Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you've been that careful, then props to you. Good job. > I’ve searched for a picture of me, and have only ever found a grainy one from two decades ago. That is it. But that's not what I mean. Facebook knows who you are. Maybe you can't find it yourself using search terms, but that's not the point. You have a Facebook profile with an email and a set of pictures and a social web connected, I'm sure, even if you've n…
That could be, it I’ve never uploaded a picture of me anywhere, and I avoid having my picture taken. I’ve never had a social media account with my real identity either, and never had an FB profile, period.
Phone cameras are high res. If you live in a city or go out in public often in busy places, then the sheer number of people taking selfies and photos is immense and makes it likely that over time, each of us is caught repeatedly in these photos.
With Facebook et. al's newfound face recognition and social scale, people who have never heard of a computer or phone or Facebook can now be automatically identified and tracked throughout the real world just by your face in other people's social photos.
I realize this dystopia might not accurate portray your life, but it is also meant as a comment for others. Privacy is not an individual choice any more. Our social networks have forced a change in expected privacy and there's little that we can do right now to change that, as the profit motives for the corporations like Facebook are aligned this way.
Note: Yes, being in public has an element of privacy. It is reasonable to expect that if you buy some groceries at a store in Atlanta, and the next week walk to Central Park in NYC, that a company in San Francisco who you have no relationship with would not know about it. But that expectation is now gone, and already it seems wild that we could have ever had it. That is a kind of privacy that is lost forever.