Facial recognition software is not new, but using it in real-time by police departments has raised some eyebrows. Add to those sentiments that Amazon is behind this latest marriage of big tech and government agencies, and privacy watchdogs are concerned to say the least.

NPR:

Until now, American police have used facial recognition primarily to compare still photos from crime scenes with mug shots. But now Amazon and Orlando are taking it further, by using facial recognition to spot people in real time.
“City of Orlando is a launch partner of ours,” Amazon’s Ranju Das recently told a developer conference in Seoul, South Korea. “They have cameras all over the city. The authorized cameras are then streaming the data … we are a subscriber to the stream, we analyze the video in real time, search against the collection of faces they have.”

In this video presentation, Das is seen saying the system can be set up to notify the city if cameras see a “person of interest,” and it could be used to reconstruct a person’s past movements. He showed the conference a demo of real-time facial recognition using video from a “traffic cam that was provided by the city of Orlando.”

In a written statement, the Orlando Police Department called the Amazon facial recognition system a “pilot program” and said it “will be used in accordance with current and applicable law.”
The statement also says the department “is not using the technology in an investigative capacity or in any public spaces at this time.”

It did not say whether the system has been used that way in the past, or will be in the future. NPR tried to follow up, but OPD said it wasn’t doing interviews on the topic.

Amazon also wouldn’t do an interview with NPR. In a written statement, it pointed out that its visual analytics tools have a wide range of applications beyond policing, and that “[o]ur quality of life would be much worse today if we outlawed new technology because some people could choose to abuse the technology. Imagine if customers couldn’t buy a computer because it was possible to use that computer for illegal purposes?”

Amazon’s statement added, “[W]e require our customers to comply with the law and be responsible when using Amazon Rekognition.”

The American Civil Liberties Union has asked Amazon to stop marketing the technology, to no response.

LA Times:

The American Civil Liberties Union and other privacy activists are asking Amazon to stop marketing a powerful facial recognition tool to police, saying law enforcement agencies could use the technology to “easily build a system to automate the identification and tracking of anyone.”

The tool, called Rekognition, is already being used by at least one agency — the Washington County Sheriff’s Office in Oregon — to check photographs of unidentified suspects against a database of mug shots from the county jail, which is a common use of such technology around the country.

But privacy advocates have been concerned about expanding the use of facial recognition to body cameras worn by officers or safety and traffic cameras that monitor public areas, allowing police to identify and track people in real time.
The tech giant’s entry into the market could vastly accelerate such developments, the privacy advocates fear, with potentially dire consequences for minorities who are already arrested at disproportionate rates, immigrants who may be in the country illegally or political protesters.

“People should be free to walk down the street without being watched by the government,” the groups wrote in a letter to Amazon on Tuesday. “Facial recognition in American communities threatens this freedom.”

Amazon released Rekognition in late 2016, and the sheriff’s office in Washington County, west of Portland, became one of its first law enforcement agency customers. A year later, deputies were using it about 20 times per day — for example, to identify burglary suspects in store surveillance footage. Last month, the agency adopted policies governing its use, noting that officers in the field can use real-time face recognition to identify suspects who are unwilling or unable to provide their own ID, or if someone’s life is in danger.

“We are not mass-collecting. We are not putting a camera out on a street corner,” said Deputy Jeff Talbot, a spokesman for the sheriff’s office. “We want our local community to be aware of what we’re doing, how we’re using it to solve crimes — what it is and, just as importantly, what it is not.”

It cost the sheriff’s office just $400 to load 305,000 booking photos into the system and $6 per month in fees to continue the service, according to an email obtained by the ACLU under a public records request.

But Police departments are defending their trial of the technology, and downplaying what it is it actually does.

NY Times:

In a statement, a spokesman for the Orlando Police Department, Sgt. Eduardo Bernal, said the city was not using Amazon’s technology to track the location of elected officials in its jurisdiction, nor did it have plans to. He said the department was testing Amazon’s service now, but was not using it in investigations or public spaces.

“We are always looking for new solutions to further our ability to keep the residents and visitors of Orlando safe,” he said.

Early last year, the company began courting the Washington County Sheriff’s Office outside of Portland, Ore., eager to promote how it was using Amazon’s service for recognizing faces, emails obtained by the A.C.L.U. show. Mr. Adzima, a systems analyst in the office, told Amazon officials that he fed about 300,000 images from the county’s mug shot database into Amazon’s system.

Within a week of going live, the system was used to identify and arrest a suspect who stole more than $5,000 from local stores, he said, adding there were no leads before the system identified him. The technology was also cheap, costing just a few dollars a month after a setup fee of around $400.

Mr. Adzima ended up writing a blog post for Amazon about how the sheriff’s office was using Rekognition. He spoke at one of the company’s technical conferences, and local media began reporting on their efforts. After the attention, other law enforcement agencies in Oregon, Arizona and California began to reach out to Washington County to learn more about how it was using Amazon’s system, emails show.

In February of last year, before the publicity wave, Mr. Adzima told an Amazon representative in an email that the county’s lawyer was worried the public might believe “that we are constantly checking faces from everything, kind of a Big Brother vibe.”

“They are concerned that A.C.L.U. might consider this the government getting in bed with big data,” Mr. Adzima said in an email. He did not respond for a request for comment for this article.

Deputy Jeff Talbot, a spokesman for the Washington County Sheriff’s Office, said Amazon’s facial recognition system was not being used for mass surveillance by the office. The company has a policy to only use the technology to identify a suspect in a criminal investigation, he said, and has no plans to use it with footage from body cameras or real-time surveillance systems.

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David Graeber’s new book, “Bullshit Jobs” is sure to grab people from the title. But how does the content stack up?

From Miranda Purves for Bloomberg:

Very loosely, a bulls— job, by Graeber’s definition, is one that could be erased from the Earth and no one would be worse off. It’s also phenomenological. If you feel your job is bulls—, it probably is.

Any corporate lawyer or health-care services administrator who’s reading this and thinking, “Wait a minute, serving my client’s needs is necessary and fulfilling,” is going to disagree with a lot of this book, but even those readers will be hard-pressed not to admit that inventing and maintaining many of the unpleasant aspects of daily life requires a lot of work hours that would be better spent elsewhere.
For instance, consider the poor souls whose work entails implementing the ubiquitous feature of automatic phone systems: when you call about a bill or service issue, you have to speak your name into a computer system; once you’ve articulated “speak to an agent” some 16 times to said computer system, waited 20 additional minutes, and finally reached a human being, you immediately have to provide the same information you already gave the system.

Meanwhile, says Graeber, practitioners in the fields that directly benefit mankind or offer personal fulfillment, such as teaching, caregiving, waiting, writing, performing carpentry, or making art, are (with the exception of some doctors) poorly paid and secretly resented by those forced to waste their time pursuing a paycheck. Being occupied for long hours of the day fulfilling tasks that, at best, are useless and, at worst, hurt others—building the aforementioned phone systems, foisting software on budget-starved elementary schools, creating paperwork morasses for the homeless—is “a profound psychological violence” that causes anxiety and depression. Basically, our collective soul is being crushed by a rise in what Graeber sees as make-work.

But there is also the author’s motivations to consider:

He does nail it when he writes that “much of the reason for the expansion of the bulls— sector more generally is a direct result of the desire to quantify the unquantifiable,” but he’s fallen into the same trap. The tension at the heart of this book, of course, is that the writing of it is a bit of a bulls— job. Graeber might even be hiding a crushed soul of his own.

In his comfortable seat as a professor at an esteemed institution, musing amusedly about the mind-numbing hours most working people have to put in and put up with—even at jobs that have lively, meaningful moments—fits neatly in his category of “duct taping,” maybe also “flunky.”

The L.S.E. is publicly funded but also relies on alumni donations. (It’s known for graduating billionaires.) In other words, his salary is made possible by the people he accuses of being in charge of this bulls— job-generating system. Why might they want to pay him? (Graeber loves the pedagogical question structure.) By offering this cultural pacifier, which soothes by affirming people’s lonely suspicions, he’s doing only what the British version of The Office and Mike Judge’s masterpiece Office Space already have. And these diversions often just use up the little time we have left after work, restoring us only enough to return tomorrow.

Graeber is also an activist, so he must be given some credit for not just honking off in an annoyingly self-satisfied tone; although he claims he’s not interested in suggesting policy (he is, after all, an anarchist), he does endorse Universal Basic Income as one solution.

But he misses an opportunity to examine the other group of people who are trying to eliminate the bulls— job cycle. This week, droves of Glocksters (Global Blockchain Hipsters) have descended on New York for the Ethereal Summit and Consensus 2018, conferences run by Consensys and CoinDesk Inc., which are companies trying to galvanize cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. Many attendees are just Bitcoin bros who are or want to be rich, but a significant segment of crypto believers is persuaded that the blockchain will obviate the middleman, cut through the administrative morass generated by Graeber’s overlords, and offer the first pure form of state-free value exchange.

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In the words of our own @trumwill, “This will end badly.” Starbucks has announced a new policy that touts anyone can sit on their properties or use the restrooms whether they are a paying customer or not.

NBCNews:

Company executives have said its previous policies were loose and ambiguous, leaving decisions on whether people could sit in its stores or use the restroom up to store managers.

Starbucks said it has told workers to consider anyone who walks into its stores a customer, “regardless of whether they make a purchase.”
The company said anyone can use its cafes, patios or restrooms without buying anything, but it noted workers should still call the police if someone is a safety threat.

“We are committed to creating a culture of warmth and belonging where everyone is welcome,” Starbucks said in a statement.

This move comes as part of the coffee giant’s continuing response to an incident in Philadelphia:
NY Times:

Last month, two black men who went to a Starbucks in Philadelphia and did not buy anything were denied use of the restroom and asked to leave.
Then an employee called the police and the men were arrested, prompting protests, boycotts and accusations of racism.

Now, Starbucks has changed its policy.

On Saturday the company announced that “any customer is welcome to use Starbucks spaces, including our restrooms, cafes and patios, regardless of whether they make a purchase.”
It added that employees should follow established procedures for “addressing disruptive behaviors,” and call 911 in the case of “immediate danger or threat” to employees or customers.

Previously it might have fallen to store managers to decide whether people could sit or use the restroom without buying anything, The Associated Press reported.
“This is now an established policy for consistency across all of our U.S. company operated stores,” Haley Drage, a Starbucks spokeswoman, said on Sunday.

The men who were arrested in Philadelphia, Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson, were waiting for another man, Andrew Yaffe, who is white, for a business meeting on April 12 when the officers arrived. Their arrest was captured in video footage that has been viewed millions of times on social media.
“What did they get called for?” Mr. Yaffe asked in the video, referring to the police. “Because there are two black guys sitting here meeting me?”
Starbucks did not press charges and the men were released hours later.

After protests erupted, Starbucks apologized and Kevin R. Johnson, the company’s chief executive, released a statement in which he called the arrests a “reprehensible outcome.” The employee who called the police was fired.

Reaction was pretty much what you would expect:

BRB… packing a suitcase to move in to my new apartment… it's the entire 2nd floor of the Starbucks. https://t.co/UicJcEqQJu

— Tim Young (@TimRunsHisMouth) May 20, 2018

Note to self: avoid NYC Starbucks at all costs going forward. https://t.co/uhZ9X7ohBW pic.twitter.com/BJ8cCsTI30

— Sonny Bunch (@SonnyBunch) May 20, 2018

I believe the manager who called the cops was in the wrong and had overreacted (most likely due to the race of the two men), but this is an unnecessary overcorrection that Starbucks is going to regret. https://t.co/lmFINrgR6N

— Sarah Quinlan (@sarahmquinlan) May 20, 2018

I am wiling to bet this ends in increased sales.

— Tod Kelly (@RTodKelly) May 20, 2018

Time will tell. My biggest issue with Starbucks is that compared to others I am already less likely to be able to find a seat. Which is a situation this seems likely to make worse.

— Will Truman (@trumwill) May 20, 2018

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There are, evidently, at least seven:

What’s more, the theory leads us to expect that, because there are many types of cooperation, there will be many types of morality. Kin selection explains why we feel a special duty of care for our families, and why we abhor incest. Mutualism explains why we form groups and coalitions (there is strength and safety in numbers), and hence why we value unity, solidarity, and loyalty. Social exchange explains why we trust others, reciprocate favors, feel guilt and gratitude, make amends, and forgive. And conflict resolution explains: why we engage in costly displays of prowess such as bravery and generosity; why we defer to our superiors; why we divide disputed resources fairly; and why we recognize prior possession.

And, as predicted by the theory, these seven moral rules – love your family, help your group, return favors, be brave, defer to authority, be fair, and respect others’ property – appear to be universal across cultures. My colleagues and I analyzed ethnographic accounts of ethics from 60 societies (comprising over 600,000 words from over 600 sources)2. We found that these seven cooperative behaviors were always considered morally good. We found examples of most of these morals in most societies. Crucially, there were no counter-examples – no societies in which any of these behaviors were considered morally bad. And we observed these morals with equal frequency across continents; they were not the exclusive preserve of ‘the West’ or any other region.

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