Profile picture
, 10 tweets, 3 min read
My Authors
Read all threads
Amazon has announced a one-year moratorium on the sale of #Rekognition, its facial recognition tool, to US law-enforcement.

bbc.com/news/business-…

1/
The company has renewed its call for Congress to pass laws regulating FR technology. A charitable interpretation of this call is that the company is genuinely concerned with the abuse of its tools.

2/
However, if that's true, it could voluntarily withdraw its products from customers like ICE and law enforcement.

A more realistic take is that the company wants to have an external authority it can appeal to when it is accused of unethical conduct.

3/
That is, "We're just doing what Congress told us to do."

And of course, federal laws mean that any forbearance from Amazon in its sales to cops will not disadvantage it relative to less ethical rivals.

4/
Some opponents of sales of FR to law enforcement stress that FR systems have well-understood biases (stemming from poor training data) that make it less reliable when asked to recognize Black and brown faces.

5/
However, as I wrote when IBM pulled out of the facial recognition business a couple days ago, this is a dangerously incomplete critique.

pluralistic.net/2020/06/09/war…

6/
Because if the main problem with FR is that it fails to recognize racialized peoples' faces, then the answer is to feed FR systems with new training pictures of PoCs until it is highly accurate at recognizing them.

7/
Which is to say, until the police have a perfect tool for tracking and identifying people of color.

That's what happened in China, where tech giants fixed their Black FR problem by requisitioning the entire Zimbabwean drivers' license database.

foreignpolicy.com/2018/07/24/bei…

8/
Today, Chinese state security can use FR to reliably identify and track African faces within China (and they can sell this capability to African states that are entering into debtor relationships with China to acquire tech capacity).

9/
This is hardly a bright spot for racial equality.

The problem with FR for law enforcement is that it sets up a high-tech totalitarian surveillance state: not that it fails to recognize Black faces well enough.

eof/
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh.

Keep Current with Cory Doctorow #BLM

Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

Twitter may remove this content at anytime, convert it as a PDF, save and print for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video

1) Follow Thread Reader App on Twitter so you can easily mention us!

2) Go to a Twitter thread (series of Tweets by the same owner) and mention us with a keyword "unroll" @threadreaderapp unroll

You can practice here first or read more on our help page!

Related hashtags

#Rekognition

More from @doctorow see all

Profile picture
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Since the pre-internet days, the NYPD had posted its "Personnel Orders" (reports from closed-door disciplinary proceedings) to a clipboard in its public information office, explicitly so that journalists could look at these reports.

1/ Image
In 2016, the NYPD abruptly stopped. Their excuse? They needed to "save paper."

No, really.

techdirt.com/articles/20200…

2/
But the real reason came out later, as @TimCushing recounts: "An NYPD spokesman said someone in the PD's legal bureau had re-read the 1976 law and realized the NYPD had no obligation to turn over this info to the public. So it stopped."

3/
Read 8 tweets
Profile picture
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
There are so many reasons to dunk on HBO Max: its confusing name (quick, what's the difference between HBO, HBO Max, HBO Go, and HBO Now?), its terrible UI, and so on.

But worst of all is what it embodies about monopolies.

eff.org/deeplinks/2020…

1/
HBO, of course, is part of Time-Warner, which is part of AT&T (a garbage company).

AT&T caps its customers' data, but not when it comes to HBO Max. So if you're a Netflix subscriber, every video you watch brings you closer to massive excess bandwidth charges.

2/
But if you're an AT&T subscriber, HBO Max is "free" (in the sense that the monopoly provider you're forced to use for internet access doesn't charge you directly - merely uses your viewing habits to try to destroy all alternatives).

3/
Read 13 tweets
Profile picture
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Happy #BookBirthday to @StephanieKelton on the publication of her long-awaited "The Deficit Myth," a book that could NOT be more timely in this moment of massive structural unemployment and trillions of free money for the wealthiest among us.

stephaniekelton.com/book/

1/
Kelton is one of the leading proponents of #ModernMonetaryTheory, which describes how money actually works, as a series of accounting flows, and makes some profound observations about the implications of understanding how government spending actually works.

2/
I've written about Kelton's work before:

pluralistic.net/2020/05/14/eve…

But here's the shortest possible summary I can give:

Money ISSUERS (sovereign states) have a different relationship to money and debt than money USERS (everyone else: people, companies, local governments).

3/
Read 23 tweets

Embed code for your website

×
Follow Us on Twitter!

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3.00/month or $30.00/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!