I think a fun thought exercise is finding the fine line between tech and guns/alcohol/cars. You cannot sue a gun/car/alcohol manufacturer if their product is used to injure someone because it functioned as designed but was used maliciously. How does that legal precedent work when extrapolated to tech and something like facial recognition? If it worked exactly as designed and we know it has a margin of error (or can be used improperly and have disastrous results, like a car or gun), could Amazon or a tech administering it be liable for someone falsely imprisoned?
I would be shocked if LE started using this tech, imprisoned a bunch of people, and used the excuse "Well, we followed the FAQS." I would imagine they would work very closely with Amazon and run a ton of calibration. For the ACLU to say that we used the default settings and it doesn't work correctly is disingenuous.
In my opinion, this is where the crux of the misinformed population epidemic resides. Sensational headline that causes mass amounts of doubt, panic, uncertainty, and outrage will get thousands and thousands of retweets and shares, yet the very valid response to it from the accused will not get any traction.
I concur. I really enjoy reading the comments section on some websites because there is some very insightful discourse happening that offers counter-arguments to the points in the article. But I am thoroughly unimpressed with the HN community when I read the comments on any topic that can tangentially be related to politics or currently politicized topics (mostly US topics, like immigration, Repub vs Demo, Trump, etc.). Ones that come to mind recently are MSFT and ICE, Facebook and censorship, TSA, Amazon and AI. There is an immense amount of conversation that could happen and great insight can be shared from a community of extremely knowledgeable people, but within 2 hours of it making to the front page, the comments section is mostly light gray, double digit dead threads, and not much more comprehensible than a Buzzfeed comment section about the Kardashians.
I believe there is a huge difference between you working on something that has the main function of facilitating an illegal enterprise and you working on something that has a tiny minority mis-using your product for illegal purposes. Silk Road vs Craigslist is an example that comes to mind.
Even though this sounds like an incredible minority of employees at moment based on the article, this along with all the other flak the big tech companies are getting could potentially impact legislation on how much power they have and even push towards tougher privacy laws in the US.
Google had their pains when their Pentagon contract was met with opposition and here is a recent ACLU petition against Amazon for using facial recognition with the government.
As odd as it is that people can use religion as their motivation for refusing to do something (refusing to sell alcohol/pork to a customer as a store checker because it is against their religion to consume those things), the free market in the US will probably weed those people out. If you generate bad publicity and turn away money enough, you will find yourself out of business in a capitalist society.
You are right. What it seems like a lot of people in these comments are saying is that the question perhaps should not stop at "Do you feel welcome?" because that only explores feelings of one side, which is highly subjective. If you invite someone into your house, they come in with muddy shoes and make a mess even though you had a sign at the door asking them to please wipe their feet, they might feel unwelcome when you ask them to go back, read the sign, and take off their shoes. The invitee might be offended, but the homeowner is justified and their feelings and the entire situation need to be considered. It is not "End of Discussion" once someone is offended.
SO could make a site with all the same content, downvotes disabled, comments disabled, and all flags disabled. You would also get random upvotes to reinforce that your question was good. That would make everyone feel safe and appreciated since they are unable to see any negative comments towards them and their question.
I too was wondering how this shakes out. The vast majority of <100 rep users I come across that ask pretty dicey questions have a default user profile picture or a picture of something that is not a person, not associated with an ethnic/religious/political group, etc. How can a group be intentionally or unconsciously hostile to POC and women when their photo is a stock photo provided by SO and their handle is user12098739578?