I don't think it's healthy, and I suffer from that too. But I'll turn away if I see a tourist point a camera at me (well, not at me, obviously, at whatever interesting thing I'm standing near), I'm obsessively private about things like that, especially with colleagues. Sharing photos would be painful.

For one recent thing at a new company, we had to play "two truths and a lie" in a breakout room with 4 people I'd never met. Normally I can think on my feet but I ended up telling three truths by accident, and was then forced to lie about one of them being a lie to these complete strangers, which made me feel like a fraud incapable of even playing a basic icebreaker without being weird. And I'm not weird! Basic as you get. Ugh.

And I've got another one of those godawful 300 person-with-breakouts ra-ra sessions coming up in 15 minutes.

Tangentially related: I was deeply relieved to be able to take a required training course on one of the standard corporate "don't be a bad person" topics virtually, thinking I would be spared the inevitable small group discussions. I of course completely overlooked Zoom's breakout room functionality and had to deal with two hours of periodic awkwardness as three of us started at a countdown timer and tried to stretch 30 seconds of bullet point discussion into 7 minutes.

Id be like “what photos?” (I almost never take pictures of anything including myself). Id be happy with a phone that didn’t have a camera etc.

Feeling nervous about it may be common. Anxiety attack prob not

It's never healthy or normal to get anxiety attacks from a situation that is not genuinely dangerous. For example an anxiety attack from being chased by a crazy dude would be normal. In any normal social situation, no.

Yikes, that is terrifying. Thankfully, I have a cat. Nobody complains about cat pictures. Pictures of me? F off.

(and, no, anxiety isn't "healthy" but an employer disregarding your mental health is the real problem)

Should go on the attack with HR that this discriminates against neurodivergent people who aren't comfortable with social situations and who don't document their lives on their phones. Maybe throw in that its possibly ageist against older employees who didn't grow up with facebook in their teens.

I'd rather they just glue my face into a smile Clockwork Orange style.

What happens if you don't?