# What are best practices for encouraging / enforcing profile pics?

**URL:** <https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-are-best-practices-for-encouraging-enforcing-profile-pics/112262>\
**Category:** Community Building\
**Created:** [March 21, 2019, 3:39pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-are-best-practices-for-encouraging-enforcing-profile-pics/112262 "2019-03-21T15:39:15Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 23

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**Author:** ![wal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/d6d6ee/32.png) [@wal](https://meta.discourse.org/u/wal)\
**Post date:** [October 28, 2024, 11:03pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-are-best-practices-for-encouraging-enforcing-profile-pics/112262/23 "2024-10-28T23:03:37Z")

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I am very much against profile pics, and especially against profile pics that are people’s real life photos. It’s a massive invasion of privacy, in an age when your public profile on the Internet is increasingly being used against you.

> **[Clearview CEO claims company's database of scraped images is now 30 billion...](https://www.engadget.com/clearview-ceo-claims-companys-database-of-scraped-images-is-now-30-billion-strong-174921576.html)**
>
> Clearview AI, the controversial facial recognition software used by at least 3,100 law enforcement agencies across the US, has scrapped more than 30 billion images from social media platforms like Facebook.

Similarly I think that connections between your Discourse community and users’ social media accounts should be discouraged, if not disabled. These things are a liability and seem likely to inadvertently leak users’ personal private information.

We’re living in an age when all of a user’s activities across the Internet are being constantly scraped and tracked by unknown entities, often for profit, sometimes by bad actors. I would not think that we would want to contribute to this by making users upload personal photos of themselves and linking their personal social media accounts. These things can be opted into by users but to try to force it or even encourage it seems unethical. Is this against the Discourse Best Practices?

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