The Man Who's Kept His Face Off the Internet for 20 Years 134
An anonymous reader writes: Jonathan Hirshon is a 48-year-old Silicon Valley PR guy. He was an adult when the internet went mainstream, and he went online with a unique bit of forethought: "I decided to play a game with myself: How long could I keep my picture off the Internet." He's managed to keep the internet free of his image for two decades, and he's expanding the game. Hirshon is rallying the troops to outsmart Facebook and Google facial recognition. He asked his friends, "If you're so inclined, take a moment and tag me in some random picture or image. A leaf on the wind, a howler monkey, geometry equations, George Clooney, a large steaming pile of excrement—select an image that you think best suits me or [is] based solely on your whim."
What's the big deal (Score:4, Insightful)
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You're sure you're not on someone's vacation pictures or something? Maybe if you stay away from big cities, landmarks, events etc, or wear a balaclava full time, it might be possible but I think it's kind of unlikely.
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I come from a family that almost NEVER took pictures,. The last time we took family photos was when my dad was testing out his brand new polaroid instamatic.WHen I needed to find a photo for the web I only had one to choose from. Thankfully it was a good one. Over ten years old now, right before I got old and mmy health started to suffer. I've been tossing over whether I should take another one for the last decade ;-)
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Seriously... my facebook avatar is the standard anonymous user... with a goatee added for "veracity". I won't even go into details about the crap I've had to put up with from LinkedIn about the fact that my photograph isn't a real one. They've deleted it so many times it's a chore re-upping it in and of itself, but worth it.
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Re:What's the big deal (Score:5, Insightful)
The big deal is that this guy works in PR. A good chunk of PR these days is managing social media pages. This is just another way to say to his clients, "Look at me! I know how to avoid having my face on the internet despite having a Facebook profile! This clearly means I am the best person to manage your PR campaign, call my office today at (x) or send an email!"
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The whole damn point is to have the client's face everywhere, not your own.
Very good point. Makes his game particularly interesting in that light.
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The big deal is that this guy works in PR. A good chunk of PR these days is managing social media pages. This is just another way to say to his clients, "Look at me! I know how to avoid having my face on the internet despite having a Facebook profile! This clearly means I am the best person to manage your PR campaign, call my office today at (x) or send an email!"
I'm not certain I would hire a person who actually worked to keep his picture off the internet.
Strikes me as being like the crazy uncle that sits around bragging about how he doesn't have a computer.
Re:What's the big deal (Score:5, Insightful)
Or how about a super successful PR guy, by getting his story right to the front page of /. and probably many other tech sites. "Hey, if he can get a silly story about himself everywhere, WHAT CAN HE DO FOR US!?" He just PRed the hell outta himself right in to the pocket books of many new clients.
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Or how about a super successful PR guy, by getting his story right to the front page of /. and probably many other tech sites. "Hey, if he can get a silly story about himself everywhere, WHAT CAN HE DO FOR US!?" He just PRed the hell outta himself right in to the pocket books of many new clients.
If they are impressed by that, maybe they should hire my uncle, who doesn't have an email account or even a computer. For even longer than the internet has been around. Beats this guy, hands down in the Who friggin cares? contest
Sorry, I just don't buy it. In order to keep his face off the internet, he has to do stupid things like refusing to stand for group shots, grip and grins, portraits, or any of a list of innocuous things. Maybe even go out in public now that he's bragging about it just like my uncl
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You could've saved a lot of time by just typing "I don't understand your point." Because you clearly don't.
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It strikes me as being a good sign that he actually has a reasonably good understanding of how various of these technologies work, which is a pretty rare thing amongst the bullshit artists that populate PR. I'm more likely to go postal on a PR department than to recruit one, but as a strategy for getting attention, this works for me.
Car analogy : You're looking for a garage to service your car. Do you consider J
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Yeah, this is pretty clearly a self-promotional stunt, especially the please-tag-me-everywhere angle.
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Hey, I too am an old guy that doesn't see the point of having a picture of my mug on the big bad Internet..
Well, to be completely honest, I have no friends either, so I don't often leave my basement; this helps a lot.
Well, to be really completely honest, I once tried to upload a picture of my face on a dating site, but the it refused the picture, pretexting that profile pictures could not be images from animals. I remember I cried that day.
Now I'm fine.
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Mine is on the internet. It's pretty damn hard to prevent it without beating up people with cameras and smartphones. However they haven't tagged me in them as I disallow that on G+ and I'm not on Facebook so the picture doesn't link to anything about me. When someone does want to tag me, I just say "what the hell is wrong with you and how did your parents screw up so badly?"
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Let me know how it works for you when your kid wins a medal in a state competition.
In my own case - a colleague pointed out that there is a picture of me on Facebook after I went to a small local festival and the organizer of the festival had a professional photographer snapping pictures for the festival's FB page.
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But seriously, I'm the same way. I doubt you'll find my picture anywhere on the internet, and if you do, it almost certainly won't have my name attached. Not my real name, and probably not even a fake name.
20+ years ago I started using a false name for everything internet-related, a nom de plume for the internet, if you will. Behind that was another fake name used for run-of-the-mill stuff. People would dig down through the first fake name, keep digging until
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I'm just a few years younger and my face is not on the internet either, despite publishing youtube videos, etc..
I'll be it is, just not tagged with your name.
Challenge accepted (Score:3)
"I decided to play a game with myself: How long could I keep my picture off the Internet."
A game which he will probably shortly lose, since the first rule about keeping your photo off the internet is not to brag about how you've kept your photo off the internet.
(ack: "Posted by Soulskill on 2015-08-08 0:03 from the good-luck-after-this-article dept.")
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Update... As a bmp that's 30054 bytes per image (in MS Paint anyway), for a total of 4.478 petabytes of data. So pretty big. :P
You can reduce that pretty quickly, though. A 100x100 image of a face would be only about 70% or so occupied by the face itself, the rest could be black (or white) as it would add nothing of value to the image.
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It's getting late; I'll do the part inside the braces tomorrow.
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This is quite interesting. In that brute force dataset is also every other face of the earth and then some. How will you know what picture is him?
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How will you know what picture is him?
You won't. But his picture WILL be there.
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I would compare them against 'stupid_git'.
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Isn't it _way_ bigger than 16.8 billion?
In 24 bit colour each pixel can be one of 16.8 million colours. To create every possible 100x100 pixel image, isn't it going to be around 16,768,216^(100*100) or 10^72244.86859709876?
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Erm...no
That's 10000^16777216 . Probably not brute forceable.
Make things easier and use a single bit colour space (that's either black or white, no shades of grey) and a 16 x 16 image (now the number of images you have to generate will only be around 3 orders of magnitude less than the number of atoms in the universe).
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Make that 16777216^10000 instead of the other way around. Not quite as much, but still quite a lot.
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I've got eight concurrent C++ processes brute forcing his face right now.
That sounds disgusting.
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Hey, I've probably broken Rule 34 :
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Especially in an age where people can purchase tiny rotorcraft equipped with spy cameras in every major department store.
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No kidding, reminds me of the LifeLock CEO putting his social security number on billboards claiming nobody can steal his identity. It's been stolen, what, 13 times now? I'd never heard of this Hirshon fellow but now he's painted a giant bullseye on himself, Streisand-style. Everyone who encounters him is going to be sneaking a photo.
So at this point it's a contest (Score:5, Funny)
between the two greatest pasttimes of internet users: "laziness" and "being a dick". Which one will win?!
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Rule #1: There's always some people with waaaaaaaaaaaaay to much time on the Internet.
See also Winning an argument on the Internet
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You never go on vacation? Because if you do, your picture is bound to be on someone's vacation pictures online. But even close to home, you have to stay away from anything anyone might find remotely interesting. Live in a big city? Better stay away from the cathedral, library, train station, etc...
Greg Egan (Score:2)
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That's not true, because there are only finitely many images.
I won't send you the links... (Score:2)
I won't send you the links... but I personally am aware of at least 5 pictures of Greg Egan on the Internet, since I have met the author at a convention, and the author is quite recognizable in the photos.
Comment removed (Score:3)
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Here's mine withouse my nose: :)
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Me neither (Score:3)
You won't find mine either. I've been on the net since before www, but you won't find a picture of me. Go ahead, please, try. You have my email address and from that you can get my last name and address. First person to send me a link to an image of my face I'll send you a bottle of nice Irish or an old Motorola HT, your choice.
Re:Me neither (Score:4, Insightful)
I have bad news for both you and Jonathan Hirshon. Neither of you has any idea if there is an image of yourselves on the internet or not, but the odds are overwhelmingly against your claim to the contrary.
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You won't find mine either. I've been on the net since before www, but you won't find a picture of me. Go ahead, please, try. You have my email address and from that you can get my last name and address. First person to send me a link to an image of my face I'll send you a bottle of nice Irish or an old Motorola HT, your choice.
Wow. That's really impressive. Oh wait, no it isn't - who cares?
This whole topic seems like an Onion article.
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A/Cs don't count, can't verify you.
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AC or not, that sure seems like it's very likely to be a photo of you. The page it's hosted on has a profile of you that is a damn good match: http://www.monorails.org/tmspa... [monorails.org]
I'd be surprised if they posted a photo of someone else, but who knows.
kinda weird... if you do a google search by image, using that image, one of the 23 results is Dwight from the office: with his police drawing of himself: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CE... [twimg.com]
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Oh, that is me. I just can't send a bottle to the AC because he's an AC.
I forgot about my induction to the hall of fame.
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If you go that far I'll invite you in for a drink or you can select your own radio to claim.
I am aware of a good 30 of them... (Score:2)
I am aware of a good 30 of them... but then I used to work at Whistle with Julian, and know what you look like; in other words, the same "cheat" I used to make the same response about Greg Egan... ;^)
Not to be pessimistic, but.. (Score:2)
That should be the standard pretty much.
The only people interested on your regular life are people wanting to wreck the hell out of it.
law enforcement and intelligence agencies (Score:2)
True (Score:3, Interesting)
I once had a UK police officer officer call me in Holland (on my mobile phone) to ask why my car was parked too long in the UK, had I abandoned it? The owner, of the house it was parked outside, was complaining.
I explained to the police officer that the woman thinks she owns the road outside, and my car is a taxed and legally parked car on the street and the woman uses the police to harass me, because she doesn't like a dirty car outside her house.
The rozzer got from my car plate to home address and from my
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I once had a UK police officer officer call me in Holland (on my mobile phone) to ask why my car was parked too long in the UK, had I abandoned it? (...) I explained to the police officer that the woman thinks she owns the road outside, and my car is a taxed and legally parked car on the street.
Don't know about the UK, but in Norway they can put up temporary signs on public streets like parking prohibited and you're required to comply within 24 hours so leaving it on the street for extended periods could get you fined or towed. Happens both in winter (for snow plowing) and summer (digging up the street and repair mostly), in practice they usually give you longer notice but that's the legal minimum.
Millions people in 3rd world accomplished that too (Score:1)
My dear God... (Score:1)
Goat (Score:5, Funny)
The Goatse Guy also kept his face off the Internet. However, the other end was not so fortunate.
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I've read Slashdot all these years and never realized that he'd been tracked down.
I read some of that first article with an undue amount of fascination. I might be slightly traumatized and/or screwed in the head from being trolled on Slashdot year after year, but I found it undeniably fascinating that it's not just some random photoshop.
TIL, and today I wished I didn't...
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The image is out of a whole set... There are multiple sets. He seems to have a fascination with making his hole bigger. I do not understand the reasoning but everyone should have a healthy hobby, I suppose. Yes, I learned about the extra sets and that this was not a one-off image from Slashdot. Thank you, Slashdot. You will forever be held dear in my heart. You fucking freaks... ;)
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From the TMI Research Institute.
Not really extraordinary. Not even newsworthy. (Score:2)
I've never published or had published pictures of me either. It's not really all that hard, just don't participate.
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My company did many, many jobs for the government. It is fair that the government is known to the people and, by extension, I am as were many of my employees. It was usually just newspaper articles or some quick blurb on local television but the pictures are out there. As I am now running for office my picture is going to be more prevalent. I do not like it but I have no means or real desire to curtail it. Anyone involved in working for the people must be known to the people (unless it is some secret shit -
Probably not true (Score:2)
It may be true that he didn't put his picture up on the Web for 20 years. However, especially in the last five years, given the parties and events that he probably has to attend for his job I'm sure that someone has captured him in a photo and posted it onto the Internet. He may not be the primary person of interest in the picture but I'm sure that he's on there.
Of course to verify that there are no pictures of him on the Web then he would have to upload a picture of himself onto the Web.
And technically h
So... (Score:1)
No one took his picture and put it on their Facebook/whatever?
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or randomly filmed him in a public location and uploaded the video to youtube? I ask for a picture so we can validate his claim.. There's just no other way!
No reputation (Score:2)
No reputation is worse than a bad reputation. What you did isn't as bad as what my imagination uses to fill empty spaces.
gaping maw (Score:3)
Way to throw down the gauntlet, Mr Hirshon.
I've got $10 that says this guy's dick pix will be all over the Internet by Sunday. Or, we'll find out that he's the subject of the most famous ass pic ever.
Maybe not his face.... (Score:2)
Bullshit (Score:1)
He was PR manager for Sony, and he worked at Apple. He didn't spend that time stumbling around with a paper bag on his head - he had lots of photos taken (cough*Internet Archive*cough). Same with his school years.
tl;dr? He's a spin doctor. He tells huge lies and people buy them. There's a big difference between asking that people mis-tag photos with your name and not having any photos of you on the internet - to do that he'd have needed to avoid ever being photographed. Hint: if you ever had a school year p
I gave up (Score:2)
I was free and clear until I decided I wanted a Linked In. I knew that would put a picture of me up, but I figured the dubious loss of that would be made up for by the dubious gain of having a Linked In.