{"id":196402,"date":"2020-02-01T01:56:15","date_gmt":"2020-01-31T22:56:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ww-vb.mine.nu\/w108\/why-amazons-ring-and-facial-recognition-technology-are-a-clear-and-present-danger-to-society\/"},"modified":"2020-02-01T01:56:15","modified_gmt":"2020-01-31T22:56:15","slug":"why-amazons-ring-and-facial-recognition-technology-are-a-clear-and-present-danger-to-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hameed.nwar.uk\/sa\/why-amazons-ring-and-facial-recognition-technology-are-a-clear-and-present-danger-to-society\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Amazon&#8217;s Ring and facial recognition technology are a clear and present danger to society"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> [ad_1]<br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p>\u201cThe deployment of connected home security cameras that allow footage to be queried centrally are simply not compatible with a free society.\u201d Amazon engineer Max Eliaser<\/p>\n<p>The greatest threat posed to democracy in any free nation is that of ubiquitous government surveillance. Many countries today are struggling to find the proper balance between useful facial recognition and connected-camera technologies and those that threaten our privacy.<\/p>\n<p>We\u2019re here to make it easy: Public-facing facial recognition or connected home-security camera systems that offer access to law enforcement are dangerous and should be banned outright.<\/p>\n<p><em>Read:\u00a0Amazon Engineer: \u2018Ring should be shut down immediately and not brought back\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n<p>We\u2019ll start with Amazon\u2018s Ring devices.<\/p>\n<h3>The problem with Ring<\/h3>\n<p>Here\u2019s how Amazon convinces millions of people they need to pay $200 for the privilege of letting hackers, Google, Facebook, contractors in other countries, and the US government spy on them. The official Ring website has a page titled \u201cCriminals Caught In The Act.\u201d As advertised, the page displays several examples of their connected-camera doorbell device thwarting criminal endeavors.<\/p>\n<p><figure class=\"post-image post-mediaBleed aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1269215 aligncenter lazy\" alt=\"\" width=\"1640\" height=\"1338\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1640px) 100vw, 1640px\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn0.tnwcdn.com\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/1\/files\/2020\/01\/ringcriminals.jpg\" data-lazy=\"true\" srcset=\"https:\/\/cdn0.tnwcdn.com\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/1\/files\/2020\/01\/ringcriminals.jpg 1640w, https:\/\/cdn0.tnwcdn.com\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/1\/files\/2020\/01\/ringcriminals-257x210.jpg 257w, https:\/\/cdn0.tnwcdn.com\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/1\/files\/2020\/01\/ringcriminals-331x270.jpg 331w, https:\/\/cdn0.tnwcdn.com\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/1\/files\/2020\/01\/ringcriminals-165x135.jpg 165w, https:\/\/cdn0.tnwcdn.com\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/1\/files\/2020\/01\/ringcriminals-796x649.jpg 796w, https:\/\/cdn0.tnwcdn.com\/wp-content\/blogs.dir\/1\/files\/2020\/01\/ringcriminals-1592x1299.jpg 1592w\"\/><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n<p>What Amazon (the company that paid two billion dollars for Ring) wants you to believe is that you simply install a <i>smart<\/i><span> <\/span><i>doorbell<\/i> where your existing doorbell is. This <i>smart doorbell<\/i> has a camera in it that\u2019s always recording. Amazon takes care of hosting the footage so you don\u2019t have to maintain large amounts of high-definition data.<\/p>\n<p><span>These devices are positioned as security cameras. The past few years have seen a sharp increase in occurrences of package theft. Ring says its cameras can help law enforcement track down and apprehend these thieves.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Amazon also positions the Ring cameras as a sort of digital Neighborhood Watch. Users are encouraged to download the company\u2019s Neighborhood app and participate in a community forum that\u2019s even open to residents who don\u2019t own a Ring device.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"How a Dallas Community Used the Neighbors App to Make their Neighborhood Safer\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/F44O9hVuUVc?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><span>They\u2019re also asked to consent to allowing the police to request footage from their cameras in the event a crime is committed in the neighborhood and said footage could aid police in apprehending the criminal.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>If you\u2019re reading this and starting to feel like maybe you and all your neighbors should go out and buy a Ring camera, then Amazon is doing its job perfectly. Unfortunately for anyone considering purchasing a Ring camera, its job is to sell you\u00a0Ring devices so that it can fulfill the promises its made to police departments across the country.<\/p>\n<h3><span>Here\u2019s some key facts that consumers in the US should know before installing a Ring camera<\/span><\/h3>\n<p>They\u2019re essentially useless unless you opt-in to having your footage stored centrally. This means your data will live on Amazon\u2018s servers for as long as Amazon chooses to keep it there. It will almost certainly be accessed by at least one stranger. This stranger may not work for Ring, Amazon, or even be in the same country as you.<\/p>\n<p><span>You cannot stop police from accessing your Ring camera data, even if you opt out. Amazon and Ring do not disclose the full nature of their partnership with police departments and Amazon has no access control over how police use the footage.\u00a0<\/span>T<span>hey\u2019re basically on the honor system.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>This means the police are required to police themselves: there are no actual <\/span><i>laws <\/i><span>or physical security precautions in place to prevent them from misusing their specific access. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Ring cameras have already been hacked several times and the longer they\u2019re out in the wild the more opportunities bad actors will have to find new vulnerabilities. There currently exists no technology by which Amazon can guarantee your camera won\u2019t be hacked. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>There are no US laws preventing Amazon from sharing any footage it obtains with anyone else. And it\u2019s important to remember that even if you don\u2019t own a Ring camera, the ones in your neighborhoods are still recording footage of you without your consent. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Ring shares information with third-parties such as Google, Facebook, law enforcement agencies across the US, and contractors in the Ukraine \u2013 this isn\u2019t a fear, it\u2019s a fact. That means that right now, if you\u2019ve ever been caught on any Ring camera, footage of you is on an Amazon server and you have no way of controlling who has access to it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><span>What\u2019s the danger? <\/span><\/h3>\n<p><span>Who cares if cops and some random programmer in the Ukraine can see footage of us mowing our lawns and carrying groceries? The argument here usually goes something like this: \u201cAny reasonable person in modern society already knows they\u2019re being filmed all the time. If the police can use Ring footage to catch murderers and child abductors, I\u2019m willing to risk being seen scratching my butt while I pick up my newspaper.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><i>Related: Read this if you\u2019ve got nothing to hide<\/i><\/p>\n<p>Privacy means that if the rules ever change, and someone tries to make your lifestyle illegal, you won\u2019t regret wearing the wrong hat\u00a0when you went to check the mail, or kissing your spouse goodbye in your driveway in view of a camera the police can access.<\/p>\n<p><span>It means hackers can\u2019t go from home to home looking for cameras that show a view of your children playing outside in order to find the best abduction angle. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Privacy means police can\u2019t bypass the search warrant process by just looking\u00a0through all the available\u00a0Ring camera footage in a given neighborhood for \u201cblack suspects\u201d or \u201ctall men\u201d that look suspicious so they can start rounding people up and bringing them in for questioning. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>But we have no privacy if our neighbors are using Ring cameras. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>And that brings us to facial recognition technology. <\/span><\/p>\n<h3>The problem with facial recogntion<\/h3>\n<p>Amazon says Ring doesn\u2019t currently use facial recognition technology, but reports indicate that it intends to. The company\u2019s already working on a system by which \u201cwatch lists\u201d could be generated that use facial recognition to identify people. The idea here is that a known \u201cbad person\u201d could be tagged by users so that if they showed up in a neighborhood again after, for example, stealing packages, police could be alerted or a community alarm could go out.<\/p>\n<p>Once again, this sounds innocuous at first \u2013 it\u2019s like having an AI watching out for people we already know are bad. But, Ring isn\u2019t a guard dog there to protect our packages. It\u2019s a surveillance conduit that just happens to have some uses for those hosting it.<\/p>\n<p><span>The fact is that facial recognition technology is flawed. When a company like Amazon, Palantir, or Clearview AI claims their algorithms are accurate they\u2019re being misleading. Law enforcement can\u2019t use facial recognition\u00a0software at the recommended\u00a0settings (the ones the companies developing these systems base their accuracy claims on) because they don\u2019t work. In order to deploy facial recognition technology, law enforcement agencies set the threshold for accuracy low enough to simply work as a dragnet. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><em>Read:\u00a0Chicago police: Facial recognition adds \u201cjet fuel\u201d for criminal investigations<\/em><\/p>\n<p><span>These systems aren\u2019t designed to identify criminals in real-time, they\u2019re designed to build up a surveillance library that can be pored over at a later time. That\u2019s the very definition of a surveillance state. <\/span><\/p>\n<h3>The second amendment can\u2019t protect us from Ring and facial recognition<\/h3>\n<p>Imagine if every firearm in the US could be weaponized against its owners and their neighbors by the US government.\u00a0Instead of protecting ourselves from tyranny, we\u2019d be enabling it. Now imagine giving the government the ability to type a name into a database and figure out which civilian-owned gun was closest to any given person in real-time: that\u2019s what giving them facial recognition is like. We install these systems and let cops access them because we think we\u2019re protecting our families, in reality we\u2019re ensuring that our right to form a militia and bear arms is meaningless.<\/p>\n<p>In 2020, it\u2019s easily arguable that our right to privacy in the US is more important to our freedom than those granted under the Second Amendment to the US Constitution.<\/p>\n<p><span>Yet police throughout the US continue to adopt faulty facial recognition technology simply because it leads to arrests. So do permanent military checkpoints, stop and frisk, racial profiling, and ordered state religion, and none of those are compatible with a free society either. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>The bottom line is that these technologies are dangerous to democracy. Donald Trump\u2019s administration, state and local law enforcement agencies, and companies such as Amazon are only able to get away with implementing them now because there\u2019s nobody around to stop them.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span> Simply put: the companies profiting\u00a0off these technologies\u00a0aren\u2019t going to protect us from the government. And it doesn\u2019t matter whether you\u2019re a Republican, Democrat, Socialist, Libertarian, or none of the above.\u00a0<\/span><span>Because the only people in our democracy who truly have\u00a0nothing to hide are those who\u2019ll trust the US government implicitly no matter who wins the next election.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p>[ad_2]<br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/thenextweb.com\/artificial-intelligence\/2020\/01\/31\/why-amazons-ring-and-facial-recognition-technology-are-a-clear-and-present-danger-to-society\/\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[ad_1] \u201cThe deployment of connected home security cameras that allow footage to be queried centrally are simply not compatible with a free society.\u201d Amazon engineer Max Eliaser The greatest threat posed to democracy in any free nation is that of ubiquitous government surveillance. Many countries today are struggling to find the proper balance between useful &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":196404,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-196402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tie-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hameed.nwar.uk\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hameed.nwar.uk\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hameed.nwar.uk\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hameed.nwar.uk\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hameed.nwar.uk\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196402"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hameed.nwar.uk\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196402\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hameed.nwar.uk\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/196404"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hameed.nwar.uk\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hameed.nwar.uk\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hameed.nwar.uk\/sa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}