Go Ahead, Post the Stupid Photo of Yourself From 10 Years Ago

Ten years ago, Facebook already had 15 billion photos in its database. As you uploaded pictures and tagged friends and added date and location data, the software got really, really good at recognizing people’s faces. This facial-recognition capability is mirrored at other companies—and some, such as Amazon, sell it to whoever wants it.

There isn’t some global corporate conspiracy to get you to post a photo of yourself from the old days and today. There has been a global corporate conspiracy to get you to post everything about yourself, continuously, for the past 15 years. Which many of us have done, providing the vast data sets that companies have already trained their neural networks with. If you think that not posting these two photos does anything to surveillance capitalism or the platforms that succeed through it, that’s just not right.