I cannot see this product being more than a rounding error in Amazon‘s revenue, ever. In such a light, I am surprised they keep at it despite the bad PR it has already caused.
Maybe they have dug in for purely emotional reasons now, and need some shareholders to set them straight. Or maybe there even are enough shareholders that value behaving ethically more than money. There’s no law of either governments, physics, or human behavior that prohibits that.
I guess there is a tradition of deference to corporate leadership, especially among institutional investors. But there have been cracks in that consensus, with for example Blackrock (the largest of them) making more noises wrt such issues (trade in weapons, climate change, etc).
>I am surprised they keep at it despite the bad PR it has already caused.
Americans do not care about privacy or security in any mass sense. They will let the country fall to a total surveillance state with without even batting an eye, put wiretaps right in their homes so they can set timers for their lasanga, all for 'convenience'. Amazon's 'bad PR' doesn't effect them in the slightest and Americans have already forgotten about their past issues with facial recognition, except a small percentage of techies that visit sites like this, not any majority of society.
I think people underestimate the potential benefits of being a good partner to the Dept of Defense. While facial recognition maybe a rounding error in Amazon's revenue, there are large cloud infrastructure contracts that could be won with the DoD. This sort of partnership on FR could build trust and position Amazon as a willing (and front-running) partner for the DoD (and its many challenges in modernizing data centers and migrating to the cloud).
Facial recognition is key to some of their projects — say, verifying who uses a security badge or (possibly) things like the Go store to match you with your account.
It’s also ignoring the generally silent shareholders who want Amazon to develop such technologies, who want them to have government contracts, etc. Or who view Amazon managing such a service in the open and where we can discuss it as superior to someone like Palantir doing the same, and don’t believe it’s possible to restrict all companies from developing that technology — particularly those less open to public pressure or oversight.
You’re assuming a vocal cohort of anti-American, uninformed activists represent the majority of Amazon shares — and I don’t think they do.
Frankly, if BlackRock drops weapons trade, I’ll drop my iShares: that would be them failing to represent me as my fiduciary.
Amazon has no real future in physical retail and facial recognition would be crap at ensuring the security of your premises. You would be better off paying a person to verify a badge with a picture. Fewer false positives and not fooled by changes in facial hair.
As a matter of principle, most public companies object against all shareholder ballot initiatives, and then recommend against them in the proxy statement. It’s just generally believed to be poor practice to let annual meetings turn into a general election on how to run the company.
