrests, the ACLU has learned.
Amazon claims that Rekognition offers real-time face matching across tens of millions of individuals held in a database, and can detect up to 100 faces in a single photo of a crowd. Rekognition can be used to analyze videos, and to track people even when their faces are not visible, or as they go in and out of the scene.
As a result of these disclosures, a coalition of organizations including the ACLU has sent a letter to Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos demanding that the company stop providing its facial recognition tool to the government. The ACLU has also launched a petition that calls for the same.
Emails obtained through freedom of information requests submitted by the ACLU show that Amazon has worked with the city of Orlando, Florida, and the Washington County Sheriff's Office in Oregon to roll out Rekognition in those locations. In addition, law enforcement agencies in California, Arizona, and multiple domestic surveillance "fusion centers" have indicated interest in Rekognition, although it is not clear how many of these have gone on to deploy the system. Orlando has used Rekognition to search for people in footage drawn from the city's video surveillance cameras. Washington County, meanwhile, has built a Rekognition-based mobile app that its deputies can use to run any image against the county's database of 300,000 faces.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Tuesday May 29 2018, @01:53PM (27 children)
A whole generation is growing up completely internalizing the fact that total surveillance is normal.
1984 is edging closer and closer - because that's the real message of this book: freedom dies when people truly accept and welcome servitude.
(Score: 5, Touché) by c0lo on Tuesday May 29 2018, @02:04PM (16 children)
And the paradoxical thing is the older generation, who should have know better, mock [soylentnews.org] and curse [soylentnews.org] the Europeans for doing something to protect the privacy of their citizens.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 29 2018, @02:32PM (9 children)
Pretty much. It's like 9/11 snipped everybody's balls off.
The correct solution to school violence would involve a combination of better support for students and reducing access to the weapons being used in those attacks by restricting access to firearms whose primary use is killing other people. But, we can't have that because freedom, so we get to enjoy having our freedoms curtailed so that a bunch of dickless blunders can have their penis enlarging devices.
(Score: 2, Funny) by c0lo on Tuesday May 29 2018, @02:43PM (2 children)
Lobes, the brain uses lobes to function, not balls (grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday May 29 2018, @04:52PM (1 child)
You'd never know it, listening to a lot of the government, OR the male populace in general...I'm reminded of that Robin Williams sketch where he says "God gave men a brain, and a penis, and only enough blood to operate one at a time."
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 30 2018, @06:03AM
On these matters, women don't seem to be any better in general. It's a human problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 29 2018, @02:44PM
Its pretty obvious the endgame is to have pervasive surveillance and restricting access to buying literally anything because weapons, or pollution, etc.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 29 2018, @02:51PM
You would kill hundreds of millions to save a couple hundred. Because feels. Typical woman solution. There's a reason why you belong chained in the basement.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 29 2018, @06:16PM
these fucking "schools" don't even bother to lock the fucking doors but i'm supposed to give away my right to defend my homestead?
and most people aren't scared after 9/11. they are just too stupid. they think that giving the government more power(even when they are the ones that fucked things up to begin with) will fix things. just like you want to do with guns. you're just like them. another dumb slave.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Tuesday May 29 2018, @08:37PM
Okay, let's analyze this.
Now: Potential shooter looks over pistols, rifles, shotguns, some of which are cool-looking assault weapons. "I'll use that one!" (points at cool-looking assault weapon). Many people die.
Then, we implement your solution measure:
After that: Potential shooter looks over pistols, rifles, shotguns, some of which are cooler-looking than others. (Guns AC does not approve of for murder purposes are not included here.) "I'll use that one!" (points at cool-looking shotgun). Many people die. Ironically, none of the dead had as a dying thought "Well, at least it was a hunting or target-shooting sporting weapon I was murdered with."
What does this half-baked idea accomplish to protect people? Nothing.
What was accomplished at all, then? The advance of a gun-control agenda that does not have "protecting people" as its goal has banned another category of weapons, and is ready to target the next one.
No thanks.
It's already illegal to "shoot people to death".
There is no benefit in turning this into "illegal to shoot people to death with a [certain] gun."
Seriously, think about it. If you got all the guns banned, then acid attacks, knife attacks, and the like would increase, maintaining net violence. Idiot shooters now can just grab a gun, shoot a couple people, get shot themselves saving everyone else--but if they had no guns, they would have time and inclination to do something like google "anarchist cookbook bomb poison etcetera", where they would learn how to kill the entire building/area full of people at a stroke, which they wouldn't have thought of before. Be careful what you idiots wish for.
Instead of monkeying with the numbers to change "how" some of the people are murdered, it would probably be better to work on intervention between would-be murderers and potential victims, with the goal of fewer prematurely dead people.
This targeting, attacking, of the guns is a result of self-selection bias. If you look at violence throughout history, you see as commonalities violent people in either a culture or state of mind that led them to thinking they would get away with it to the degree they wanted to. But if you look at only, say, people bludgeoned to death, you see the problem there as bludgeons. Examine poisonings? You see the terrible free availability of poisonous things.
And if you look at shootings? Duh, you see guns. Knock it off; you're making yourself look stupid and you're perpetuating the cycle of violence. (If you see someone on about "gun violence" or "the shootings" please point this out to them.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 30 2018, @03:08AM
And personally the DMCA trumped both of those for the 'respect mah authoritah' don't look behind the curtain crap.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 30 2018, @04:25AM
This is a false dichotomy. I won't accept any violations of our liberties. I would gladly sacrifice safety for freedom, even assuming that some authoritarian policy definitely would increase our safety.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday May 29 2018, @02:59PM (4 children)
Let's not get hasty here. We have yet to see if Europeans will carry through (particularly, their intelligence agencies). Surely, you're aware that appearance and words don't always match reality.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 29 2018, @03:12PM (3 children)
Typical khallow. Let's take a broad brush, soak it copiously in FUD and get to work under the guise of precaution.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday May 29 2018, @03:15PM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 29 2018, @04:01PM (1 child)
Like?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday May 29 2018, @10:11PM
They're also on board with the abusive copyright protection schemes pushed by Disney and other US businesses (and willing to make things worse with their own zany ideas [boingboing.net]). Nor do the alleged protection schemes of this story extend to the efforts of the national and supernational intelligence agencies of the EU (they get to continue to collect data from their citizens).
Austerity was only a thing once banks of other member countries were threatened. And of course, that happens in the middle of a recession. And there was some bullying of small countries such as Iceland and Cyprus in recent years due also to this mess.
The EU let its immigration (from outside of the EU) policy be decided by one country, Greece who pulled in well over a million refugees from the Syrian civil war (and probably did it in retaliation for the austerity initiatives against Greece). A good portion of the European far right's increase in strength in recent years comes from the resulting mess.
The EU plays a lot of lip service to climate change alarmism (and is by far the most powerful entity backing propaganda for that budding ideology), but its policies (such as carbon emissions credit markets, renewable energy white elephants, and several climate treaties such as Kyoto) are notorious for doing little to address any actual problems in that area. But they get to spend more money [bloomberg.com].
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday May 29 2018, @08:20PM
And rightly so.
Because knowing who is in the school, (or in the street) has NOTHING AT ALL to do with protecting other people, and facial reco is hopelessly inaccurate.
Knowing every face as they walk in the school house door says nothing about what is in the back pack or under the trench coat.
Facial Reco is security theater and hopelessly useless theater at that. And the people who defend it are idiots.
But a security guard and a metal detector at school house doors (just like at rock concerts and ball parks) is a deterrent that actually works.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ledow on Tuesday May 29 2018, @02:37PM (8 children)
The scary thing about such surveillance is not that it exists, or that children might be born into it.
It's that WE HAVE ALREADY ACCEPTED IT. Honestly, people have Amazon Echo in their living room listening to everything they say, uploading it to the cloud (even storing it there so Amazon and you can re-listen to it, as in the recent case where Amazon "worked out" what the Echo heard in order to share the audio with some third-party unwittingly), and nobody questions it.
We're already accepting of technology, so long as it gives us some minor benefit. We don't care about "Location" being enabled on our phones so long as we can navigate home that one time we get lost. The fact that it's then left on all the time? Meh, who cares?
The generation that DIDN'T have this stuff, turned into the generation that DOES have this stuff, and they show it off and tell you how cool it is, while simultaneously complaining that their kids spend all their time on the computer, can tap, type and swipe before they can walk or write, etc.
It's a done deal, it's already happened, the world already accepted it, even without any safeguards whatsoever. Retrofitting those safeguards isn't going to help anything.
Celebrities have their accounts hacked and their photos exposed and - as a civilisation - we're more interested in what they were saying than who broke the law to disseminate that information.
It's already game over. And so accepted that you can't explain that to people.
That we'll be the last generation to REMEMBER a time before such things, that's sad. But we were the ones who allowed it. Maybe not us as individuals, but us as a generation. And now we've allowed it, you can't put the genie back in the bottle with some retro-fitted safeguard or other.
I think it's time that we acknowledge that this stuff is more than acceptable to the vast majority of the world, and figure out what that means. Chances are there's not very much we can do about it, in that case.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday May 29 2018, @03:31PM (1 child)
Who the fuck cares about what they were saying, were are interested only if there were nude pictures and what's the site those pictures were uploaded unto (large grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday May 30 2018, @12:06AM
The problem with happening across nude pictures of celebrities on the Internet is that I never have any idea who the celebrity is.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 29 2018, @06:54PM
its not too late to reject some of the conveniences.
rioting in the streets didnt happen when Snowden made his big reveal.
but there is too much money in selling this shit to the government to allow for widespread media reporting on discontent, although the widespread reporting on the discontent is probably not going unnoticed (amazon echo, google home etc).
just... dont let that stuff into your life, people! if your extended family has it then don't use it yourself. you dont have to give up by going along with it!
resist and at least feel good you tried than to die being somebody elses bitch.
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Tuesday May 29 2018, @06:57PM (3 children)
Do you own an Android phone? It's no different than Amazon Echo in all surveillance respects. In fact, it's worse because it travels with you when the Echo stays stationary.
I balked at buying an Echo, and then realized I had already openly and willingly accepted the surveillance state.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 30 2018, @04:40AM (1 child)
All cellphones have this issue, not just Android phones.
As for the question: I don't own a cellphone, for this very reason.
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Thursday May 31 2018, @11:25AM
Yeah. But the smart phones are just so damned convenient for communication and coordination when you have a family. If I didn't have kids, I'd ditch mine or at least turn it off (and maybe transport it in a Faraday Cage) when I didn't have a specific need for it.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Thursday May 31 2018, @10:05AM
The Apple / iTunes integration is no different.
They haven't properly complied with EU data protection law in decades... they never had a DPA notice, now they don't have a GDPR notice (not a legal one anyway).
You literally have NO IDEA where your Apple-stored data actually is, there's a line in the privacy policy which basically says "we reserve the right to store your data anywhere".
Also they also utilise Google, Azure and AWS storage to run iCloud - there have been articles on The Register about it.
So if you can't have Android, can't have Apple, Windows phones are dead but they are all in the Microsoft accounts/cloud... what does that leave? Tiny, niche players in the market making things you've never heard of.
Told you - you've ALREADY accepted it, just by owning a modern phone.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 30 2018, @04:30AM
Even here, there was some guy defending it on the basis that it does not yet record absolutely everything one says. That's some fine long-term thinking right there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 29 2018, @07:14PM
Indoctrinate them while they're young and they won't question authority as they grow up. It's the American way.