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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 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.