The Amazing Amazon: Did Jeff Bezos See His Forest from the Trees?

User needs to “think as a producer when acting as a consumer”

Ahh, the Amazing Amazon Rainforest of South America. It’s breathtaking! Whether you’ve visited, seen pictures or films you cannot escape its beauty. Alongside this exterior beauty one can see its resources. Jeff Bezos appears to have been able to “see the forest from the trees” and found the resources of his multinational company Amazon. Although the genesis of Amazon appeared to be slow in the making, it rapidly gained momentum from an unassuming platform of selling books. Genius!

From “Alexa” to Whole Foods Market, one can now purchase just about anything for your home or your entertainment, and something to eat – all from the comfort of your own home. As a user online, you can open an account and purchase a product from a producer becoming a consumer. But, a user needs to “think as a producer when acting as a consumer.” Some users have become customers or subscribers and are more interested in the services the producer can provide them – cloud services, application program, and computing power.

Amazon Rekognition, AWS, and EC2 appear to do just that. According to its website “Amazon Rekognition is a simple and easy to use API that can quickly analyze any image or video file stored in Amazon S3.” Referencing its web pages, the Application Program Interface (API) appears to operate with inputs and outputs specifications in which its customers provide the data that can be integrated within the Amazon Web Services (AWS).

AWS “is a secure cloud services platform, offering compute power, database storage, content delivery and other functionality to help businesses scale and grow.” AWS appears to provide subscribers this platform to access databases and analyze consumer data. For those interested in a service that provides multiple platforms then Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) may be ideal as it is “designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers.”

Netflix, NASA JPL, and FINRA are some of Amazon’s EC2s “featured customers.” Intelligence agencies, not surprisingly, have reportedly contracted the AWS cloud service and as “associates” are able to access data. A May 2018 Washington Post article notes that “Amazon is providing the technology, known as Rekognition, as well as consulting services…” to law enforcement.

Surveillance concerns appear to be raised in the Post article where certain groups “called on Amazon to stop selling the program to law enforcement because it could lead to the expansion of surveillance” arguing “officers could have Rekognition scan against footage of potential suspects in real-time.” The “could”s voiced by the groups appear to be not only presumptuous but precipitative in nature.

Reading the article, it readily appears that law enforcement went to Amazon and not the other way around. Also, the article notes, “We demand that Amazon stop powering a government surveillance infrastructure…” First, who specifically are these “we” who demand? Second, such demands are misdirected. Was it not law enforcement who freely bought the program?

These groups do not mention if they’ve addressed consumers on their voluntarily providing images and videos via multiple social media and networking sites. Remember that “Amazon Rekognition is always learning from new data…” that is, data that customers provide and possibly users and/or consumers voluntarily post. I imagine its service is only as good as the number of images imputed. As long as there’s a supply of data, there will be a demand to access it.*

*Note: This turns the “supply and demand” economic term on its head wherein demand precedes supply.

What does this mean for all you consumers? As you’re clicking from page to page, I imagine a customer or “associate” is doing the same, viewing the data file created from your “clickity clicks.” Concerned about privacy? Put yourself in the place of the producer growing a business or running surveillance. It’s not personal – it’s business and it’s the law, sailing the website waves most of you freely “surf” in.  Watch out you don’t get caught in the net!

Like breaking a few eggs to make an omelet, one cannot make a book without cutting down a few trees. And by all accounts, Amazon’s Founder appears to have been able to see the mass number of resources from his massive “forest” in the “cloud.”