If this person’s beliefs are sincerely held, showing people on the internet the “the right way” to go about being serious about privacy is an impossible task. One can’t be on the World Wide Web and “be the change they wish see” (i.e. not be on the web) with regards to their privacy perspective.
And I’m not sure if it’s defeatist to state that all of us, just by being online, likely have some hooks in our mouths. It’s just the cost we pay for not being luddites. Yes, there’s benefits to not having a ton of hooks in us, which is why we do what we do, but even one hook is enough to steal your private info and sell it to everyone. We’re posting to the World Wide Web after all, not Gopher/Gemini/Onion. Hell, this goes beyond the internet since the DMV freely sells your personal information too. We make these limited sacrifices so we have an actual community instead of feeling like we’re self-righteous in our loneliness.
This is definitely AI. And kinda old AI at that. The backgrounds are nondescript, the facial hair is ambiguous, the face looks like one of those “upload a photo to see it realistically move with the magic of AI”, the shirt looks airbrushed and ambiguous, he has dark eyes instead of very blue eyes like in real life, and if you try to look up pictures of any interviews of him in those particular years, he usually has facial hair and a button down, sometimes with a jacket.
Compare the upper right and lower left picture on this post with this similar meme. Film grain is missing (possibly due to AI “beauty filters”?) and how the upper right image, his eyes are way more blue. I think the original meme creator probably wanted to make it look like all 4 pictures were the same gray shirt rather than 4 different gray shirts since the bottom left shirt in the picture I posted is heathered gray instead of flat gray.