Amazon continues its ban on allowing police to use its facial-recognition software

Amazon promised it would refuse to allow the police to use its controversial Rekognition service for one year, and has decided to continue its ban indefinitely. Amazon committed to a one-year moratorium on its facial-recognition technology back in June 2020. And now it's going to continue that freeze, according to Reuters. …

[Pascal Monett]

"a typical supercomputer"

And just exactly what is that ?

Every supercomputer is unique. From the number of CPUs to the amount and type of RAM to the disk space, not to mention the architecture used, there is no such thing as a typical supercomputer.

And excuse me if I think that compressing months of work from a supercomputing behemoth that has thousands of processors, terabytes of RAM and petabytes of disk space, into 16 hours on a desktop GPU means that there has to be loss of precision in the result.

[Gene Cash]

DeepMind wants to ... prevent Google from being able to control its AI research

Wait. So you let them buy you... and they spend "hundreds of millions of dollars" on you... and you don't understand why you're under their control?

[fidodogbreath]

The moratorium, however, only covers police departments, and Amazon still sells access to its Rekognition technology to organizations that may well end up supplying services to cop shops, and to government agencies, too.

The uniformed henchman stood rigidly before Lord Bezos, trembling with fear. He didn't have a name; none of them did anymore. Not that it mattered; no one survived in the undersea volcano lair long enough to learn names, anyway.

"So both privacy-laundering and money-laundering," Lord Bezos purred. "You have done well."

Before the henchman could sigh with relief, guards roughly threw him to the ground in response to an almost-imperceptible nod from the man they once new as Jeff. His wrists, ankles, and neck were swiftly locked in the dreaded Echo Torture manacles -- the ones that only responded to Lord Bezos' voice.

As panic overwhelmed the henchman, he dared to speak.

"But, my Lord, you said I did..."

"Silence, worm!" barked the Praetorian Guard captain.

"Yesss, you did well," Lord Bezos hissed. "But your standard was excellence."

[Michael Wojcik]

Indeed. Police departments in the US have already demonstrated that they're more than happy to evade warrant requirements and other regulations by purchasing data from aggregators and resellers. This is a token PR move by Amazon; they and the police know it's essentially meaningless.