Mugshots with Jeffery! Amazon's Involuntary Facial Database

By Anonymous

 Amazon Rekognition Update – Celebrity Recognition | AWS News Blog

Cam Moore


In their DuBoisian analysis of algorithmic data extraction, Ricarda Hammer and Tina M. Park observe: “Just as much as the colonial project and racialized governance enabled the extraction of labor, land, and resources, so do digital technologies replicate racial governance, while in turn extracting labor, resources, and data.” (226) It’s no small secret that in nearly every niche of the digital technology industry, there are entities who make a vast majority of their income selling the data volunteered by their users to other companies, corporations, or at times even governments. But as technology and data collection further permeate our day-to-day existence, hyper-inflated entities like Amazon have sought to capitalize on their extraction of user data by dealing it to the racially-governing, pro-state forces such as police.  “Amazon Rekognition” is a learning, data-based image recognition software designed by Amazon and distributed for corporate use in 2016. These image-based algorithms, combined with Amazon’s disturbing wealth of user information and facial data from their Whole Foods stores, make for an enticing package any police force would be eager to pick up and employ. 

A group of more than two dozen civil rights organizations, led by the ACLU, petitioned Amazon against making this software available to national police departments, citing its potential use to track protestors or any individuals deemed “suspicious” based on the biases of either the software or the department themselves. While I figure many of us have come to anticipate the digital technology we engage with to pawn off our personal information at this point, it’s unnerving to see these same exploitative practices infiltrate our physical spaces as a product of tremendous corporate mergers we have no power to halt. All that on top of this same deeply personal information being used for racially-antagonistic policing efforts, yikes! 






Wingfield, Nick. May 22, 2018. “​​Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police. Critics See 

Surveillance Risk.” Retrieved May 5, 2022 (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/22/technology/amazon-facial-recognition.html).


Barr, Jeff. June 8, 2017. “Amazon Rekognition Update - Celebrity Recognition.” 

Retrieved May 5, 2022 

(https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-rekognition-update-celebrity-recognition/).


Hammer, Ricarda. and M. Park, Tina. 2021. "The Ghost in the Algorithm: Racial Colonial 

Capitalism and the Digital Age." Political Power and Social Theory, 38, 221–249. 

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