#64 “AWS has approved a list of ‘safe’ (their word) names for use in this type of content to avoid using real employee names.”

“I was recently drafting a blog post for Amazon Web Services (AWS). I was planning to include screenshots of people with names attached. AWS has approved a list of ‘safe’ (their word) names for use in this type of content to avoid using real employee names. The names provided were incredibly exclusionary. The list seemed to largely be an anglicized list of Hindi, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and stereotypically white (European origin) names. There are huge swaths of the world, and the company’s own workforce, that are unrepresented — Indigenous, Black American, African, Arab, Japanese, any many more. I was asked to work with a diverse set of people to picture in the blog post, but I did not feel I could offer a diverse set of names to choose from to go with the diverse faces.”