An interesting read, but this guy is picking the wrong battles. Nowadays, I'm primarily concerned with protecting my privacy online from corporations like Facebook and the information they collect about me -- not from individuals who might recognize me by the way I look in a photo.

Not to mention, he's already been tagged in Facebook posts -- and you can't just delete a picture off the internet. Especially not from big F's servers.

You're right that it's important to fight the collection of information by corporations, but the data they collect about people also include face pictures.

I would say that photos carry a disporoportional amount of data about a person.

> public-relations professional Jonathan Hirshon

This is just some marketing trick.

Indeed, it almost makes me want to hire him, take his picture and share it with the world.

> "I choose to share virtually everything about myself on social media, but my face is the essence of me individually and this is about refusing to give up the last piece of identifiable information that I can control."

That's a really weak and short sighted definition of "the essence of me individually". By this definition, twins are "essentially" the same individual.

Why? He's not twins. Did you read "everyone" where he said "me"?

No, but by this definition (i.e., if twins used this definition), twins would be the same person.

Is he a twin?

I also do this, and also start talks asking people not to post photos of me online.

Also, I don't believe he's kept his picture off Facebook. Unless he avoids all photographs, one of his friends has posted a photo, and another of his friends has tagged him. It doesn't matter how many times you ask people not to post/tag, Facebook has very aggressively marketed this as a normal thing to do. The tag step probably isn't even necessary if he's consistently one of the only people untagged in a group photo.

I look forward to GPDR enforcement and hope it can be used to delete even Facebook's shadow profiles.

> ...who has managed to stay anonymous on the social network for the past 20 years.

Oh man, this article totally conflates Facebook and the web. For the record guys -- no one had their picture on Facebook 20 years ago, because there was no Facebook 20 years ago!

Happy New Year!

He just broke the first rule of keeping your face off the internet: announcing that you're trying to keep your face off the internet.

If he has a driver's license, his picture is someplace. CCTV facial recognition anywhere and everywhere, data correlation, cell phone tower triangulation, GPS, I'd bet his picture is correlated to his account.

Speculation, but if we all did what this man did, then I suspect Facebook could be a happier place.

If he's such a mystery man why does he share everything on facebook?

The article explains why.