Amazon's facial recognition fear crusade ramps up: now they're paying Facebook to show you pictures

[blondebanshee]

pictures of suspected criminals to scare you into getting a surveillance doorbell

Amazon's Ring doorbells are surveillance devices that conduct round-the-clock video surveillance of your neighborhood, automatically flagging "suspicious" faces and bombarding you and your neighbors with alerts using an app called "Neighbors"; it's a marriage of Amazon's Internet of Things platform with its "Rekognition" facial recognition tool, which it has marketed aggressively to cities, law enforcement, ICE, businesses and everyday customers as a security measure that can help ID bad guys, despite the absence of a database identifying which faces belong to good people and which faces belong to bad people.

Part of the home surveillance project is a fear-based marketing campaign -- a whole news vertical -- designed to convince Americans that their neighborhoods are so dangerous that they owe it to themselves and their neighbors to conduct surveillance of the streets in front of their homes.

The latest salvo in the war is a paid "promoted post" Facebook campaign featuring Ring surveillance footage of suspected petty criminals (a woman trying a car door handle and walking away), urging viewers to get in touch with local cops in order to help solve a crime that may in fact not be a crime.

[link:https://boingboing.net/2019/06/07/fear-sells.html|

F**k Facebook and Amazon

[dalton99a]

1. Amazon's Home Security Company Is Turning Everyone Into Cops

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qvyvzd/amazons-home-security-company-is-turning-everyone-into-cops

Amazon’s Home Security Company Is Turning Everyone Into Cops
Neighbors, a social media crime-reporting app owned by Amazon, creates a digital ecosystem in which you are encouraged to assume the worst about your neighbors—and people of color are once again being harmed.
by Caroline Haskins | Feb 7 2019, 2:29pm

“MY PACKAGE THIEF HAS BEEN ARRESTED!!!,” reads a post on Neighbors, a “neighborhood watch” social network run by Ring, which is a home security systems company owned by Amazon.

The post shows two side-by-side images: one is of a man as captured on a home security camera, and the other is of someone who appears to be the same man, as photographed in a mugshot.

“This man stolen my packages along with my neighbors packages on 1/14/19 and I’m happy to report that he was arrested on 2/3/19 by the NYPD,” the post caption reads. The comments universally congratulate the person who posted the images.

Neighbors defines itself as a “new neighborhood watch,” according to its website. But on a more practical level, Neighbors is like NextDoor, a social platform for local communities, if the posts on NextDoor were only reports of crime or “suspicious activity.” NextDoor has faced long-standing issues of racism on its platform, and Ring faces the same issue. Each Neighbors post has one of the following labels: Crime, Safety, Suspicious, Stranger, or Lost Pet. Ring captures footage that can help leads to arrests when that footage is shared with police, like in the case described above.

Neighbors is not just a social media app: it’s a service that’s meant to be used with Ring security cameras, a Wi-Fi-powered home security company that was acquired by Amazon last February in a $1 billion deal. Neighbors was launched in May 2018, three months after the acquisition. If you have Ring security cameras, you can upload video content straight from your security camera to Neighbors. And if you download Neighbors and invite a friend to join the app, both you and your friend get $10 off Ring security products—which include doorbell video cameras, floodlight video cameras, and in-home security cameras.

Beyond creating a "new neighborhood watch," Amazon and Ring are normalizing the use of video surveillance and pitting neighbors against each other. Chris Gilliard, a professor of English at Macomb Community College who studies institutional tech policy, told Motherboard in a phone call that such a “crime and safety” focused platforms can actively reinforce racism.

[FakeNoose]

2. Even though I shop on Amazon-dot-com

... they have never seen my face because my desktop computer's camera is taped over. I suggest everyone else do the same on their desktop or laptop webcams. I don't need an ap to identify the people who are standing on my doorstep either. Not today, Amazon.