Recently I tried to join a small GC group online. I didn't want to talk extensively about feminist issues but thought it would be nice to be able to join a group where if anything like that did come up, I wouldn't be steam-rolled into submission or kicked. The website in question has many chat groups on all sorts of topics, but it is mainly known to what I call a Tumblr demographic - young, geeky, tech-savvy, gaming fans, home to fandoms generally and study groups of various topics like languages. In these chat groups there is a capacity to allow video chat and vocal chat (many just stick to text chat like on forums but it is an option).
The things that were required have been written below. I've blanked the names of the sites out so they are not searchable on this forum. Everything in { } brackets are my additions but otherwise I've directly copied & pasted the request from them -
(I) Send a selfie with your face and throat visible holding a piece of paper with your {popular discussion website} and/or {popular server} written on it; and
(II) Your answers to the following questions:
1. Age:
2. Tell me a bit about yourself:
3. {tell me your name of your} account on {a very popular discussion website}
*
These people might have benign intentions, but they wouldn't let me join without providing a selfie or video verification. To me this is just crazy. Facial recognition technology is getting increasingly sophisticated and I'm sure people with bad intentions already have access to it, even if it's illegal. I'm not sure how sophisticated Google image search is these days, but it's probably getting more sophisticated rather than less. It just made me incredibly suspicious and it's something I would never ask anyone to do to join a chat group.
Obviously, nothing is truly anonymous online but the requests to join this group were unreasonable, unsafe and suspicious. I declined the information and I was refused access by one of the admins of the group - fine by me but I do think these requests are putting women at risk.
I hope I don't have to say this to anyone here but I'm doing it anyway - please don't give info like this (like your photo) over to totally random people in order to join a GC group.