Reviews
Lookalike user submissions: what we keep and what we drop
User submissions to a celebrity lookalike site: public-figure comparisons and corrections are kept; private individuals and minors are dropped, with examples.
A user submissions inbox on a site about faces is not a feature to be designed for convenience. It is the point where a publication either does or does not become a tool for identifying people who did not agree to be identified.
On a celebrity lookalike site the line is easy to state. A resemblance between public figures, a correction to a comparison, or a performer's account of working as a celebrity double can be kept. A photograph or description of anyone else is dropped. This page sets out what a responsible policy has to contain, shows kept and dropped examples, and explains why each rule is not negotiable.
What to take away
- The two rules come firstno private individuals, no minors. Neither takes an exception, and consent does not create one.
- Plenty is still welcomecorrections, questions about how face perception works, and accounts from people who do this work.
- Put the exclusions in front of the form. A rule on a policy page nobody opens arrives after the message that breaks it.
The two rules that come before everything else
No private individuals. A submission about a person who is not a public figure is not published, in any form, for any reason. Not their photograph, not their name, not a description precise enough to place them, not the town and workplace that between them identify one person.
Two hard exclusions
- No private individuals, in any form
- No photograph, name, or locating description
- No minors, no photographs of children
- No exceptions for parent or teacher consent
- Hard exclusion, not a review threshold
No minors. No photographs of children, no submissions about children, no exceptions for a parent's consent, a teacher's consent or a claim that the child is already visible somewhere else. This is a hard exclusion, not a review threshold.
The law points the same way for the youngest children. Under the COPPA Rule's definitions in 16 CFR 312.2, personal information includes a photograph, video, or audio file where such file contains a child's image or voice. COPPA imposes requirements on operators of websites directed to children under 13, and on operators that have actual knowledge that they are collecting personal information online from a child under 13. The rule here is wider than the law: it covers every minor, whatever a parent agrees to.
Everything that follows is detail. These two are the policy.
Why "private individual" is the line, and not "consent"
The obvious objection is that consent should solve it. Someone submits a photograph of themselves, or their friend agrees, and the exclusion looks excessive.
Consent versus publication reality
What consent assumes
- Verification
- Checkable
- Scope
- One context
- Withdrawal
- Possible
- Subject reply
- Has a route
How submissions arrive
- Verification
- Unverifiable inbox claim
- Scope
- Indexed public page
- Withdrawal
- Copied, cached, scraped
- Subject reply
- Cannot answer
Consent cannot be verified through an inbox. A message saying "my friend is fine with this" is a claim by the person who wants it published, about someone who is not in the conversation. There is no way to check it and no cost to getting it wrong.
Consent to one context is not consent to publication. A photograph shared with a small group was consented to for that group. Moving it onto an indexed public page is a different act, and the reach it acquires cannot be recalled.
Consent cannot be withdrawn once the page is copied, cached, scraped and reposted. Whatever the takedown policy says, the practical position is that publication is permanent.
And the subject cannot answer. Once published, the claim about their appearance sits there, and their only options are to ignore it or to draw more attention to it.
A public figure has a professional relationship with being looked at, an audience, representation and a route to reply.
What a published claim does to a name that has none of those is the whole asymmetry. That is why the line runs there. Public figures do not deserve less consideration; the asymmetry is smaller and the harm has somewhere to go.
The requests to refuse outright
These arrive constantly, in reasonable-sounding language, and every one of them is refused.
Refusing identification requests
Does the request identify a person from an image?
Refuse; it is the core mechanic of stalking
Does it name or link face-search tools?
| The request | Why it is refused |
|---|---|
| "Who is this person in the photo?" | Identifying someone from an image is the core mechanic of stalking and harassment. The stated reason does not change what the method does |
| "What tool can I use to find them?" | The same answer. This site does not name, describe or link face-search tools, services or techniques |
| "This person scammed me: help me find them" | Sympathetic and still refused. It belongs with the police, who can act lawfully and are answerable for errors |
| "I think this is the same person as in this other photo" | An identification dressed as a resemblance claim. Photographic comparison cannot establish identity |
| "My ex looks like a famous actor, here is her picture" | A private individual, with a submitter whose motive cannot be assessed and often should not be trusted |
| "Everyone at my school says these two look alike" | Minors, and a school is a small enough place that description alone identifies people |
| "This is a public figure's child" | Being related to a public figure does not make a child one |
| "It's already online" | Prior exposure is not consent, and republication adds reach |
The pattern worth noticing is that several of these are indistinguishable, from the inbox, from a legitimate query. That is precisely why the rule has to be categorical rather than case-by-case. A policy that depends on assessing a stranger's intent will be defeated by anyone willing to describe their intent differently.
One borderline case recurs. A submitter sends a photograph of a colleague and argues that the colleague is a public figure because they post to a large audience. The submission is refused. An audience is not the same as being a public figure, and the person in the photograph is a private individual.
What can be submitted
Plenty, and it is more interesting than the thing being excluded.
- Corrections. If something on this site is wrong, that is the most valuable message in the inbox.
- Questions about how face perception works, which is what most of this site is actually about.
- Accounts of the trade from people who do this workdoubles, stand-ins, tribute performers writing about their own practice and their own likeness.
- Observations about the photographya comparison you found unconvincing and can say why, an example of how a crop or a lens changed a face.
- Reports of the failure modea case where a resemblance claim was used to accuse or harass someone.
- Anything about your own likeness. The interest a person holds in the use of their own image is yours to exercise, and you are the one person who can do so without a third party being harmed, though even then a submission is not a promise of publication.
Kept and dropped: examples from a lookalike inbox
Kept, because every face in them belongs to a public figure or to the person writing:
- Two actors who are regularly mistaken for each other, sent with the credit and date of each photograph so the comparison can be checked.
- A tribute performer's account of how make-up, wig and posture build the resemblance to the star they portray.
- A note that a comparison on this site used a cropped image or a different lens, with the original frame.
- A correctionthe photograph labelled as one celebrity actually shows another.
Dropped, because a private individual or a minor is in the frame:
- A photograph of a coworker who "looks exactly like" a named actor.
- A school photograph of a teenager set beside a pop star.
- A request to find out who the celebrity double in a viral video really is.
- A photograph of a public figure's child, however often it has already been shared.
How a submission should be handled
- Say the exclusions before the form, not in a policy page nobody opens. Most bad submissions are made by people who did not know the rule.
- Delete what is refused. A refused photograph of a private individual should not sit in an archive; retaining it recreates the risk the refusal was meant to prevent.
- Strip location metadata from anything retained, and never publish an image without doing so.
- Do not publish the submitter's identity, and do not publish the fact that a particular person submitted something.
- Have one named role own the decision. The submissions editor answers for what is refused and what is published, so the standard does not drift with whoever is on duty.
- Provide a clear takedown route (a dedicated email or web form) and honor it fast, without requiring the subject to explain themselves.
- Correct in place, with a note. A silent edit looks like a cover-up and destroys the record of what was fixed.
The failure this prevents
The reason to be strict is not abstract. Crowd identification from photographs has a documented history of naming the wrong person, and identification from a brief or poor-quality view is one of the best-studied failure modes there is. The consequences fall on someone who did nothing and has no way to make it stop.
The mechanism that produces this is not malice. It is ordinary face perception doing what it does: reporting high confidence from low-quality images, especially with unfamiliar faces, and offering no internal signal that it is wrong. That is covered in athlete lookalikes and international lookalikes.
A submissions policy is where a site decides whether it wants to be part of that. The strict version costs some engaging content. That is the correct trade.
Common questions
Why is consent not enough to publish a submission about someone else?
It does not hold up, and the argument for that sits in the section above on the private-individual line.
What happens to a photograph that is refused?
It is deleted rather than filed. A refused image of a private individual sitting in an archive recreates exactly the risk the refusal was for.
Is "it is already online" ever a reason to publish?
No. Prior exposure is not consent, and republishing adds reach that the original never had.
What kind of submission is genuinely wanted?
Corrections, questions about mechanism, accounts from people who do this work, and observations about the photography. Those get real answers.
In this guide
- Why user submissions quiz rounds get refusedUser submissions quiz proposals rarely survive: no provenance, private faces, and items about young people that are refused and deleted on sight.
- Every user submissions pair hides four answerable questions insideUser submissions arrive as finished pairs. Taking one apart gives four answerable questions and one that nobody, with two photographs, can answer.
- User submissions submission rules, clause by clauseThe user submissions submission rules for lookalike faces, clause by clause, with the reason beside it: no pairings, deletion on refusal, removal on request.
- Six user submission mistakes a lookalike desk makes, and the safeguard for eachSix handling mistakes a celebrity lookalike desk makes with reader photos and claims, from debating a bad request to keeping refused files, with the safeguard and the law behind each.
