Andy Baio did an experiment with Mechanical Turk which is somewhat interesting on it’s own, but what really caught my eye was:

Upload a photo of yourself…

DON’T provide any identifiable information, like your name or email, since that’s a violation of MTurk policy.

When did technology take over so much that our face, the single most important aspect our brains use in identifying people, become not personally identifiable information?

I have a very simple benchmark for judging how much emphasis a site puts on people instead of technology – I look at how it identifies those people. Sites that don’t have anything to do with people treat everyone the same and don’t have a name for their users at all. The next step up is sites that let you log in some how and then refer to you by your username or email address. At least you exist, but in a very abstract, computer oriented way. Getting in to the area of treating you like a real person is where the site refers to you by your real name (or the pseudonym you put in the real name box). That’s a really big step towards having people form connections. Where it really makes a giant leap forward though is when you have photos to identify people.