Yes, Amazon Is Tracking People

&gt; When most people think of the tech giant Amazon, they think of an innovative, consumer-friendly company responsible for affordable deliveries.<p>This is one of those instances where I say to myself, &quot;I wish I had listened to Richard Stallman X years ago&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stallman.org&#x2F;amazon.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stallman.org&#x2F;amazon.html</a>

As long as I or you can use it to track the coming and going of your Congressman and Senators, at the same price that Amazon charges others, I guess it is okay. That nice townhouse he visited with the attractive blonde who lives there, while his wife was out of town? It&#x27;s ok for me to track and then publish the info, right?<p>We&#x27;re all equal when we are in public view, right?

This is a terribly clickbait-y title for HN. Amazon is not tracking people, AWS has a service offered to anyone who wants it which would be useful for large scale surveillance.<p>Facial recognition services are incredibly close to neutral technologies in my opinion. If we truly want to stop abuse of them, it should be done with legislation. Getting mad and ranty at one of the many offerings (which also includes open source software) because it feels good to beat up a tech giant will have no useful impact.

Rekognition is a public service and not specific to law enforcement use[1].<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;rekognition&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;rekognition&#x2F;</a><p>Disclaimer: I work for AWS.

&gt; Amazon’s facial recognition service, Rekognition, is designed to identify and track people going about their daily business. This isn’t hyperbole - a Rekognition spokesperson explicitly mentioned real-time tracking and identification at an Amazon Web Services summit earlier this year. The same spokesperson went on to call Orlando a “smart city,” with cameras everywhere that allow authorities to track persons of interest in real time.<p>Truly creepy.

Does this service exclude children under the age of 13?

Facial recognition software isn&#x27;t particularly new and isn&#x27;t specific to Amazon. Cato is just trying to sling manufactured mud at Bezos to further a political agenda because that&#x27;s what they do.

Not a fan of Amazon but this article is directly sponsored by the koch brothers. kind of weird we have transparently political articles like this yet others are banned.

I am in this dangerous situation where I see posts like &quot;X is tracking people online&quot; and just scroll though without even giving it a thought. Help me!

No, Amazon isn&#x27;t! It&#x27;s the company&#x2F;government&#x2F;whatever that implements a service Amazon is offering to everyone.<p>All it takes you to do the same is create an AWS account, fill in some info so they can bill you for the services you use, a bit of code and some camera&#x27;s.<p>I know it&#x27;s very popular these days to quickly blame it on the big tech names, and yes they are doing a lot of shady things, but articles like this are simply name calling and not explaining how things really work.<p>Besides that, this technology is not new. Xovis camera&#x27;s for example have this ability build in for a long time already. Those camera&#x27;s are installed in a lot of public places like shopping malls, railway stations, airports etc and they are used to track you. Just because Amazon made a scalable central version of this doesn&#x27;t make them track you.<p>People who write articles like this should do some research first ...

Cases like this (where government is the &quot;consumer&quot; for the technology) make me think surveillance tech could be the law enforcement version of military spending on defense contractors.

I guess we will all have to wear a full face of juggalo makeup to remain anonymous in public from now on.

They deliver stuff to my door within 1 hour to 3 days and save me the hassle of driving 15 minutes each way to Walmart, the closest option for varied purchasing, so... I&#x27;m fine with it.

&quot;asleep at the wheel&quot; is extremely generous.

I&#x27;m a little surprised that a Libertarian think tank is taking issue with a private company going about its very profitable business.

I distinctly remember watching the Amazon conference when they demonstrated their facial recognition software. It occurred to me that if this technology was around in Mao&#x27;s China or Stalin&#x27;s Russia the twentieth century might have been darker and bloodier than it already was. This technology certainly has a lot of potential for improving, but it also has a huge potential for violating human rights. Kudos to the author for talking about this.

Kind of confused why Rekognition continues to be made into the &#x27;bad guy&#x27; here. Even if stronger protections are rolled out for this it&#x27;s become far too easy to make these types of systems to do a great job of keeping them at bay at this point. Most people with programming experience could roll out a reasonably accurate facial comparison&#x2F;recognition model like Rekognition and deploy it to a Raspberry Pi without expelling too much effort. There are many open datasets for it<p>EDIT: fixed a spelling error