That’s a little dramatic, don’t you think?

With the exception of public figures, they aren’t sharing facial recognition datasets. This is a service that a moderately skilled team could implement with off the shelf and free software or an individual could do with a raspberry pi.

Law enforcement has been doing this for a long time in many areas. If there’s an ethical issue here, it’s with machine learning and camera surveillance in general, not Amazon.

Amazon is still facilitating it. If you’re selling guns to someone you know is a a serial killer, “someone else would have sold them a gun” is not a defense.

Edit: especially if you run ads about how effective your guns are for serial killing.

There’s a big difference between committing a crime and engaging in lawful commerce.

By your standard, HN is on the same level as Amazon, as there have been many articles here over the years describing technical details on how to implement such a system available to anyone. A serial killer may be using a raspberry pi based facial recognition system that he learned about here, right now to stalk a victim.

That’s an untenable position.

Well I mean everything is lawful commerce until it isn't. That doesn't mean it was right to do.

Implementation requires specialized skills for the hardware, software, and logistics, as well as lots of time, money, and patience. A stalker isn't going to deploy many pi zeros with cameras in many places on his own, and I'm not concerned that they will be able to round up many assistants.

Amazon's product takes care of all that nitty-gritty, thanks to the work of their many bright employees.

If a stalker isn't going to deploy many pi zeros with cameras, then Amazon isn't useful to him either. It's still up to the customer to actually take the images.

For implementing facial recognition, yeah, it takes a little bit of coding skill. Same as integrating with Rekognition.

where are the 'many areas' where law enforcement is doing real-time surveillance using a city-wide grid of cameras and and backed by facial recognition?

"public service" was a bit of a misnomer. The article states:

"Amazon is providing police departments in Orlando, Fla., and Washington County, Ore., with powerful facial recognition technology."

Rekognition is SaaS (software as a service). Anyone can pay for running Rekoginition on their data sets (within Amazon ToS). Rekognition was not created directly for the police departments in FL or OR.

This is disingenuous. It's been actively marketed to law enforcement. A product is not created out of the blue with no target market. That's simply not how things work.

And that's whats happening to with a lot of surveillance technology, see Palantir, they are being packaged and aggressively marketed to schools, law enforcement and government.

Taken together these companies are selling and enabling a surveillance dystopia for no bigger reason than personal gain and the people responsible should be called out.

I think they may have meant something more like “publicly available service”

I believe the parent probably meant service as in the 'service' in SOA.