Amazon, which announces earnings Thursday, has faced similarly harsh criticism to Facebook over its Rekognition facial recognition API and other technologies that some privacy watchdogs have deemed intrusive, including Alexa.
Rekognition has been criticized because law enforcement agencies use it, and because developers can tweak Rekognition for their own purposes, with little centralized control over how its managed by Amazon or anyone else. Several privacy advocacy groups and other organizations, including rival Microsoft, have questioned the safety of the product and how it could be used for damaging purposes in the wrong hands.
It’s incredibly difficult for companies to calculate the business cost of “social outcry,” but Facebook did it Wednesday. And in its case, that cost may ultimately have been minimal. If Facebook’s upward trajectory in terms of users and record profits continues, it will lead investors and companies to assume there’s unlikely to be a linear relationship between what people complain about in terms of privacy and security and their likelihood of abandoning the product.
from Update News Zone http://bit.ly/2Sn8IeV
0 Comments