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Comment by heroprotagonist | Hacker News Reader

Try asking other people not to put your photo on Facebook. More people are becoming understanding about that, but there's still a range of responses like incredulity, contempt, or the inevitable person who wants to turn it into some kind of debate of abstract principles.

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I can see how that would be a problem. I'm pretty fortunate in that I have no real friends. I don't need to worry about people wanting to take pictures of/with me, much less post them on their facebooks.

I must say, this last addition to the thread makes you sound like less a content and healthy escapee of the social media vortex, and more of an isolated depressive. Quite a less inspiring model.

So we're labeling people as mentally ill with a view towards criticizing them and their opinions now?

The nail that sticks out will be hammered down.

We are a whole society unravelling, because we did the Icarus and flew to high.

Men retreating back into electronice dreams of the purposes of the past. Woman, errecting warped social pagodas to enforce freedom and basic income contracts against the building backlash.

Beeing mentally ill, as in unable to adjust to this, is the new normal. The only people well adapted to our circumstances, are drug addicted, no life work-aholics and ironically they are the group to force its standards down humanitys throat.

I guess that never appeared in anyones singularity vision- that the species as a whole could step away from its invention, smash it all to bits and errect some codex hamurabi with just one rule:

"You shall not wrap thy fellow man in machinery."

I was depressed when I thought I had friends, but they didn't treat me like one. I'm much happier in my current state.

I might sign in FB once every few months. We ask people not to put photos of our children on FB. That brought a surprising amount of tension with grandparents etc. It's all fine and understood now, but I remember it being touchy in the beginning.

If you're out in a reasonably public place then some people are going to take pictures and post them online. It's unreasonable to expect them to filter out pictures where you happen to appear in the frame somewhere. On Facebook though you can at least prevent others from tagging you, so those pictures won't show up when someone searches for you.

It's been surprisingly easy to avoid. Facebook doesn't know me, so random strangers uploading a photo with me in the background can never associate it with my identity. And people who know me don't post my photo.

The concern is not so much with people finding me, it's with the unknown data processing they could be performing.

I just wonder if those random photos where I make an appearance without being tagged are getting cataloged and a profile for this 'unknown individual' is being built so that it can be linked with my identity if there is a slip someday.

I don't quite have the nerve to ask relatives for photographs of people who died in the 20th century to put up as my own photo to confuse their sensors, though, so I suppose it will eventually be unavoidable to be correctly cataloged and tracked.

Can you explain why you don't want your photo on Facebook?

It's one thing to chose to abstain from social media, but it feels more invasive to ask others to change what they post.

Because Facebook will still run its face detection algorithms etc., thus allowing them to build a database of information to resell to advertisers even if you don’t have an explicitly created Facebook page.

I don’t see how asking friends to not post pictures of you online is invasive. However, posting pictures of someone online if they’ve asked you not to is extremely rude.

I ran into someone on the street who I haven't seen since high school (almost 10 years ago). She knew from Facebook that I had recently had a child. I don't use Facebook, but my wife does. The thing is that this old acquaintance doesn't follow my wife on fb.

Facebook is still profiling me. Its weird.

If it's invasive to not post personal data of other people on the internet, then the definition has certainly shifted over the years..

Controlling might be a better word, in that I request respect for my belief that my personal data is my own, to share or not share with whatever corporation I decide.

This is usually forestalled from being much of an issue by being up-front about it. EG, when I see someone new is going to take a photo of me, I try to say something before they take the photo instead of afterwards, and offer to leave so they can get their photograph without me if they seem perturbed.

This way they can decide, "Do I still take this photo, and remember not to put it on Facebook? Or do I take it with the intent to share it despite his wishes? Or do I simply wait 3 seconds for him to move?"

A recent scenario. Kid gets their face painted and it seemed to take longer and look better than the few in the line ahead of us. When finished the person running the operation pulled out a camera and asked to take a photo “For my Facebook feed”.

That's not an explanation, and that's clearly someone trying to show off their work that happens to be on your kid (aka use them as an ad), not a friend trying to post a picture of the two of you at a party.

The idea that this demands explanation is somewhat outrageous. Everyone has had unflattering photographs taken of them, and most people know how it feels to be embarrassed by a bad photo. I'm sure you know what it feels like to have pictures of you laughed at.

Some pictures are seriously confidence sapping, and others are downright ruinous. Even pictures that don't seem terrible to the outsider, can seem just as bad to a person who lacks confidence to begin with, even if irrationally so.

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