events vs. privacy
This past week, I attended a networking event. I arrived, got my little name sticker, and walked over to the entrance of the main event area with a little get-to-know-each-other bingo card in hand.
At the door, someone had taped the following message to the glass:
"We will take pictures of the event to post on our website and social media. By entering this room, you agree to these conditions."
I froze in place. Am I agreeing to this? It would be really awkward for me to immediately turn around and leave. I wanted to be here to get out more and practice meeting new people, now I'm confronted with something I had forgotten to take into account before and wasn't informed about during signup for the event.
For context: I try to avoid posting my full face or full body online. I'll either dither it (like on my home page) or I'll censor it otherwise (via sticker or wearing a mask). I used to be comfortable with posting full face online, but we simply don't live in times like these anymore. It makes me uncomfortable how many "nudify" apps and websites there are, where AI will generate a nude image of a clothed person they posted online, or will be able to put your face on an existing sex worker's portfolio.
Don't get me wrong, Photoshop has always made it possible, but it used to look really fake and bad. You could tell it wasn't real, and it took some effort and time. Now with generative AI doing an amazing job in seconds, it's possible to churn out tons of very real looking revenge porn, without that person even having taken or shared nudes in the first place. That stuff is humiliating, violating, and affects the relationship with your loved ones and your career. People have killed themselves over this. I know I can't control it and AI will be able to approximate and guess even missing parts of my face, but I can make it harder to get an exact match and reduce the risk of it harming me.
Now I'm going to this event where my full face will be put online.
I don't think organizers are really aware of what's happening online with AI, especially if they are most likely still using social media where everyone is posting face like usual. It's just normalized and tons of people either don't find out they've been nudified or they're presented as extreme outlier cases. It's portrayed as some sick and twisted individuals who had a clear target; but if you read more thorough reports of this kind of stuff (usually 404media is good for this) or visit the spaces where requests are posted, you can see it can happen to anyone. They just browse, see some stranger they want to see naked, and request that (or just generate it and then share it for anyone who might want it). You don't have to be close to anyone or anger anyone. This is just about power and lust and the targeting is random.
The motivation of the event organizers is promoting and documenting their event, which is fair; but if we weigh that against what is sadly now a very real risk, I think people wanting to protect themselves from the above should have the option to modify how they appear there. You should not have to choose between socializing/networking and shouldering this risk - this is just supporting further isolation.
Unfortunately, I think a part of why this risk is swept under the rug a little is also because it is happening mostly to women and protecting them from this stuff has never been a priority. A vocal part of the population loves to blame them for when this happens. Here, they'd point to the women entering and agreeing while they "should know the risks" and if you don't want this, you "should just stay home". I disagree, and I have an alternative approach.
proposed solution
It should be possible for people who want to participate but not show up online to be able to have their face (or parts of it) altered before posting. For this, I suggest event organizers offer an e-mail address to message for these requests and set a deadline. You'll most likely not post immediately anyway, so let's say the people have 24 hours to write to this e-mail address that they would want to be censored in the pictures. This should give people enough time to think about it and then to prevent being posted clearly.
That means the notice at the door could be something like
"We will take pictures of the event to post on our website and social media. By entering this room, you agree to these conditions. Should you prefer to be made unidentifiable, please message us within 24h at (email address)."
I want to note here: blurring is not enough, as this can be undone. It'll have to be something that covers the original pixels, not just warps or moves them. A black box works, but if another color would be less intrusive and visually unappealing in that picture, I'd choose that instead.
Images from the back without face visible should be okay, or very blurry, very tiny in the background where the details can't really be made out are also okay. Furthermore, the censorship only affects the pictures that are supposed to be uploaded to the internet - you can keep uncensored pictures for archival purposes as long as they aren't uploaded publicly.
This should serve both the interests of the person and the event organizer - they get to document and promote, and the person has had their rights to privacy respected with regard to the known risks online right now.
a sidenote about EU laws and German national laws
A note like this on the event location door makes it seem like you have no recourse afterwards. You should know that as long as you're in the EU, depending on what's shown in the image, you can probably still withdraw the given consent later. Relevant laws in my case here would be the GDPR and the KunstUrhG. The rights to decide over your own image is a part of the allgemeines Persönlichkeitsrecht which is derived from the German constitution.
This is highly dependent on the specifics of each case. Rough guidelines could be: If someone takes a picture of a beautiful church and you happen to walk by, that's usually not something you have any control over; you're not the point of the image (Beiwerk) and they didn't want to include you. Also, if you are at a big gathering (a concert, a theatre, a party) and you're somewhere in the crowd and the point is to just picture the crowd and not you specifically, that's also not something you can control or should really worry about.
But let's say, you're at an event standing at a table together with three other people and it's a close-up portrait image of all three of you posing and looking into the camera, there is obviously intent to picture you and you're clearly visible. That might be a situation you have more rights in.
Are images considered personally identifiable data according to the GDPR? This isn't always evident to everyone because most GDPR cases focus on text like name, birth date and more, not images. But as long as you're identifiable in them, they do count, and it affects the processing of this image.
Caution: Processing is defined in Art. 4 Nr. 2 GDPR and also includes any operation which is performed on personal data (automated or not) "such as [...] recording, [...] storage, adaptation or alteration, [...] dissemination or otherwise making available, [...]", which includes a lot of steps in taking an image and sharing it on websites and social media. Even cropping or increasing contrast or applying some pseudonymization measures.
That means other rights in the GDPR may apply in the specific case, which means people may be able to ask the event organizer to take the pictures down retroactively, depending on the image composition.
The option to anonymize people in the image to fall out of the application of GDPR still stands, though likely goes against the purpose of taking pictures, so…
edit
Jawad sent me an email that some events solve this by color-coded tags that you can wear that signal your consent to photographers. Nsec.io seems to do this - food for thought for other event organizers. :)
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Published 11 Jul, 2025