And I think that cuts to the core of this: this is an anti-Amazon move. Nonetheless, I do also think it's a pro-consumer, pro-civil liberties stance. It's also a recognition that the tide is turning with respect to consumers and privacy; here, Microsoft is getting ahead of this changing trend and establishing that they're on the right side of it. Amazon is going to find itself hurting on several levels next year, as legislation likely finds its way onto the books and the consumer tide changes further.
On Nov 27th, I watched the International Joint Hearing with Richard Allan, Facebook’s vice-president of policy solutions. It was a couple hours long and of much higher tech literacy than the one the US held with Zuckerberg. Questions came from seven countries. Questions were mostly honest and the answers were informative. There were still a number of people who chose to just ask angry questions for sound bites. (Canada's rep was unfortunately one of the ones who asked bad questions.)
Overall though, it was a really good discussion. Here's a link to the transcript and video ("watch the meeting" link).
http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence....
A joint-declaration was made after the hearing. It speaks to an international alliance for regulation. This is really where I see traction forming.
Here's the declaration, it's only a page long: https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z...
Hope this throws you a notification or something. Cheers.
If enough industry people are on the side of it and/or there no populist fight over it, Trump would have no reason to veto it.
I don't think Trump really cares that much about these things, it'll only be a thing if it turns into a pop-culture war in which he may choose sides.
But if MS and a bunch of other heavyweights are in favour of it, he just might even go for it.
It's possible. But more likely in a few years.
> But if MS and a bunch of other heavyweights are in favour of it, he just might even go for it.
I remember the first time I heard about Net Neutrality as an issue, in what, 2011 or something? I couldn't have imagined it becoming politicized at all. Plus, Wikipedia, Google, basically any tech company who isn't an ISP should clearly be on the same side. And yet, it became a political issue. People who couldn't explain the first thing about what Net Neutrality is, have opinions about it. Trump's administration is against it.
Maybe it'll be different for Facial Recognition, since people can better intuit about it, but honestly, that probably just makes it easier to fear-monger about, rightly or wrongly.
Carriers are enormously powerful and influential so there will be a war.
If it's MS vs. Amazon ... well it's not one industry vs. the other.
But I agree it could turn into a pop culture war.
Amazon or tech in general wont be stopped , but it will have to pay the toll. This is something dems and repubs agree on. Im guessing MS is not looking to be the leader so why not just get some good press at the same time.
Amazon's "main business" is AWS, not their online store. For many years their store operated at a loss. Don't get me wrong, amazon.com is a HUGE business, but it's not Bezos' breadwinner.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/all-of-amazons-2017-operating-...
AWS is a very large business, and much more profitable than selling physical goods online.
But Amazon's overall revenue was $56.6B (Q3 2018[1]) and "only" $6.68B of that was AWS. By comparison, revenue from Amazon's advertising business is $2.5B - and no one is claiming that is their main line of business.
Even the article you point to shows Amazon made a profit of $1.69B on North American ecommerce vs $1.35B profit from AWS.
So yeah - AWS is a high margin business, but no where near their "main business".
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/25/amazon-earnings-q3-2018.html
More specifically, a common theme in public policy analysis is agenda setting. Unfortunately, in many situations, the agenda is so crowded with priorities that only crises cut through. For more context, see "The Public Policy Primer: Managing the Policy Process" (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8727263-the-public-polic...)
Facial recognition's biggest abuses are from the fox watching the hen-house. "Common sense" would lead to such absurdities like banning using it on cops because "everybody knows criminals could use it to track them" while using it on every protester because "they might be terrorists" despite both known truths being complete bullshit.
Perhaps I'm jaded, but I don't agree at all. They're trying to get it regulated so they can be creepy without fear. One of the first "good" uses listed was finding 3000 children. "Think of the children" is a common rallying cry for evil. Nothing else mentioned was really relevant.
The line IMHO needs to be drawn at anything that you'd call stalking if it were done by a human. If a store wants to recognize me as a prior visitor, that's fine because an actual employee might do the same. But when my presence (just my presence, not even my purchase history) is shared among more than one location, that's like someone following me around. Stalking. This tracking of people and creating databases about them is at its essence a form of automated cyber stalking and should be illegal. The "societal benefits" of this are nothing more than claiming what's good for corporations is good for society. It is not. Please stop pretending this shit is OK.
As best I can tell, from a surveillance standpoint what Microsoft is encouraging to become standardized is to apply the same level of legal rigor for wiretaps to facial recognition, which would be a significant step beyond matching legal standards for physical surveillance (which is as it should be, as there's a scaling potential with automated surveillance that needs to be kept in check beyond simply the legal limits of physical surveillance).
Microsoft's stance is a pretty good one "in a perfect world." The problem is that it isn't a perfect world, and we've already seen a good system of FISA courts established after the uncovered abuses from the 1975 Church committee turn into a revolving door for exponentially increased secret warrants for NSA surveillance, even to the point of that surveillance becoming available to local police forces.
What doesn't help is that Hollywood has already normalized a lot of surveillance tech so that most of the public assumes things are already legal/implemented in much broader ways than they are, so it's normalized the very idea of the surveillance state that we are growing into.
If anything, private corporate abuses of the technology is the only thing that will generate enough public outrage to lead to a generalized reform. Self-governance at a corporate level may seem good, but I suspect it will simply mitigate the necessary outrage.
The necessary conversation starter would be the ACLU running a personalized erectile dysfunction out-of-home display advertising campaign in Washington, DC. As long as that level of abuse is against the terms of use of the intermediate providers, it protects the less visible abuses of the technology.
Ironically, a "race to the bottom" is precisely what will result in the appropriate level of regulation - corporate self-governance will always be a half-measure that seems good on paper but leaves a lot of procedural loopholes for systemic abuses that go unnoticed for a very long time.
Yeah, you're talking about human stalkers, but OP's talking about capturing your image with many cameras, logging your presence into databases and sharing that information with other organisations.
I don't think Microsoft and their partners are interested in building a warrants-only surveillance system. Businesses already have camera systems and one could run face recognition on stored video after something has happened. Nobody is talking about that. This is all about real-time cloud connected face recognition.
Follow you?
Video tape you?
Video tape an entire public area constantly?
Have Arial footage of an entire city?
All these things exist and are being done. There's good uses for all of them too. But where do we draw the line? Do the good uses outweigh the bad? Personally I'm not convinced. And that's before we include the internet as a public place, which I really don't think people internalize it like that.
Connecting the AI face recognizer to the cloud or any other system is exactly where the line needs to be.
We need a framework for programming ourselves so as to be able to systematically protect ourselves at emotional, mental, and spiritual levels.
Further, any system incentivizing such emotional exploitation needs to leave now. I'm looking at you, capitalism.
I'm not familiar with this line of reasoning -- can you elaborate, or are there any good examples?
> Ethicist Jack Marshall described "Think of the children!" as a tactic used in an attempt to end discussion by invoking an unanswerable argument.[2] According to Marshall, the strategy succeeds in preventing rational debate.[2] He called its use an unethical manner of obfuscating debate, misdirecting empathy towards an object which may not have been the focus of the original argument.[2] Marshall wrote that although the phrase's use may have a positive intention, it evokes irrationality when repeatedly used by both sides of a debate.[2] He concluded that the phrase can transform the observance of regulations into an ethical quandary, cautioning society to avoid using "Think of the children!" as a final argument.[2]
So now they have an excuse to get all of thus unsightly severely maimed Civil War Veterans reduced to begging out of the way. It isn't that we don't want to provide for them at all or have to look at them but it is for the children!
That bit of stupidity got left on the books until the 70s - mostly since it got forgotten until it came up as an excuse for the police to be dicks. Then there are the similar rationales of 'we have to discriminate against gays because they are all sexual predators'.
It’s not the same. That employee is not always there, not always paying attention and he doesn’t keep a log.
A machine on the other hand is very efficient and it’ll recognize you every single time.
For a period of time, there was a lot of chatter about all developers having some kind of professional oath, like doctors. Many of the approaches that were taken have issues (preclude working on smart weapons program or legal surveillance).
I wonder if what we really need is a developers oath along the following:
"Anything I build can and will be abused. I am responsible for my designs, for my products, and for the data I collect and store. If my technology is used for evil, I am responsible."
So, by that logic, Tatu Ylönen should be held responsible for all hacks/crimes committed via ssh?
You can't blame someone for making a tool that someone else uses for evil. Should Ford be responsible for all auto-related deaths? Should Edison be responsible for all deaths where the state put someone to death via electrocution? Should Jobs be responsible because a hacker used an OSX machine to hack into another machine?
I don't get this line of thinking, although I understand the sentiment.
I'd argue few companies ever reach this level of risk, and those that do are so large that the individual contributor cannot reasonably take on that burden of responsibility.
In the example of some Amazon surveillance 'big-brother' software: Max the software dev is just making facial recognition software to the best of their ability. They aren't privy to the motivations, long-term plans, and potential consequences of those decisions.
The oath is always a fun topic to discuss though: In reality it holds no meaning other than to the one who takes the oath. Correct me if I'm wrong, but in malpractice cases I doubt they cite the oath as evidence since all students are essentially forced to recite it.
Can we make it a requirement for ourselves to limit our power to our ability to keep that power safe?
I think that’s a superset of the problem of incentive alignment in AI safety, so probably not... but we also shouldn’t let the perfect to be the enemy of the improved.
I commit every single day of my professional life as a physician to do my best for my patients, and to do the absolute least harm possible. And over the entire course of my lifetime, I will not achieve the scale of harm - or benefit - that a developer can achieve with a few months or years of concentrated effort.
That aside, in US specifically, there's already something that is more narrowly tailored to our current reality. They aren't accepting new signatures because of how many there were, but you can still make the same pledge (and e.g. share it publicly to have some skin in the game):
Well, which is it? Both of these statements can't be true. Does this creed apply to gun manufacturers? Knife manufacturers? Car manufacturers? Hammer manufacturers?
There seems to be an eternal cycle of abstraction creating and breaking, in both finance and software.
- Someone builds a general-purpose abstraction that becomes popular.
- Inevitably, the abstraction gets abused.
- To prevent abuse, the abstraction gets violated. It's not general-purpose anymore because some usages are disallowed.
(This seems to be why open API's to online services tend not to last very long.)
Higher order causation must be separated from moral culpability. In other words, you should not hold people responsible for things that happen far downstream. Things that happen several links down the causal chain have occurred due to the decisions of many other people further along that chain, and a higher culpability should fall upon them.
That is not to say that a software developer cannot be directly responsible for bad outcomes, maybe for example working on weapon systems for a nefarious state, where you’re fairly close causally to the point of application. My point is that it’s not a good idea to push this to it’s limits.
Obviously hyperbolic, but not very different at the core.
"Anything I build can and will be abused. I am responsible for my designs, for my products, and for the data I collect and store. If my technology is used for evil, I am responsible."
Even if we somehow had that measure in place it would be a cure worse than the disease - well you can't get a job doing something legitimate because it turns out that your safety human recognition algorithm got abused by somebody else? Just crime for you to make a living.
If my tech is used to do harm, the responsibility to heal is shared between myself, the cultures involved in leading to harm, the perpetrators of the harm, those harmed, those witnessing harm, and those in denial of responsibility. I'll do my part while encouraging and believing in others' willingness to grow together.
I won't be holding my breath as you start on your new venture.
In software, at least.
The world has moved on a lot since 1848 — someone needs to promote genuinely new political ideas for our era, not rehash ones that came from the transition from agrarian-feudalism to industrial-capitalism.
But the root cause of the problem is legal. No matter how you try to analyse this,it's a social problem and society is governed by laws through government not by corporate policies through megacorps.
America's democracy is not agile. It cannot adopt to rapid changes in society and advancements in technology. America desperately needs legal reform starting from the constitution.
For this issue in particular,why aren't lawmakers passing laws in favor of the public? I don't want this to be up to Microsoft feeling like a good "corporate citizen" today,the government is supposed to be for the people,by the people and of the people.
You what concerns me and should scare every american? What if everyone is running around trying to fix the symptoms while ignoring the elephant in the room,a disease at the heart of american democracy. What if by the time people get around to try and fix the disease(root cause) it's too late?
I find it downright scary when corporations take shortsighted and immoral positions like that. It is historically very clear there are consequences to our work as engineers and companies developing and supplying technology. It is very important to know that we share responsibility for how our work is used starting from the moment we reasonably understand how it is being used.
I mean, there are engineers who designed and built the gas chambers in the second world war. Were they responsible for the murders that were committed with it? Or is only the one turning the wheels responsible? Or the one who was in command? Or his boss higher up? I think everyone who knew was partly responsible, including the engineers.
It also has also been proven that is is really easy to coerce people (including engineers) into doing immoral things. It is easy to deny any responsibility when it is someone else telling/ordering you to do things. But it does not clear you of responsibility for your actions.
I think Microsoft is doing the right thing now, they have come to realize their technology can easily be abused in ways they did not foresee (this probably already happened), and they try to take responsibility by speaking out and lobbying to get legislation in place to avoid abuse, but without destroying the market opportunity.
Tragically, I expect several things:
- There will be no government legislation / "red tape", certainly not from the current US government.
- The race to the bottom they are afraid of will happen anyway, and Microsoft gets to choose whether they want to be part of it or not. Their morals (now out in the open) will work against their chances of market success.
- What Microsoft asks for is still far to weak. They want to take the moral high-ground, but they also want to sell their stuff. For instance, they ask for clear signage in stores that facial recognition is being used, so that customers can choose not to enter the store. Do they really think this will provide good privacy protection? Business will simply strong-arm consumers into consent by denying service if they don't, just like they did with the old EU privacy directive (cookie law).
- In the EU, GDPR is already providing consumer protection against facial recognition, mostly better that what Microsoft is asking for. Business in EU are now effectively prohibited from using it, but US based startups will use their lead to "disrupt" the market and introduce it here anyway.
How exactly? Maybe lobbying for relaxing the law? I think that maybe shopping centers and similar businesses could lobby for facial recognition. I hope both of them don't succeed.
Also there is the option of "growth hacking" and "legal marketing", aka just doing it illegally (with some faux activism story behind it) and seeing what happens. The government here is not really actively enforcing GDPR, so you can probably get away ignoring it for quite some time, flying under the radar if you are small, like most website publishers do too.
As someone who's worked in the tech sector in the Seattle area for over a decade, I could have told you that would happen. One of Amazon's core values is minimizing expense -- it's baked into their DNA. It doesn't matter what the issue is. If it costs Amazon money, they HATE it.
Lots of potential problems can arise. I wonder how they bake those into their DNA?
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/07/amazons-rekognit...
Taking matters into our own hands becomes an option.
Which group?
There is no such thing. “Why take a step away from the oncoming truck, that one strp won’t save my life?”
This stands in stark contrast to the meeting I attended on Tuesday with Amazon's general counsel regarding their Rekognition service. There was a near complete rejection of the idea that mass deployment of surveillance technologies in today's largely unregulated environment posed any danger to civil society. He also denied that Amazon had any responsibility for the negative impacts of their AI/ML technologies, or role to play in industry efforts to self-regulate.