Hacker News Reader

Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

A much more accurate title would be "19 Amazon shareholders demand it stop selling facial recognition to governments." They even wrote a sternly worded letter!

View on HN

A much more accurate title than that would be "Shareholders representing X% of Amazon demand it to stop selling facial recognition". I mean Jeff Bezos and myself are both shareholders, but his stake is worth mentioning.

Activist funds are able to shake things up with a lot less than 19 shareholders, so the count isn't important at all unless it's giant.

Yeah but 19 is a much larger number, visually, than 0.25% or whatever

I don't care about larger which is a relative scale vs percentage which is absolute scale.

If it's 0.25% then at least we know it's not important.

> They even wrote a sternly worded letter

Privately delivered to Amazon by the ACLU. Until one of the signatories, who is also a major Amazon shareholder, goes public with their disgruntlement this should merit no further attention.

CNN[1] says that it is "Nearly 20 groups of Amazon shareholders ... which include the Social Equity Group and Northwest Coalition for Responsible Investment."

[1] http://money.cnn.com/2018/06/18/technology/amazon-facial-rec...

I don't know who those groups are - but they're exactly the sort of name I'd choose for my single-share-holding activist organisation...

(It's a more-than-impulse-buy price of ~$1700 right now - but if I were the sort of person who bought single company shares to push my personal causes at shareholder meetings, I'd probably have bought in at a few hundred bucks 5 or more years back...)

I was curious, so I looked up the Northwest Coalition for Responsible Investment [1]. They have 16 member organizations, including the Tacoma Dominicans and the Sisters of St Mary of Oregon. Most of their actions seem to be 'dialogue,' which they apparently engaged in over 60 times.

[1]: http://www.ipjc.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/NWCRI-Annual-...

Pretty soon, they'll have to move to outright scowling at at Jeff Bezos!

Or a tweet. That is how most official communication is handled these days, right?

Is there something wrong with this? Email, fax, phones, telegrams, snail mail, etc. Everything was the new weird thing at one point in time.

Tweets have the side effect of being public. Sometimes that becomes the main effect. Emails and the rest of your examples don't have that property.

You've clearly never had somebody forward your email on you. All digital communication is effectively public by virtue of fast, easy copying.

There is a difference between public nature of tweet where anyone can go and read it vs public nature of email where you would need to forward it to everyone (or one of them would have to tweet it which is back to what GP said).

Transparency!

Tweets are limited in content, unlike other forms of communication their perminance is at the leisure of one American tech company.

Their visibility is as well.

You mean like gmail?

Gmail is just one company's implementation of an application layer sitting on top of SMTP. You are free to use any other company's implementation or even host your own and you will still be able to communicate with all other existing SMTP services. Not at all like tweets.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com