City Of Orlando Kicks Amazon's Facial Recognition Tech To The Curb
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For a few years now, the company behind online streaming and speedy, cheap shipping has been seeking to expand its offerings. Amazon Web Services pays the bills, providing data storage for multiple companies/governments. "We can remember it for you wholesale!" Amazon promises. But that's the old thing.The next tech bet Amazon is willing to use as a loss leader to gain market share is facial recognition. Amazon has been handing this stuff out like bank teller lollipops to any law enforcement agency with money to spend and a desire to expand its surveillance net.Naturally, Amazon is high on its own supply. Everyone else, not so much. Congress demanded answers after a test drive of Amazon's facial recognition tech (called "Rekognition" because misspellings mean the future is now) said 28 of its members were criminals.At that point, it was no longer an existential threat to people's freedom. It was now a pile of computational garbage incapable of telling a Congressperson from a criminal. That those two groups sometimes have a significant overlap was lost on everyone involved. But the upshot was the US federal government had its eyes pinned on Rekognition, for better or worse.Cops shops love tech, especially the cheap kind. They also love the sort of tech they can pretend to understand as they pitch it to city legislators who also pretend to understand it. Some legislators are ahead of the curve and are telling cops this simply isn't going to happen on their watch, but for everyone else, there's cheap facial recognition tech from a recognized brand name not really recognized (yet!) for cop tech.Sadly, not everyone is happy with the cheap goods Amazon sort of sold them. The Orlando Police Department decided to give Amazon's Rekognition program for a test drive. After 15 months and an untold amount of dissatisfaction, the department is pulling the plug on its relationship with the internet giant.Orlando's two-phase pilot with Amazon to try out real-time facial recognition software ended Thursday, capping 15 months of technical lags, bandwidth issues and uncertainty over whether the controversial face-scanning technology actually works. Read this closely. It says several negative things about Amazon's latest product. First, it says Amazon's infrastructure can't deliver on the promises the company makes. Second -- and most importantly -- it says there are serious doubts about the tech itself.The city of Orlando, faced with disappointing tech and growing public opposition, has read the wind speed changes and adjusted accordingly."At this time, the city was not able to dedicate the resources to the pilot to enable us to make any noticeable progress toward completing the needed configuration and testing," Orlando's Chief Administrative Office said in a memo to City Council, adding that the city has "no immediate plans regarding future pilots to explore this type of facial recognition technology." The city is unwilling to piss residents off by allowing the PD to deploy faulty tech at their expense. Good call. Sometimes politicians playing it safe pays off for taxpayers. There's no codified moratorium on facial recognition tech in Orlando, but this "hold the fuck up" declaration doesn't exactly encourage further experimentation. Amazon is out. Others could step up and take its place. But for now, Orlando looks like San Francisco, which was the first city in the United States to ban the use of facial recognition tech by city government agencies.Digging a little deeper, it still appears the problem is more tech-related than we-give-a-shit-about-our-residents-related. As noted earlier, bandwidth was a problem. The other hitch was image resolution. The city's cameras aren't optimized for facial recognition. The video resolution was too low and the cameras positioned too high to snag enough faces for testing. Add this to bandwidth limitations, and the rollout couldn't actually identify faces on the fly.Amazon is obviously disappointed by this decision. Its official statement says the company believes it offers the best technology and that cities like Orlando are better off buying products they can't actually use yet. But if this is the best Amazon has to offer, it's not going to impress many government clients. Bandwidth may be an end user problem, but it makes zero difference to end users if what's promised isn't what's actually delivered.Orlando's aborted test flight doesn't bode well for Amazon's embattled offering. If clients can't seamlessly misidentify people, no one's going to re-up subscriptions to a service that stutters along, hampered by bandwidth that can't cash the checks Amazon's figuratively writing. That being said, the company will still find law enforcement partners willing to test drive its facial recognition software simply because the fiscal barrier to entry is so low.But, once it becomes obvious they're only getting what they paid for, the allure of cheap/free tech is going to wear off. And every time it fails, it gives cities reasons to get out of the facial recognition business. That will help the public in the long run and that definitely isn't a bad thing.
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Fans, Indie Soccer Clubs Slam Liverpool FC For Trying To Trademark 'Liverpool'
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Covering trademark nonsense, our posts tend to intersect regularly with the world of sports. It's relatively common at this point to witness teams and even entire leagues pulling anti-fan trademark stunts, from athletes trademarking their own nicknames no matter the fallout, to leagues considering messing with the trademark applications of video game companies, up to and including iconic baseball teams managing to trademark the derisive nickname given to them by other teams. It's all very, very stupid.Across the pond, however, teams in the Premier League have somehow managed to get trademarks on their home-city's names. Chelsea FC, for instance, has a trademark for "Chelsea" related specifically to football services and merch. This sort of thing is almost never allowed here in the States, but it's become enough of a thing that Liverpool FC is attempting the same move for "Liverpool" and it's pissing off a whole bunch of people.As was the case with Chelsea FC, Liverpool FC insists its mark will be very narrow.The Reds stress their application is "only in the context of football products and services", and intended to protect both the club and the supporters "from those benefiting from inauthentic products". There are a couple of problems with this. For starters, the general public has apparently become educated enough on the practices of trademark abuse to want to push back on the application themselves. Given how ignorant the general public has long been on how broad trademarks can be abused, this is rather encouraging to see.A petition has been launched on Change.org that, at the time of writing, had already gathered more than 850 signatures in the space of a few hours.It said: "This petition is to keep [the word Liverpool] for all people of Merseyside to use without a solicitor's letter dropping through your door. Do the right thing. Let's stop this."Twitter user Azul wrote: "The club only need see how unpopular this is with its own fans to realise their greed is going too far. Not everyone has the budget for official merchandise, and there’s many making a living from this. Turn it in lads." Negative feedback from the public goes on from there, including from local ward Councillors. But you have to also wonder just what the granting of such a trademark would do to City of Liverpool FC, an independent club that plays in the Northern Premier League.City of Liverpool FC, who play in the Northern Premier League, called the move "outrageous" on Twitter. A spokesman for the club told the ECHO : "Our club is one of many that will be affected by this trademark application made by Liverpool FC. We as an ambitious and independent football club feel that we are entitled to use the name of our city in our name. We understand that LFC may not have intended to threaten the future of our club, but that is an effect of this application, but even just on a moral basis, we don't think any private business should be able to own the word 'Liverpool' - it simply does not belong to them." Beyond any moral concerns, this is exactly why many trademark systems put such a high bar on attempts to trademark geographic terms. That term is typically more widely used than any kind of creatively inspired name or term, as is the case here. For a given industry, never mind something as popular as football in the UK, there is likely more than one player in a geographic area. Allowing any one of them to gobble up the rights to a geographic term for that entire industry, even an industry as narrow as football, is insane.Fellow Twitter user John Furlong called for a campaign against the "ridiculous idea", adding: "The name of the city does not belong to any one individual or group." Not so in the case of Chelsea, as we've said. But that's a problem, not a precedent worth repeating.
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