Digital Collage | 2025 | Inset | AOTM AiR IV
AI-powered facial recognition technology is revolutionizing marketing by enabling personalized and hyper-targeted campaigns, enhancing customer experiences, and providing valuable market insights. By analyzing facial features, expressions, and demographics, marketers can tailor advertisements, promotions, and even in-store experiences to resonate with specific consumer profiles, leading to increased engagement and sales.
Simultaneously this same exact technology is being utilized by law enforcement, militaries and government regimes worldwide for mass surveillance and biometric gating. The tech is employed for various purposes like tracking criminals, tracking and targeting alleged enemies, monitoring ethnic minorities, monitoring dissenters, border crossings and even surveilling citizens' emotions in the workplace. This technology is integrated into vast networks of surveillance cameras and used by various government agencies and private companies.
The overlap of state sponsored violence and surveillance driven capitalism might seem like a dark irony but is it actually just another case of saying the quiet part out loud? Our economies are driven by innovation and labor, taxes are paid which then fund the government's military spending and occupational/imperialistic/oppressive force is employed onto citizen civilians in order to expand power structures and protect the very markets that pay for them. What is revealed is a never ending feedback loop of consumption and domination that begins and ends with the expressions of basic human emotion interpreted by machine.
The following is a conversation with Chat GPT which informed the creation of this collage.
Q: What are the connections between government surveillance and consumer behavior in regards to facial recognition?
GPT: 1. Online Facial Recognition and Behavioral Profiling
• When you shop online, especially on big platforms (Amazon, Instagram shops, etc.), facial recognition can be used through:
• Your webcam (if permissions are granted — or exploited).
• Uploaded selfies, profile pics, or live video features.
• Your emotional reactions, eye movements, and micro-expressions can be passively monitored or inferred.
• Your shopping habits, likes, and social media activity are combined with this biometric data to build a behavioral profile: what you like, what you fear, what excites you, how you act under stress.
2. Data Brokers and Government Access
• Your behavioral and biometric data doesn’t just stay with the companies.
• It gets sold to data brokers — massive shadow companies that package and resell personal information to:
• Marketers
• Private security firms
• Insurance companies
• Law enforcement and intelligence agencies (who often buy data they legally can’t collect themselves without a warrant).
This means your online shopping behavior becomes part of your “file” — even if you’ve done nothing illegal.
3. Facial Recognition at Public Protests
• If you attend a protest, facial recognition cameras (sometimes handheld, sometimes hidden, often attached to police drones) scan the crowd.
• Your face is matched against massive commercial and government databases — including ones populated by your online activity.
• If your behavioral profile suggests you’re “at risk” of being disruptive (based on past purchases, political posts, emotional indicators from facial scanning, etc.), you could be:
• Flagged for further monitoring.
• Preemptively targeted by law enforcement (phone tapping, house visits).
• Added to watchlists without ever committing a crime.
Facial recognition turns your identity and emotions into a product — and a tool of control — at the same time. Buying sneakers online and attending a protest could both end up in the same database — and be used to justify government action against you later.