Just stop having a face. And friends, or family. Become an unperson. The solution is so obvious.
It's always hilarious how people try to pretend that it's easy to just drop out of society and the systems that people use to keep in touch. Sure, you can live like the unabomber in a shed in Montana with no phone service, but having that be the only option to keep your personal data safe from leaks is a bit much of an ask. People should be able to live their lives and take reasonable but not extraordinary precautions to safeguard their privacy and be able to have some expectation of privacy as a result. Unfortunately, there is so much data being collected on everyone, so many intrusions to our private lives, and so little care being taken by the stewards of that private data that it is not, it turns out, a reasonable expectation. And the onus for solving that problem shouldn't be on individuals. We shouldn't be forced to live our lives in fear of digital representations of our appearance being leaked onto the internet as someone might have once feared an ordinary photograph could steal a soul. Rather, those who are going to great efforts to destroy the boundaries of personal privacy should be heavily regulated to prevent them from doing so and heavily incentivized to safeguard private data whenever they are in possession of it.
I left FB when they made reverted a policy that let you opt to confirm all tags before they showed up in searches for you.
This means anyone in the world can upload an image, tag you in it, and it will show up in searches for you. It still won’t show up on your profile if you have confirmations for that enabled, but still.
Will it show up in searches from just facial recognition? That would be very bad for anyone trying to live in a way incongruent with their culture’s standards. (I personally left in solidarity with a Muslim friend who no longer wears Hijab, but would prefer her family didn’t know that; pictures of her without Hijab started showing up in searches without her approval suddenly and without warning when they removed the old “confirm before search results” option)
Sadly, this is the moment that those photos stop being private. I get that this is hard for the general public to understand - but at this point, uploading anything to Facebook = obfuscated, maybe, but not private.
