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.

> The fact that your face can be tracked does not mean your speech will be curtailed, those two things are fairly unrelated.

Anonymity is one of the most effective tools for preserving free speech. If you can't speak anonymously, you're more likely to self censor what you say. If you can't consume information anonymously, you're unlikely to seek out or research unpopular views or ideas.

Barring massive social changes that are realistically never going to happen, a world where your identity and actions are always visible is a world without free speech.

I agree with some of the principles you're articulating here, but I think the general class of position you're taking here is a bad one. Free speech has an actual meaning. It means the government does not restrict speech. Tracking people does not restrict speech. It may impose a social cost on you for speaking, but it does not prevent you from doing so. Nowhere in the constitution of the United States, nor any constitution that i'm aware of, does it say that you are to be insulated from the social consequences of speaking your mind. Nor do any guarantee the right to anonymity in public spaces.

Now, will this have a chilling effect on certain kinds of speech? Most likely, yes. Should we be concerned about that? Probably. But please, do not conflate 'free speech' with 'freedom from social consequences'.

I disagree that freedom of speech can be so neatly boxed into such a narrow definition, but that isn't really the point I was trying to make.

Ignoring broader social issues and focusing purely on the government, citizen monitoring can be (and often is) utilized by governments to curtail free speech. People joke about the NSA monitoring them, but that absolutely has an impact on free speech - people are less likely to search something online the government finds distasteful when they know they're being monitored. Note that this is true even if the thing they'd search is legal.

If the government can monitor which events you show up at or what you read, does that make you more likely to be put on a no-fly list? Does that make it more likely for the government to pursue a separate legal action that it otherwise might ignore?

> Ignoring broader social issues and focusing purely on the government, citizen monitoring can be (and often is) utilized by governments to curtail free speech. People joke about the NSA monitoring them, but that absolutely has an impact on free speech

It has an impact on speech. It does not have an impact on freedom to speak. The fact that a social architecture changes behavior does not mean that it restricts it. This difference is important.

This does not mean that the right to anonymity is not important. It may well be. It just isn't the same thing as the right to free speech, and they shouldn't be conflated. I understand the desire to conflate them - anchoring the right to anonymity to the more recognized right of free speech gives it greater moral force. That's why people make arguments like that. But in so doing it lassoes the even more important right of actual free speech to the probably less important right of anonymous speech. It tethers them in a way that exposes the weaknesses of the lesser right to the greater one.

Free speech is the right to say whatever you want without government interference. The right to anonymity may be important to, but let it stand on its own.

> If the government can monitor which events you show up at or what you read, does that make you more likely to be put on a no-fly list? Does that make it more likely for the government to pursue a separate legal action that it otherwise might ignore?

Lots of things make you more or less likely to do various things. That is not the same as curtailing your right to do them. Changing organ donation from opt-in to opt-out increases the right at which people choose it. That is not the same thing as forcible organ harvesting.

Anonymity doesn't stand on its own. The right to anonymity is only important because it protects other rights. If we're not trying to preserve people's ability to express ideas that the government dislikes, then who cares if their identity is public?

Anonymity is a tool to shield people from otherwise unpreventable consequences. Separating them is like saying, "you have a right to privacy, not a right to encryption." One of these things allows you to get the other thing.

Think about why voting is usually anonymous. Most countries recognize that even with the general restrictions on government retaliating against speech, it is fundamentally impossible for us to block all of the many avenues it has to punish citizens. The only way to block that is to not allow it to know who specifically to target.

As a more modern example, America's current administration was willing to prosecute a bunch of inauguration protesters. If they had the ability to identify every single person at those protests, that would be a major deterrent to people attending them in the future. The government wouldn't even need to prosecute future participants; they'd just need to make sure that people kept in the back of their mind, "we could put you through a year-long legal battle if we wanted to."

Intimidation, targeting, and threatening is a form of suppression. We're not talking about marking a form opt-in or opt-out, we're talking about government interference into people's lives with the explicit goal of discouraging speech. It's not about whether or not people's speaking habits happen to change, it's about why they change - because they're frightened of government power to punish them for searching or expressing unpopular opinions.

People aren't conflating anonymity with free speech because it makes the argument stronger, or because they're trying to sneak it in on the side. I couldn't care less about anonymity, in except that it is the only strategy that anyone has ever come up with that allows me to have a large number of other fundamental rights that I do care about.

> Anonymity doesn't stand on its own. The right to anonymity is only important because it protects other rights. If we're not trying to preserve people's ability to express ideas that the government dislikes, then who cares if their identity is public?

The same is true of speech. It is a right that exists to protect other rights. Speaking, in and of itself is nice, but the function that right serves is the circumscription of state power.

> Anonymity is a tool to shield people from otherwise unpreventable consequences. Separating them is like saying, "you have a right to privacy, not a right to encryption." One of these things allows you to get the other thing.

I totally agree. That doesn't make it equivalent to the right to speak, however. The fact that anonymity augments the right to speak is great. That may be an argument for having a right to anonymity. It does not make the right to anonymity equal to the right to speak.

> Think about why voting is usually anonymous. Most countries recognize that even with the general restrictions on government retaliating against speech, it is fundamentally impossible for us to block all of the many avenues it has to punish citizens. The only way to block that is to not allow it to know who specifically to target.

Again, totally agree. We don't disagree that attribution has a chilling effect on speech. You're preaching to the choir here. We disagree that the right to speak is inalienable from the right to have your speech unattributed.

> People aren't conflating anonymity with free speech because it makes the argument stronger, or because they're trying to sneak it in on the side. I couldn't care less about anonymity, in except that it is the only strategy that anyone has ever come up with that allows me to have a large number of other fundamental rights that I do care about.

Your argument seems to be that "anonymity makes the right to free speech stronger, therefore the right to speak and the right to speak anonymously are equivalent". Which, to my reading, does not follow.

I think there are great arguments for the right to speak anonymously. I think you have articulated several of them nicely. I personally believe in the right to speak anonymously. But it should not be discussed as if it is the same right as the right to speech, because it is not.

Anonymous speech has costs and it has benefits. One of those costs is president. I still think it's worth it on balance, but if you say that anonymity and speech are the same, you're saying that arguments against anonymity apply to speech, and that's a dangerous game that I, and I don't think even you, really want to play in this political climate.

Again, I don't think that anonymity is a fundamental right - although if it was, you would be correct and I would agree with you. In fact, that theoretical right I don't believe in would be so distinct from freedom of speech that it might even be in opposition to it (cough right to be forgotten cough) ;).

Anonymity is an implementation detail. At the moment, it is an implementation detail that is essential. If your point is that it's not literally equivalent to free speech, then sure, definitely. We're on the same page and I agree with you.

But for all its warts and problems, if anyone wants to get rid of anonymity, then it's their job to come up with an alternative implementation. Part of supporting free speech is figuring out how to practically guarantee it in the real world, the rest is just wishful thinking.

> Speaking, in and of itself is nice, but the function that right serves is the circumscription of state power.

Quick side note, but this is a very narrow reading of free speech that I expect many people would disagree with. The function of free speech is to facilitate a person's fundamental right to share and explore ideas. Limiting the power of the government is a means to that end, not the other way around.

The idea behind a fundamental right is that it is... well, fundamental. Government doesn't give it to you, it respects that you already have it. Imagine how silly it would sound to say that freedom of religion, or racial equality, or the right to discover your own gender identity existed just so we could keep a government running smoothly :)

> But for all its warts and problems, if anyone wants to get rid of anonymity, then it's their job to come up with an alternative implementation. Part of supporting free speech is figuring out how to practically guarantee it in the real world, the rest is just wishful thinking.

I used to agree with this religiously. But now i'm not so sure. Anonymous speech is great for countering authoritarian regimes. It's great in China, Russia, North Korea. But those countries don't have freedom of speech in the first place. I'm all for anonymity technology there.

But in places that do have freedom of speech, what does anonymous speech really do for you? It seems to me that it mostly induces polarization. It encourages a certain kind of Overton-window stretching that has so far proved mostly toxic. I can't think of any examples to the contrary at the moment, though i'm sure a few must exist.

> Quick side note, but this is a very narrow reading of free speech that I expect many people would disagree with. The function of free speech is to facilitate a person's fundamental right to share and explore ideas. Limiting the power of the government is a means to that end, not the other way around.

Ok, yes, in a certain sense that is true. I don't mean "the reason people ought to be allowed to speak". But moreso, "the reason we ought to enshrine free speech in a constitution, making it especially difficult for even our democratic government to alter or amend". I think the reason you want the latter is because in a democracy, an informed public is essential. If the government has the power to limit speech, they have the power to reshape voting behavior in their own image, which short-circuits the meaning of democracy.

Do not conflate "social consequences" with "police state consequences"

If the government is imposing consequences upon speech, then speech is not free.