Is forcing users to use a photo of themselves (Slack, etc.) ethical?

> I also know that it's really hard to have a work conversation with Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes.

Weird, I don't feel this way at all — maybe because I grew up on social media? I just associate people's profile picture's with them as a sort of symbol / personal emblem. Like if I'm chatting with someone with a profile picture of Calvin, I wouldn't interpreted that as me talking to Calvin or the person "wearing" Calvin's face, so to speak, more like me talking to someone with a Calvin button pinned on their lapel.

I don't think it would be unethical, in a workplace, to ask people to use real photos of themselves. But I also wouldn't want to work somewhere with that kind of culture.

If you want a profile photo to be mandatory, you better be getting a photographer in to take company staff photos. Then make it mandatory for them to use this photo as their Slack profile pic. Add it to your company policy and inform HR that this should be included in the onboarding process.

Downside: it's costly to have professional photos taken with each new staff member and some process need to be changed.

Upside: you're no longer talking to Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes. Also it looks professional and it's in my opinion better for overall company culture.

I think using photos of people that are not you should be disallowed. People who haven't seen Star Wars might think you actually look like Luke Skywalker or have a medical condition like Darth Vadar IRL or something.

I do think you should be required to upload a picture of something. If you want to be a blue flower, that's fine. Lots of people with the exact same "default avatar" make it additionally harder to distinguish large numbers of coworkers.

An avatar picture can be more representative of who you are than a picture!

I don’t have a solution but want to echo the sentiment that it is weird that people do not have a picture of themselves as their profile picture. Cartoon characters and random photos are very unprofessional IMO and I wish people would take the 5 minutes required to take a decent selfie and use that at least. Especially with everyone being remote, it’s nice to have a photo to match a face of a person that you will see in person very infrequently. As an amateur photographer I’ve thought about offering to take portraits at the next office gathering. Some people just take terrible photos of themselves. The classic shot with the camera too low pointed straight up the nostrils.

We have a professional photographer come in once per quarter, all new hires have their photo taken - and anyone who wants an update are able to join. For remote employees however, this just isn't possible. There are opportunities for this at team offsites or conferences, so with careful planning provided they're not too far offsite, it's still possible. Depends on the company.

There's also cultures, beliefs and personal preferences that just run diametrically opposed to having your headshot on every message you send. I think for those younger-looking people, having no profile photo at all can actually be beneficial in more traditional environments.

We have everyone use a real photo in slack and emails. Over a hundred have been successful, without issue, without professional photographer. This is not as hard as others made it out to be.

I'm ugly and non-photogenic to many so yeah, short of claiming a disability for being bald at 26 I'd say being forced to provide an image to my employer or some app is ethically questionable.

Granted, I really enjoy remote work now. Don't have to worry as much about being ugly anymore.

Can't wait for HN "am I too ugly for a faang" job to become a thing lmao.

Create your own profile picture

https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/

Professional services employee here. Your company simply hires a photographer to take professional photos for its employees. You can use the photos for work or you can also use them for your LinkedIn profile as well.

In my opinion its better and healthy for company culture. We're moving more and more to collaborative tools rather than face to face, but it is still important to know the face of the person you're working with.

I've noticed a visible split between product-facing teams and customer-facing teams where I've worked. The customer teams generally all used real selfies. The development teams all used random avatars and icons (myself included).

Frankly, it seemed to work fine in each context. You could always look up someone directly on the company registry if you want to put a face to a slack handle.

I have no picture of me just because of privacy. If you upload a picture to everything social media like today, you lose all right on the picture. Also some funny guy will make a DB with all face pictures, another guy will do some ML stuff and abuse your face picture and so on. No thanks.

Nope. This sounds to me like a "you" problem. And some people are uglier than others so that could be why they don't want to have their face on their avatar.