What are best practices for encouraging / enforcing profile pics?

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.

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?

No one is forcing anyone to upload an image of themselves, so let’s stop telling that story. :smiley:

It is not unethical to encourage someone to upload an avatar to a discussion platform; this is a common way people tell users apart at a glance while using forums.

Forcing users to upload images of themselves (not sure how that would ever work) is not the same as encouraging users to use avatars in forums. :tada:

If you think so, please start a new topic laying out your argument. It is noted that for this discussion you are against the practice as a whole, which is a valid perspective, but does not lend much to a discussion concerning “best practice”. :+1:

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