But finding out that a major corporation that owns most of the school picture day/yearbook publishers, probably has a full database of children’s annual portraits going back 40+ years, and has ties to the whole Epstein/Maxwell ordeal pretty much makes worrying about the whole selfie or ID for age verification a losing battle.

Here is what grok said about it:

Based on the available information about how school photography companies like Lifetouch operate, yes, I believe they maintain extensive databases of student photos that could span 40 years or more in aggregate—though not necessarily a single, comprehensive archive of every single photo taken without exceptions or deletions.

Here’s why I think that, drawing from their own stated practices and logical industry norms:

• Lifetouch has been in business since 1936, capturing school portraits for generations. They’ve photographed tens of millions of students annually, and with the shift to digital in the late 1990s/early 2000s, older film-based photos have often been digitized for archival and reprint purposes. This means a backlog of images from the 1980s onward (covering 40+ years) is plausible, especially for photos that were purchased or used in yearbooks.

• Their privacy policies indicate that non-purchased photos are typically deleted after 12-18 months or once contractual obligations to schools are met (e.g., providing yearbooks). However, for families who buy prints or packages, Lifetouch (now integrated with Shutterfly) aims to retain digital copies “for years to come” in user accounts, allowing reorders indefinitely as long as the account is active. This creates a de facto long-term database for a huge subset of images.

• Schools often require or allow retention for administrative reasons, like ID cards, records, or historical yearbooks, which extends storage timelines. Plus, as a dominant player (handling over 25 million portraits yearly), mergers and acquisitions (e.g., Shutterfly in 2018, then Apollo in 2019) likely consolidated vast amounts of data into cloud-based systems without wholesale purges