Question

Debate yourself: Prepare a pro & a con statement for how an ethical product is based on Amazon's development of facial recognition software. Cite external sources.

Answer 1

Answer :

Amazon Rekognition makes it easy to add highly accurate image and video analysis to your applications. As with many technological advances, it’s important to understand how facial recognition works, and how it can be used. Let’s take a look at some of the most frequently asked questions.

What is facial recognition :

Facial recognition is a system built to identify a person from an image or video. This technology has been around for decades, but its usage has become more noticeable, and accessible, in the past few years as it now powers innovative solutions, such as personal photo applications and secondary authentication for mobile devices. To understand these emerging capabilities, let’s first discuss how facial recognition works.

Facial analysis capabilities, such as those available in Amazon Rekognition, allow users to understand where faces exist in an image or video, as well as what attributes those faces have. For example, Amazon Rekognition can analyze attributes such as eyes open or closed, mood, hair color, as well as the visual geometry of a face. These detected attributes become increasingly useful for customers that need to organize or search through millions of images in seconds using metadata tags (e.g., happy, glasses, age range) or to identify a person (i.e., facial recognition using either a source image or a unique identifier).

Pros :

ARGUMENTS IN FAVOR OF THE RESOLUTION ON RISKS OF SALES OF FACIAL RECOGNITION SOFTWARE

Amazon is exposed to financial, reputational, regulatory, legal, and human capital management risk due to its sales of Rekognition to government.

Investors are concerned by sales of Rekognition to government in the United States and globally because this highly controversial technology poses tremendous risks involving civil and human rights and government surveillance.

Rekognition is a facial recognition technology tool that is being deployed for facial recognition and recognition of other imagery in photographic and video recordings as one application available through Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS offers cloud-based products including “compute, storage, databases, analytics, networking, mobile, developer tools, management tools, IoT, security and enterprise applications. As promoted on the AWS web site, Rekognition is marketed in a suite of apps; it is offered “free” to new AWS subscribers. AWS’s apparent intention is to offer apps that will induce subscribers to use more of AWS’s cloud services.

AWS is by far the largest provider of Internet “cloud” services in the world, with 2018 revenue of $25.6 billion. AWS currently provides cloud services for all 17 United States intelligence agencies, as well as for government agencies internationally in the United Kingdom, Italy, Singapore, Belgium, Canada, and Turkey. The FBI is testing Amazon’s Rekognition, and Amazon is attempting to sell Rekognition to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Florida’s Orlando Police Department (OPD) and the city of Orlando, in July 2018, announced it would continue to use Rekognition after an initial pilot program. Amazon lists the Washington County Sheriff’s Office in Oregon, WA as a Rekognition customer.

According to the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (Principle 17), Amazon has a responsibility for the use of its products, and human rights due diligence should cover “impacts that the business enterprise may cause or contribute to through its own activities, or which may be directly linked to its operations, products or services by its business relationships.”

In the hands of government, Rekognition threatens civil liberties and civil rights for all members of society, and especially for people who are more likely to be surveilled, profiled and targeted, including people of color and immigrants. Clare Garvie, of Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology, has written: “A mistake by a face-scanning surveillance system on a body camera could be lethal. An officer, alerted to a potential threat to public safety or to himself, must, in an instant, decide whether to draw his weapon. A false alert places an innocent person in those crosshairs.”

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has noted that facial recognition technology threatens to “chill First Amendment-protected activity like engaging in protest or practicing religion, and it can be used to subject immigrants to further abuse from the government.”

Amazon has repeatedly responded to the controversy in defense of Rekognition. In February 2019, AWS’s Global Public Policy VP published a blog post outlining key areas where the Company was taking the unusual step of calling for enhanced regulatory policies surrounding facial recognition technology, especially when used by police. Amazon’s blog post is a clear recognition that the Company has placed onto the market a technology that is most inadequately controlled and regulated. Public expectations of privacy and respect for civil rights are not presently protected, and investors need greater disclosure from the Company about how civil liberties, civil rights and human rights risks are being managed.

Customer benefits :

Facial recognition is useful across many applications and industry verticals. Today, we see this technology helping news organizations identify celebrities in their coverage of significant events, providing secondary authentication for mobile applications, automatically indexing image and video files for media and entertainment companies, all the way to allowing humanitarian groups to identify and rescue human trafficking victims.

Marinus Analytics, for example, uses artificial intelligence with Amazon Rekognition to provide agencies with tools, such as Traffic Jam, that assist them in identifying and locating victims of human trafficking. Investigators save invaluable time by using image analysis to search automatically through millions of records in seconds, which previously required individual analysis by investigators.

Facial recognition responsibility usage :

Facial recognition should never be used in a way that violates an individual’s rights, including the right to privacy, or makes autonomous decisions for scenarios that require analysis by a human. For example, when a bank uses tools like Amazon Rekognition in a financial application to verify their customers’ identity, the bank should always clearly disclose their use of the technology and ask the customer approval of the terms and conditions. Regarding public safety and law enforcement, we think that governments are free to work with law enforcement agencies to develop acceptable use policies for facial recognition technologies that both protects the rights of citizens and enables law enforcement to protect the public’s safety.

In all public safety and law enforcement scenarios, technology like Amazon Rekognition should only be used to narrow the field of potential matches. The responses from Amazon Rekognition allow officials to quickly get a set of potential faces for further human analysis. Given the seriousness of public safety use cases, human judgment is necessary to augment facial recognition, and facial recognition software should not be used autonomously.

Facial recognition safety:

Yes. Let’s examine some common misconceptions about facial recognition and how it works.

First, some believe that people can match faces to photos better than machines. However, the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) recently shared a study of facial recognition technologies that are at least two years behind the models used in Amazon Rekognition and concluded that even older technologies could outperform human facial recognition capabilities.

Second, as in all probabilistic systems, the mere existence of false positives doesn’t mean facial recognition is flawed. Rather, it emphasizes the need to follow best practices, such as setting a reasonable similarity threshold that correlates with the given use case. Also, one of the advantages of this technology is that it continuously learns and improves, so false positives can be reduced over time.

Cons :

Amazon is becoming a national magnet for mounting opposition to facial surveillance — a technology that may be used to identify and track people at a distance without their knowledge or consent. Facial recognition uses artificial intelligence to scan a photo of an unknown person. The software then compares the facial template of the unknown person with a database of templates of known people and, if the templates are very similar, may suggest a name or match. Proponents of the technology argue that such systems help law enforcement agencies more easily identify crime suspects and missing children. Civil liberties groups warn that the technology could easily be misused to disproportionately pursue immigrants, people of color and protesters, infringing on their rights to free speech and movement. Other companies have long sold facial surveillance to law enforcement agencies, but Amazon has differentiated itself by, in part, playing down warnings about the technology.

Privacy as a material financial risk

Rekognition, as a potential tool for surveillance when sold to government, already presents material issues for Amazon regarding consumer privacy. According to the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB)¹⁸, which identifies environmental, social and governance factors most likely to materially impact the financial condition or operating performance of companies in an industry, consumer privacy is likely to be a material issue for companies operating in technology and communications. This includes the management of risks related to the use of personally identifiable information (such as biometric data collected through facial recognition technology), social issues that may arise from a company’s collecting information (such as public controversies surrounding the collection of facial imagery), and managing evolving regulation (such as regulation around the commercial use of facial recognition).

Reputational risk posed by sales of Rekognition to government

The public controversy surrounding Rekognition presents critical risks to the Company’s reputation, including the willingness of consumers to trust the company to safeguard their privacy and civil and human rights because storing your data on their cloud requires that you trust them to keep your data safe. Therefore, consumer trust is one of Amazon’s most important intangible assets. This comes as Amazon, with its leadership position in the technology sector, confronts growing public criticism regarding the role of technology companies, including Amazon.com, and its products and services, in societies and economies around the world. Thus, proponents believe Rekognition may threaten Amazon’s long-term prospects.

Amazon is the subject of mounting public controversy because of this product. In May 2018, the ACLU, along with a coalition of civil rights organizations, sent a public letter to the Company demanding that it stop selling Rekognition to government. In January 2019, over 85 activist groups including the ACLU, the National Lawyers Guild chapters, and Freedom of the Press Foundation signed an open letter expressing their concern for how Rekognition technology threatens community safety, privacy, and human rights.

Regulatory risk posed by sales of Rekognition to government :

Independently assessing Rekognition and the risks it poses to civil and human rights, would not only protects stakeholders who may be harmed by Rekognition; it would also help the Company minimize expensive legal, operational, and reputational risks, benefiting Amazon’s and in turn, shareholders’ bottom lines.  Amazon’s sales of Rekognition to government faces regulatory risk and an environment of uncertainty. In December 2018, the AI Now Institute at New York University warned the “urgent need” for stricter regulation of facial recognition technology.

Legal risk posed by sales of Rekognition to government :

Meanwhile, as Amazon continues to sell Rekognition in a largely unregulated environment, consumers as well as local, state and federal government actors may escalate legal challenges to the company to establish stronger precedents around consumer privacy, posing the risk of major fines charged for regulatory violations and litigation.

The Illinois Supreme Court in January 2019 expanded the potential liability for companies that sell facial-recognition technology under the state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act by ruling that plaintiffs only need to prove technical violations rather than actual injury or damages, further clearing the way for potential lawsuits involving facial technology.

Investors should have disclosure from the Company about how Amazon assesses legal risk. Supporting this proposal and conducting a study of Rekognition and its potential impact, as outlined in the proposal, would allow the board to properly understand and convey to shareholders the extent to which these sales would present legal risks, and the company’s plan to mitigate those risks, before it is too late.

Human capital management risk posed by sales of Rekognition to government :

Amazon’s status as an employer of choice, and Amazon’s ability to be consistent with the values of its employees, is being undermined by the Company’s internal management and potential sale of surveillance technologies, including Rekognition. The company’s lack of transparency about the nature of its sales and failure to respond to employees who do not want to use their time and talent in support of selling surveillance technology to government may be hurting Amazon’s ability to attract, hire, retain, and maintain good relations with employees. Amazon risks losing top new talent as millennials in the workforce seek employment from companies who can match their values. An Accenture report found that 70% of 2016 college graduates prefer an employer who offers a positive social atmosphere, and companies that “do good”, over a higher salary; 92% said it was important their employer demonstrate social responsibility.

Amazon’s existing policy to mitigate risks of sales of Rekognition are insufficient and ineffectual

In its Opposition Statement, Amazon argued that the AWS Acceptable Use Policy protects against risks posed by illegal or harmful use of Rekognition. Amazon asserts in the Opposition Statement that customers who gain access to deploy Rekognition must comply with its Acceptable Use Policy which prohibits the use of its products “for any illegal, harmful, fraudulent, infringing or offensive use,” including the violation of laws related to privacy, discrimination and civil rights, and that Amazon has not received a single report of Rekognition being used in a harmful manner as posited in the proposal. Recent experience, however, demonstrates that the Acceptable Use Policy is no guarantee that the AWS platform will not be used in a harmful manner. According to multiple media reports, a Mexico-based news site used Amazon servers to openly store 540 million records on Facebook users, including identification numbers, comments, reactions and account names. The problem was detected by researchers at an independent security firm which reportedly sent emails to Amazon “over many months” to alert it to the problem. Amazon reportedly failed to respond to those messages.

Conclusion :

Proponents of the resolution urge investors to vote in favor of the shareholder proposal Requesting a report on the impact of government use of Rekognition at Amazon.com, Inc. because:

Amazon is exposed to financial, reputational, regulatory, legal, and human capital risk due to its sales of Rekognition to government.

An independent evaluation of the impact of sales of Rekognition to government on privacy, civil and human rights is needed to assure investors that the Company’s existing policies protect shareholders and the public from risk

Amazon lags peers in governance, oversight and management practices to assess and address the ethical, legal, and reputational risks, and the Company must fulfill its fiduciary duty of care around human rights risk by conducting an independent study of Rekognition.