How careful have you been about that? Do you just mean not uploading your own profile photo to sites?

What about any birthday parties or group pictures you might be in? Photos for a work event or with friends?

Unless you've been very careful not to appear in any public photos of any kind, especially ones taken by your family and friends (as it is easily traced to you), then I would expect you have just as much of an online photo-profile identity as anyone else.

I’ve been that weirdly careful, yes. I’ve searched for a picture of me, and have only ever found a grainy one from two decades ago. That is it.

If you've been that careful, then props to you. Good job.

> I’ve searched for a picture of me, and have only ever found a grainy one from two decades ago. That is it.

But that's not what I mean.

Facebook knows who you are. Maybe you can't find it yourself using search terms, but that's not the point. You have a Facebook profile with an email and a set of pictures and a social web connected, I'm sure, even if you've never signed up. There's just a db flag set that says 'waiting for this person to sign up'.

Facebook knows.

That could be, it I’ve never uploaded a picture of me anywhere, and I avoid having my picture taken. I’ve never had a social media account with my real identity either, and never had an FB profile, period.

Those are all good steps, and I do want to say, I think our society would be in a better position if more people were concerned about this as you are. I am sorry to be saying these downer things. I don't mean to be defeatist or tell you that there's no hope. It's just that the situation is really that dire.

Phone cameras are high res. If you live in a city or go out in public often in busy places, then the sheer number of people taking selfies and photos is immense and makes it likely that over time, each of us is caught repeatedly in these photos.

With Facebook et. al's newfound face recognition and social scale, people who have never heard of a computer or phone or Facebook can now be automatically identified and tracked throughout the real world just by your face in other people's social photos.

I realize this dystopia might not accurate portray your life, but it is also meant as a comment for others. Privacy is not an individual choice any more. Our social networks have forced a change in expected privacy and there's little that we can do right now to change that, as the profit motives for the corporations like Facebook are aligned this way.

Note: Yes, being in public has an element of privacy. It is reasonable to expect that if you buy some groceries at a store in Atlanta, and the next week walk to Central Park in NYC, that a company in San Francisco who you have no relationship with would not know about it. But that expectation is now gone, and already it seems wild that we could have ever had it. That is a kind of privacy that is lost forever.

So maybe not "fuck IntraExon," so much as fuck everybody who isn't so vigilant?

Damn, I'd never realised things had gotten that bad. I willingly share photos of myself online but that's my choice. It's sad that even privacy nuts can't hide themselves anymore.

I'm reading a (sometimes hyperbolic) but interesting "book" on this: Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age:

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/digital-stock...

"Now, the modern person is determined by data exhaust—an invisible anthropocentric ether of ones and zeros that is a product of our digitally monitored age."

I won't doubt that in 15-20 years, using the process of deduction of your phone/laptop/browsing habits/credit card usage/address info a company could, if bothered, collate that data to get "your picture". And I mean literally zoom in a security cam to snap the photo.

There's the combined idea of machine recognition (facial, gait, etc) - "convenience" and overreach:

Goes a bit like:

1) a place to start, 2) a way to follow, virtually, in time and space - augmented with total surveillance.

1) "In China, KFC tests out ‘smile to pay’" https://www.techinasia.com/kfc-china-tests-facial-recognitio...

2) "China’s facial-recognition systems crunch data from cameras to monitor citizens"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14643433

Also:

https://www.theverge.com/2013/2/1/3940898/darpa-gigapixel-dr...

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/nzey3w/what-those...

You don't have a smartphone? You don't have a Google account? You don't have accounts on any platform (other than HN, obviously)? I think it's incredibly understated how easy it is to piece together who someone is from their data. You may not think you have pictures out there either but I'd venture to guess that something is out there.

My google accounts are in no way linked to a real identity. I have little doubt that my identity would be easy to deduce, but it won’t come with a picture, I hope. I’m not engaged in any secret or illegal activities, I just don’t want to give away my privacy, so I’m just cautious rather than appropriately paranoid. I do have a smartphone, and I have no illusions that law enforcement and governments can track me. The average person, and hopefully Facebook cannot.

Apple could burn me horribly though.