[HN Gopher] Microsoft bans U.S. police from using enterprise AI ...
___________________________________________________________________
Microsoft bans U.S. police from using enterprise AI tool for facial
recognition
Author : coloneltcb
Score : 196 points
Date : 2024-05-02 18:51 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
| ldng wrote:
| Wait, is that a decision a company is allowed to make ? Is it the
| beginning of cyberpunk ?
|
| Feels like they're just protecting their ass while keeping
| overselling their product.
|
| Not that law enforcement should use AI irresponsibly and without
| boundaries, but I'm not sure it is the responsibility of a
| company to make that kind of call.
| treyd wrote:
| You generally can't force a party to enter into a contract with
| another party that they don't want to.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Utilities and carriers can't just pick and choose customers
| totally. For example, your electrical utility cannot deny
| your service based on your political speech or profession or
| whatever. Even if they are privately owned.
|
| Personally, I think companies above a certain size should not
| be able to deny customers because they are effectively like
| public agencies or utility services due to their size. Banks,
| big tech, large social media platforms should be regulated
| like utilities in my opinion.
| text0404 wrote:
| microsoft's enterprise AI tool isn't a utility though, and
| they're not banning police on political or moral grounds.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| > microsoft's enterprise AI tool isn't a utility though
|
| It's part of an infrastructure as a service platform,
| which is why I view it as utility. But I also am saying
| we need to broaden what we call a utility for the modern
| world. Not having access to large platforms (like social
| media) or centralized services (banking) or large
| companies (which have lots of market share and are one of
| a few options) is very damaging. What are your thoughts
| on that?
|
| > and they're not banning police on political or moral
| grounds.
|
| How do you know this? This seems like it would almost
| certainly be the result of pressure from political
| groups.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > It's part of an infrastructure as a service platform,
| which is why I view it as utility.
|
| They haven't securely broadened it to the internet or
| mobile phone service, and you want them to broaden it to
| individual privately-produced software packages. So the
| police can't be refused as a customer.
| kube-system wrote:
| Of all the things that could be considered a public
| utility, Azure OpenAI Service ranks somewhere between
| Cabbage Patch dolls and Crystal Pepsi. Not only can
| everyone live without it, almost everyone on the planet
| _does_ live without it.
| atonse wrote:
| But utilities also have those rules because they are
| granted de-facto monopolies in their geographic areas.
|
| It's not like I can get electricity from another provider
| if there is literally only one in my area. And what they're
| providing (water, sewage, electricity) is deemed essential.
|
| Even with banks, if one bank rejects me, I can
| (hypothetically) go to another one down the street.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Companies can be damaging and anti competitive even if
| they aren't total monopolies. Being an oligopoly or
| having a significant portion of market share is enough.
| Keep in mind many of these companies have more users than
| most national governments do - and they have soft power
| on a similar scale.
|
| Another angle is network effects - social media companies
| face reduced competition due to this and so they too
| should be regulated above a certain size since there
| isn't enough competition or choice there, because the
| value of access to those particular platforms is very
| high due to their size.
|
| > Even with banks, if one bank rejects me, I can
| (hypothetically) go to another one down the street.
|
| What if they all reject you though? For example what if
| all banks decide they are better off debanking someone to
| stay in the good side of politicians who might punish
| them otherwise (like via regulation)? Some of these
| services are fundamental and should be forced to provide
| service no matter what.
| singleshot_ wrote:
| When it comes to wanting big companies to follow rules (a
| noble pursuit) many wish that common carrier status could
| be imposed on a business.
|
| But remember why common carrier status exists. Imagine I
| rob a stagecoach and lie low until the next day, when I
| catch a train to the next town over.
|
| Is the train engineer my accomplice in the robbery? Or my
| accessory after the fact? Is the train company?
|
| He and it might be, except that the train company "holds
| itself out" as a transporter of goods and services open to
| all. In exchange, the law grants the company that holds
| itself out as a carrier for all the freedom not to worry
| about whether carriage is a criminal act for the customer.
|
| But without holding one's self out as a carrier for all,
| there is no common carrier status. You cannot hold out a
| company as sufficiently large; they must hold themselves
| out as wanting this status.
|
| When I see people clamor for social media platforms, I get
| doubly confused, because not only have these companies
| never held themselves out as common carriers, they would
| take nothing they do not already have (under 230) from
| doing so.
| whaleofatw2022 wrote:
| I think in this case, a bigger factor would be this is a
| 'we will not attest to accuracy in court'.
|
| As an odd sort of comparison, this is why you can't just
| take a magic 8 ball into the courtroom and shake it; 'for
| amusement only'
| miah_ wrote:
| Corporations can make any judgement call about who can or
| should use their product.
|
| Though it does seem rare in the US for companies to prevent
| others from using their product based on ethical or moral
| reasons, but more should.
| busterarm wrote:
| US banks don't do business with the porn industry pretty
| famously.
| Alupis wrote:
| That is not due to morality though - that is due to the
| insane level of chargebacks and fraud revolving around
| payments within the porn industry.
| HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
| Except it is. High shrinkage can be baked into the
| business model and digital media is a high margin
| business that can tolerate it. Other industries with high
| fraud rates don't get cut out wholesale.
| favorited wrote:
| Exactly. Mastercard, Visa & Discover were perfectly happy
| to process PornHub payments for years - until enough
| external political pressure was applied. Religious
| special interest lobbying groups like like Focus on the
| Family and NCOSE (formerly known as Morality in Media)
| were celebrating when they stopped, as were Republican
| politicians like Josh Hawley (https://twitter.com/HawleyM
| O/status/1337111830976753672).
| Alupis wrote:
| > until enough external political pressure was applied
|
| This doesn't pass the sniff test. You have been able to
| purchase porn for decades in various mediums - why would
| a website suddenly invoke the ire of the "morality
| police"? Even more-so when porn is freely available in
| almost every case when it comes to the internet.
|
| Really though, it has nothing to do with morality - it is
| straight up the risk profile of those websites. There's
| even a movie about the start of the online paid-porn
| industry and all the stuff they had to do to figure out
| how not to bleed money on chargebacks etc.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > You have been able to purchase porn for decades in
| various mediums
|
| Have you? Or has it been patchwork and limited and
| volatile, with people being fined and jailed fairly
| arbitrarily? There were periods in the 80s and 90s where
| people were going through pornographic tapes and removing
| the _swearing_.
|
| > suddenly invoke
|
| Suddenly, after decades. Is the adjective just to make it
| sound more unlikely?
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| What about Visa and Mastercard blocking Wikileaks
| donations? Should that be allowed just because they are
| private?
| Suppafly wrote:
| Not the other guy, but I'm pretty much OK with that.
| Honestly I'm more OK with them blocking payments to
| quasi-illegal operations than I am with them blocking
| payments to presumably legal adult content. Ultimately,
| in both cases, there other ways to make those payments.
| Hell I'm more annoyed that I had to use giftcards to buy
| Minecraft for my kids back in the day, before Microsoft
| became their parent company, because of some weird
| financial law in my state.
| Alupis wrote:
| > Hell I'm more annoyed that I had to use giftcards to
| buy Minecraft for my kids back in the day, before
| Microsoft became their parent company, because of some
| weird financial law in my state.
|
| I'm curious to know more about this. I'm not aware of any
| laws in any state (assuming the US) where it's illegal or
| forbidden from purchasing video games using a credit
| card, or even a debit card.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| > I'm more OK with them blocking payments to quasi-
| illegal operations
|
| I know cases have been brought against Wikileaks and
| Assange, but in my opinion they broke no laws. They acted
| within the bounds of journalistic freedom. I don't
| understand how people are OK with news outlets leaking
| things like Trump's tax returns but think that freedom of
| the press works differently in other circumstances. Why
| would it be different case by case?
| csande17 wrote:
| Companies can decide who they provide _service_ to, and can
| give advice about who "should" use their products. But I
| don't think Proctor & Gamble has the legal authority to stop
| you from using Tide laundry detergent that you legally
| purchased from a grocery store or on eBay.
|
| The current era of tech is all about disguising web services
| as "products" you can "buy" (most recently exemplified by the
| Humane AI pin and Rabbit R1), so I can see how there'd be
| confusion, though.
| simonw wrote:
| Forcing companies to sell their surveillance-enabling product
| to the police seems pretty cyberpunk-dystopian to me.
| duxup wrote:
| Presumably if I have a service that I think is inappropriate
| for a use (for whatever reason, but let's say false positives)
| I can in fact limit what kind of use cases area allowed.
|
| I could argue that my tool used wrong presents a legal risk to
| ME because I let law enforcement do some terrible things that I
| know don't work.
|
| Semi-related, most cloud services do not allow crypto mining,
| the reason there being it's not cost effective. So whatever
| mining does happen is stolen credentials, or some inside
| company job where dude is using company resources for personal
| gain ... pretty much all illegal activity. So they ban it and I
| believe actively try to detect / aggressively disable it.
| RajT88 wrote:
| I think what it's about, is they can squint a little bit and
| see a near future where there is massive class-action suits
| against Microsoft for all the harmful uses which inevitably
| flow from a police department uncritically using
| hallucinating AI for their day to day work.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| > Wait, is that a decision a company is allowed to make ? Is it
| the beginning of cyberpunk ?
|
| Companies can choose their clients in a non cyperbunk world
| too.
| cthalupa wrote:
| > Wait, is that a decision a company is allowed to make ? Is it
| the beginning of cyberpunk ?
|
| Yes. Freedom of association is literally part of the first
| amendment. The only limits are around protected classes.
|
| How in the world is forcing a company to do business with
| someone a LESS dystopian solution than allowing them to decide
| who they do business with?
| megraf wrote:
| Of course they did. They have to pay separate licensing for the
| use of DAS - which is developed by M$ and resold from NYPD.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Awareness_System
| iceyest wrote:
| Wow, I had no idea it was this bad. I am not really suprised
| the lengths American spying goes though. Glad not to be living
| in New York.
|
| >The Domain Awareness System is the largest digital
| surveillance system in the world
|
| I wonder how it compares to China and if facial recognition
| tech is as pervasive in America as it is in China.
| pfortuny wrote:
| There's London too, totally dystopian.
| vidarh wrote:
| Most cameras in the UK are private, rarely working well,
| and usually not networked or easily accessible to the
| police. It could be better, but the idea of the UK as a
| surveillance state is seriously overblown outside of maybe
| a handful of streets.
| phantompeace wrote:
| Don't forget ANPRs that can track your vehicle all around
| the country. Doesn't even have to cross paths with a
| police car - they're at most major junctions and all over
| the motorway
| winrid wrote:
| Yeah I would want to better understand how they arrived at
| that statement.
|
| When I was in Xinjiang there were like 5-10 cameras at every
| intersection. Surely NYC isn't at that level?
| dpkirchner wrote:
| I don't know about NYC but it's common to see at least 4
| cameras per lighted intersection where I am (small city in
| the PNW). They're replacing the loops used to sense
| vehicles, but I'm pretty sure they're also remotely
| accessible.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I don't think those are necessarily recording cameras.
| They could just be radar or video vehicle detectors to
| let the light know if a car is waiting.
| janalsncm wrote:
| In America we get the worst of both worlds: police won't
| admit to domestic spying so they can't use to solve day to
| day crimes. But they still spy on us, Constitution be damned.
|
| As a result the US has a higher crime rate than many other
| countries including China. If you don't trust China's numbers
| look at Singapore, which has a population density similar to
| NYC with an order of magnitude less crime. Singapore is safer
| at night than NYC is during the day. Why? Cameras. If you
| commit an offense, you will be caught, without question.
| kube-system wrote:
| > Singapore is safer at night than NYC is during the day.
| Why? Cameras. If you commit an offense, you will be caught,
| without question.
|
| There's more to it than that. A sheisty will defeat a
| camera.
| echoangle wrote:
| Not when you have a lot of cameras, right? You still have
| to put it on somewhere without being seen, and you would
| have to swap all clothes so you can't be tracked by
| checking tapes of other locations for your clothes before
| you put it on.
| vundercind wrote:
| Same with national ID and our fear of "papers, please". We
| have all the downsides--constantly having to provide ID to
| everyone, government can trivially access all kinds of
| tracking data tied to that--but none of the benefits of an
| actual national ID because we have to pretend we don't have
| one (we do, it's just 80% privatized and a massive
| liability and inconvenience for citizens in ways that it
| doesn't need to be)
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > constantly having to provide ID to everyone
|
| I live in WA and for the past 5+ years I've only ever
| presented my driver's license to TSA agents at the
| airport.
|
| ...unless getting carded at the store for buying beer
| counts?
| vundercind wrote:
| Doctor, dentist, employers, educational institutions.
| [edit] all financial institutions, lenders, et c
|
| Unless you're buying everything with cash, your
| purchasing history will be connected to it, too. Where
| you drive (license plate scanning and data-sharing is
| widespread). Facial recognition in stores means paying
| cash might not even help (seen the ones that highlight
| your face on a monitor when you walk in the store?)
|
| But we have to pretend we don't have a national ID system
| any time it might be convenient to a person to have that.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| Right. I thought the parent post was talking about being
| challenged by government officials/police ("papers,
| please") on a regular basis - and not about private-
| sector use. A misunderstanding on my part.
| yardie wrote:
| I literally had to present ID this morning to buy cold
| medicine. Had to present ID lastweek to enter my kid's
| school then had to present ID to their pediatrician.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| At least two of those instances make perfect sense.
| Meth's a thing and we don't like unidentified individuals
| fucking around on school grounds these days.
| deathlight wrote:
| It's sad how in the state of Washington I have become
| accustomed to drawing my ID out on every transaction that
| involves confirming that I'm over 21 whereas cross the
| border into Idaho there's not a single time I have ever
| been asked to provide my ID in over 10 years. Clearly in
| Idaho they can take one look at me and go like well yeah
| clearly but such visual social technology is beyond the
| pale in the great creepy state of Washington. I'm a bit
| sad to think of what the children of today's children
| will be like when I am very old and they are very young.
| Maybe one day nobody will know what it was like to live
| in a society that was able to just tell things by looking
| at it.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| > we do, it's just 80% privatized and a massive liability
| and inconvenience for citizens in ways that it doesn't
| need to be
|
| I am guessing to you are referring to how multiple
| private organizations can just poll for my social
| security number and I cant do anything about it? Yeah...
| vundercind wrote:
| Yep. It's a pain in the ass to deal with from our end, to
| put it mildly, but easy to piece it all together on the
| other, so it's barely an impediment to bad actors. Since
| there are functionally no restrictions on government
| using parts of that system to grab all kinds of data from
| private sources, it's a national ID connected directly to
| a crazy-powerful dragnet spying system, too. But
| inconvenient, insecure, and very hard to gain oversight
| of.
|
| All the bad shit, none of the good. We may as well just
| have a national ID, it'd be less-bad than what we have
| now and might provide a jumping off point for making it a
| _lot_ less-bad.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| The irony of individuals freaking out over the notion of
| what the wildly underfunded and largely indifferent
| federal government might do to collect data when private
| industry is surveilling basically every aspect of their
| existence for most of every day...
| AvocadoPanic wrote:
| Is it the catching or the imprisoning NYC and many other
| cities are struggling with in current year?
| lupusreal wrote:
| American criminal subcultures treat going to prison as
| almost as a rite of passage, rather than something to be
| avoided at all costs. Sentences are too short and too
| easy.
| lupusreal wrote:
| I think Singapore whipping the shit out of criminals
| probably has a lot to do with it. Not just Singapore, but
| most of the rest of Asian countries as well. _South_ Korea
| treats their prisoners so harshly that the US military has
| to have a special agreement in place to ensure that US
| servicemen imprisoned for crimes by South Korea actually
| get fed more than a starvation diet and don 't have to do
| hard labor: https://www.stripes.com/migration/for-u-s-
| inmates-in-s-korea...
|
| Of course South Koreans know better than American soldiers
| not to commit crimes in South Korea, because prison there
| is so awful. Unsurprisingly they have a much lower crime
| rate than America.
| 8372049 wrote:
| The big downsides with horrible prison are that criminals
| will have a huge incentive to do anything to not get
| caught and convicted, including violently resisting
| arrest, shootouts, targeting witnesses and so on. It is
| mostly effective as a deterrent against
| financial/winning-relates crimes, but mostly ineffective
| against most other types of crimes. Plus, horrible prison
| is much less likely to actually reform the person in
| question.
|
| Statistically, the Norwegian system with "holiday
| prisons" works well, with very low recidivism rates for
| most types of crime.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Studies show that the severity of the punishment has
| little impact crime rates -- the odds of getting caught &
| punished are much more significant.
| mrcartmeneses wrote:
| Singapore isn't safe "because cameras" it's safe because it
| has high social mobility, social housing, high levels of
| education, high levels of income equality and is generally
| wealthy and much wealthier than its neighbours.
|
| And also it's a police state where you get sentenced to
| death for drug smuggling and can be punished for doing
| drugs in another country while on holiday if you are a
| citizen, for example.
|
| To the naive, Singapore is a paradise, but once you visit
| for long enough you realise it's just a super nice prison
| and it's not very fun being with the other lags
| skhunted wrote:
| The claims made in your first paragraph are undermined by
| your third paragraph.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| the first paragraph did not claim it was not a prison, it
| just claimed it was safe not because it was a prison but
| for other reasons.
|
| The third paragraph claimed it was a prison but it did
| not say the safety came from it being a prison.
|
| the third paragraph and first paragraph are not in
| conflict.
| skhunted wrote:
| I know it's not true in American prisons but generally
| not much crime occurs in prison. If Singapore is prison
| like then it seems that this would at least be a
| contributing factor to its lack of crime.
| skhunted wrote:
| The fact that it is a prison with much surveillance has
| little to do with its low crime? This is not a credible
| belief.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I wasn't saying it was wrong or not - I just said the two
| paragraphs were not inherently contradictory.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| William Gibson got a lot of hate for his "Disneyland With
| the Death Penalty" essay (in _Wired_ ), about 30 years
| ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disneyland_with_the_De
| ath_Pena...
| r00fus wrote:
| > To the naive, Singapore is a paradise, but once you
| visit for long enough you realise it's just a super nice
| prison and it's not very fun being with the other lags
|
| It's not an American style of life, but I'm sure it's
| attractive to a lot of people who simply aren't into
| drugs, partying, or living the high life.
| jMyles wrote:
| > people who simply aren't into drugs
|
| ...are we still having to go over this?
|
| There are no such people. Everybody does drugs, unless
| you adopt a definition of "drug" which is designed
| specifically to accommodate this assertion, rather than
| apply in some useful way to reality. It's difficult to
| even create a definition of 'drug' which convincingly
| excludes survival necessities like water and oxygen, but
| remains otherwise consistent.
|
| There are some drugs which are, for reasons varying from
| racism to capriciousness to an intemperant desire for
| greater cartel income, prohibited to varying degrees in
| various jurisdictions.
|
| You can go to Singapore and consume sugar, coffee,
| nicotine, alcohol, and many other drugs while enjoying
| the tacit endorsement of your behavior by the local state
| apparatus. You can also consume cocaine, opioids, and
| plenty of other drugs so long as you pay black market
| rates and do so shielded by privilege so as not to run
| afoul of an investigation. You can even consume cannabis,
| though of course it is very difficult to smuggle, so you
| pay a higher premium.
| temporarara wrote:
| This. I'm sure there are lots of things I don't like
| about Singapore, but the fact that doing and especially
| dealing drugs is kinda hard and may have death penalty
| level consequences is a non-issue for me. Cultures that
| promote drug usage are disgusting and once the drugs
| comes into your neighborhood there is no way to just
| ignore it if you care about your safety. I wouldn't care
| too much if it was just some guys using drugs for fun and
| that was the end of it, but drugs destroy whole
| communities and I hate it.
| observationist wrote:
| Not that US institutions don't lie, but our bureaucracy and
| government oversight systems come with the benefit that
| many of the things we track and document can be verified.
| Other countries simply lie. The numbers you get are not a
| rough approximation of reality; they're simply part of
| whatever story that country wants to tell.
|
| Crime rate is a statistic for which a majority of countries
| provide numbers that are completely dissociated from
| reality.
|
| You can, of course, take the numbers seriously, as if the
| statistics are being published in good faith. Unless you
| have some sort of independent oversight, however, that
| isn't beholden to or biased by the country being assessed,
| then taking those numbers seriously is probably a silly
| thing to do.
|
| The US gets lots of independent verification and validation
| of crime statistics. They're frequently analyzed at local,
| state, and federal level by journalists, students,
| activists, authors, and government officials. At every
| level an official number is published, it gets challenged,
| so there are incentives keeping the politicians and
| bureaucrats honest. They get slammed when they get caught
| lying, and they get caught lying because the public and the
| media keep track of things and demand accountability.
|
| Some stuff, like total officer involved shootings, dog
| shootings by officials, abuses of power, and things of that
| nature, don't get publicly disclosed much of the time, so
| there are gaps in what we know and what officials are
| required to disclose.
|
| The US isn't perfect, but you can get pretty good numbers
| that actually correlate with reality. Even other western
| countries don't always have trustworthy reporting and
| accounting for government actions. The best you'll ever get
| is a glowing narrative.
| dgfitz wrote:
| This post should be stickied at the top of this topic.
| postalrat wrote:
| You had no idea it was so bad? You do know how mobile phones
| work and what is tracked don't you?
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| It reads like literal "pre-crime."
| observationist wrote:
| A machine learning algorithm known as Patternizr is included
| in the DAS, which connects potential criminal suspects to
| other unsolved crimes in order to speed arrests and close old
| cases.[20][21] The algorithm is trained on a decade of
| historic police data of manually identified crime patterns.
|
| Potential criminal suspects. Who needs civil liberties,
| anyway?
| mlinhares wrote:
| Yay, even licensed to the Brazilian National Police (that
| doesn't exist). Did they mean the Federal Police?
| jampa wrote:
| It seems to be a mistake. From the original article which
| Wikipedia is citing:
|
| > "[...]Others, such as the Washington D.C. Metro Police, the
| Singapore Police Force, and the Brazilian National Police
| have purchased the DAS software from Microsoft, our software
| developer, and have used it to secure high-profile
| governmental and cultural sites, the 2014 World Cup, and the
| 2016 Summer Olympics. Microsoft has agreed to give New York
| City 30 percent of the revenue it derives from selling the
| software to other jurisdictions (Parascandola and Moore
| 2012);"
|
| But "Parascandola and Moore 2012" refers to another article
| that doesn't say anything about existing uses outside of NYC.
| (Using Archive because the site has a Geoblock).
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210812131624/https://www.nydai.
| ..
|
| EDIT: Just removed the paragraph from Wikipedia.
| beeboobaa3 wrote:
| > 9,000 CCTV cameras, owned either by the NYPD or private
| actors
|
| I wonder what kind of person volunteers their camera for the
| surveillance apparatus.
| themoonisachees wrote:
| Businesses point cameras at the public for the sole purpose
| of surveillance. I'm not talking other businesses, I'm
| talking business built to sell and launder surveillance
| footage.
| mikestew wrote:
| The business owner who might have had their fill of break-
| ins, people pooping in front of their store, et al., for one.
| I'm sure "private actors" is not all just Ring doorbells.
| MeImCounting wrote:
| This seems like a good thing. I would not trust US police to hold
| themselves to literally any standard of ethics as far as
| automation of this sort is concerned. I can easily see
| departments ignoring the outputs that dont fit into their agenda
| while running running with the outputs they do like.
|
| I would like to see more companies restricting what contracts
| theyll take based on ethics.
| ben_jones wrote:
| AI is a giant liability shield. You can blatantly steal shit
| and profit of it. Of course enforcement agencies are going to
| have a field day with it. Announcements like this are just a
| pretense that they aren't already counting the money.
| devmor wrote:
| Unfortunately that's not what's happening here. The police
| still have access to this information and tooling. They just
| have a different license agreement and access point that allows
| Microsoft to extract more tax dollars.
| Suppafly wrote:
| There is probably an actual reason for it other than
| corporate greed. I'm guessing they have to silo the data
| separately on their cloud and that costs more. It's the same
| reason healthcare applications often cost more to host, they
| can't intermingle data in cloud instances and have to insure
| that it's only hosted in the US and what not. I imagine
| having to deal with legal procedures ensures a lot of
| additional time/money compared to other customers.
| devmor wrote:
| Oh I would certainly bet there's a lot of reasons it costs
| more money too. I'm just being reductivist and pessimist
| about it!
| alwaysrunning wrote:
| How exactly are they going to stop the NYPD from using this
| service? Just not register it in their subscription as a service?
| And does it really matter? If I can use Azure's cognitive search
| and host my own model that doesn't stop me from using Azure for
| the same purpose.
| HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
| Using it unofficially through unauthorized workarounds brings
| doubt into the chain of custody and investigation integrity.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Oh no, they will have to use parallel construction, something
| they TOTALLY don't have experience doing.
| alwaysrunning wrote:
| I'm not sure the courts would consider it a workaround, it's
| a legit way to host your own model.
|
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/machine-
| learning/how...
| riffic wrote:
| when cops and DAs use parallel construction to build a case,
| "integrity" is a mere technicality.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
| karaterobot wrote:
| You can't stop someone from misusing your technology by
| updating your terms of service, just like you can't stop a
| criminal by making their behavior against the law. But I don't
| hold Microsoft responsible for making the police behave a
| certain way, or for _preventing_ violations of the rules from
| happening. As you say, it 's just not possible. I'd be
| satisfied if Microsoft consistently shut down any attempts to
| use their technology in a systematic way, once they discovered
| a violation of their terms.
| chefandy wrote:
| _" In January, reporting by Bloomberg revealed that OpenAI is
| working with the Pentagon on a number of projects including
| cybersecurity capabilities -- a departure from the startup's
| earlier ban on providing its AI to militaries. Elsewhere,
| Microsoft has pitched using OpenAI's image generation tool,
| DALL-E, to help the Department of Defense (DoD) build software to
| execute military operations, per The Intercept."_
|
| Hm... to my eye, this just seems to be a great spin on
| essentially pushing cops or their vendors to sign (more
| expensive, I imagine) independent service contracts under the
| guise of oversight. Their principles seem to be as genuine as
| they were in their plea to the US government to cede control of
| LLMs, generally, to the big corporate players "for safety."
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| OpenAI has blatantly ignored most of its principles (which Elon
| called out surprisingly well). Insane to me that people ignore
| that.
| chefandy wrote:
| Seriously.
|
| > Insane to me that people ignore that.
|
| Yeah for sure, but I don't think this is a super
| representative crowd, though. People uncritically frolicking
| through all of these developments with AI-enhanced rose-
| colored-glasses glued to their faces are over-represented in
| the SV universe. I know a lot of non-tech-focused folks that
| are casting a very wary eye towards our impending incredible
| AI-powered corporate utopia. The only similarly optimistic
| people I know outside of tech are the devastatingly credulous
| fellows still trying to figure out how to recoup money on all
| of the NFTs they bought, and they seem to be much better at
| generating headlines than societal changes. But maybe I'm the
| one wearing the rose-colored glasses, here.
| resource_waste wrote:
| Is this just PR stuff? Obviously enterprise tech companies
| (Google/MS) are going to be working with States. These State have
| to enforce the social contract so you are going to have blood on
| your hands.
|
| I don't really have skin in the game, I'm at the whim of these
| parties.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| This is a great opportunity for open-source models to get a
| foothold in this lucrative market.
| nicklecompte wrote:
| I suspect it's legal. The focus seems to be on face and speech
| recognition and I am sure MSFT's internal metrics on the AI's
| ability to recognize non-white faces/accents/etc are very bad.
|
| Even with LLMs, the existence of lawyers unknowingly using
| ChatGPT confabulations in court suggests that police officers
| will do the same with investigations or surveillance. A cop who
| takes Sam Altman's dumb tweets too seriously might think
| Azure's GPT-4 service can look at an evidence report and apply
| its AI Magic. Probably not something Microsoft wants to defend
| in court.
| hm-nah wrote:
| IMHO, speech-to-text to LLMs is borderline spycraft already.
|
| "Are you wearing a wire?" The answer doesn't mean merely
| recording the conversation.
|
| Now it could mean, a personalized "analyst" determining
| sentiment, correlating
| events/evidence/facts/(hallucinations)/building a prosecutors
| case...in real time!
| advisedwang wrote:
| This is excellent. There will be blood on our hands if we allow
| our software to be used to more closely surveil and police
| people. Not only because the software as it currently exists is
| flaky, but because of how it will enviably be used. Certain
| communities will have it deployed against them more, parallel
| construction will hide when technology is used in violation of
| rights, police and juries will believe when technology has a
| "hit" that it proves guilt and not understand the caveats, etc
| etc.
|
| Some Microsoft employees have been calling for such limits for
| years [1, 2]
|
| [1] https://www.geekwire.com/2019/microsoft-github-workers-
| prote... [2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-workers-
| asking-drop-p...
| chefandy wrote:
| If it's like what they did with the military, they're just
| trying to push them into a more expensive licensing scheme.
| rockinghigh wrote:
| The NYPD has had a system built by Microsoft for 15 years:
|
| > Beginning in 2009, the NYPD, in partnership with Microsoft,
| built a powerful counterterrorism and policing tool called the
| Domain Awareness System (DAS). The DAS is a central platform
| used to aggregate data from internal and external closed-
| circuit television cameras (CCTV), license plate readers
| (LPRs), and environmental sensors, as well as 911 calls and
| other NYPD databases. The DAS uses an interactive dashboard
| interface to display real-time alerts whenever a 911 call is
| received or a sensor is triggered. The DAS also in- cludes
| mapping features that make it possible to survey and track
| targets. The DAS was originally built to support the Lower
| Manhattan Security Initiative (LMSI) - a public-private
| partnership - but has since expanded to cover the entire city,
| giving NYPD personnel direct access to thousands of cameras
| owned and operated by private orga- nizations. Until the
| development of the mobility platform and the mobile DAS system
| described below, the full capabilities of DAS have only been
| available to the Counterterrorism Bureau and a few other
| specially trained officers on desktop computers. As the NYPD
| upgrades its network, access to all DAS capabilities and
| resources will be expanded to all NYPD's commands.
|
| https://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/html/home/POA/pdf/Technology.p...
| edot wrote:
| They are not banning them from using their AI tool. They're
| banning them from the currently-offered licensing structure. This
| is a profit-grab, not an ethical restriction. It is of the same
| vein as Sam Altman going to congress and spooking them in hopes
| of regulating AI so that they are the only ones allowed to build
| it.
|
| I wouldn't be shocked if we also saw a similar move to ban
| hospitals, schools, etc. from using the standard enterprise
| license under the guise of "we need to provide you with oversight
| for your vulnerable populations", and then charging them a hefty
| surcharge on top of the standard enterprise rate.
|
| "Responsible" AI is more profitable than standard AI - regardless
| of the nebulous nature of what "responsible" means.
| jMyles wrote:
| Spot on. I'll explore whether this nit is worth picking:
|
| > "Responsible" AI is more profitable than standard AI -
| regardless of the nebulous nature of what "responsible" means.
|
| /s/regardless of/in part owing to
| spxneo wrote:
| American law enforcement openly disregard the foundations from
| which the country was built upon yet pushes other countries to
| adopt ideas which it abandoned but won't admit it out of
| humiliation--that which we call "democracy" comes with the very
| hooks and strings it tells other countries to abandon.
|
| Just take a look at the countries that credulously adopted
| "democracy". They are not in a good shape and will probably never
| find itself out of the moving goal post that Western countries
| like to place on "lesser" countries.
|
| America is addicted to these 3 things: Oil, authoritarian labour,
| drugs. It's law enforcement is not meant to police those
| addictions at all but rather to ensure its continued
| uninterrupted supply even if it means violating its own
| principles that made the country great (about 40+ years ago).
|
| It's no wonder many Americans are yearning for past glory.
| deusum wrote:
| No one has pointed out that the AI companies are being sued for
| 'stealing' vast troves of copyrighted data, and the case is still
| in progress.
|
| If the police departments are complicit, then does copyright
| stand to lose _de facto_ as AI will only be increasingly
| implemented while the case slogs through the courts?
| kcb wrote:
| One bare minimum way to not get your data "stolen" is to not
| personally make it freely available on the internet.
| flenserboy wrote:
| It is dangerous to allow groups of any sort to be excluded from
| licensing. This sort of behavior is far too easily weaponized
| against minority political, opinion, & affinity groups. While I'm
| not keen on the police having these tools in their hands, who
| else will be next? Who will be squeezed out of the economy
| because everyone who provides a particular sort of software or
| service decides to enact the same policies? This is why software
| should be sold, not licensed -- a word processor should be
| treated no differently from a loaf of bread.
| tehwebguy wrote:
| "First they came for the Police state and I said nothing..."
| lmao
| devindotcom wrote:
| FYI, Microsoft now says (we contacted before publishing) the
| policy we cited "contained an error" and was intended to only
| apply to facial recognition, and has been changed in the official
| code of conduct. We've updated the headline and body to reflect
| this change. A mod might want to change the HN hed too.
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