Sydney lawyer Angela Harvey was very surprised to learn her image is in the top results for a 'profile pictures' search of Google. "'Your face is in her portfolio.'" The designer had created a sample webpage to showcase her skills, and among the faces of its made-up users was Carl's. "A little round thumbnail photo of me as 'Fred Young', this random person. This was in this girl's portfolio who had applied for a job here at STC. I thought: this is getting bizarre, how does this keep happening to me?" Stephanie had a thought: if you were a designer looking to populate a mock-up page with anonymous faces, where would you find them? "You'd Google 'profile pictures'," says Nilsson-Polias. "And she did that. I was right there the first time it happened and said 'shit! That's my face! My face is one of the first results!'" A Google search for 'profile pictures' delivers 597 billion such results. There at the top is Carl Nilsson-Polias. He joins the likes of documentary producer Christopher Palmer, Canadian mortgage broker Marcy Koopmans and University of Idaho admissions officer Cezar Mesquita as the people the internet has deemed the gold standard of... 'standard'.

Popular avatar: Documentary producer Christopher Palmer's profile picture is another that the internet has deemed the gold standard of 'standard.' None of them knew it, until the sequence of coincidences that led to Carl's revelation. Angela Harvey is a Sydney lawyer who reacts with great surprise when I call to inform her that her image is in the top results for a 'profile pictures' search of Google. Consider how you'd respond in the same situation (on either end of that conversation). Everyman: Carl Nilsson-Polias' profile picture is one of the first results that pops up when Googling generic profile pictures. "I'm looking at it now," she says. "That lipstick's very red... I think it's a pretty good image, though. I've always liked that one. It's pretty engaging and I think it's a good photo of me. It's no mugshot.

"I'm definitely surprised about this," she laughs. "But I'm not really troubled by it. And I'm a lawyer, you'd think if anyone was going to be worried it'd be me." Chris Palmer is no stranger to the world of images – his wildlife documentary work has seen him in the running for an Oscar and two Emmys – but it's the profile picture on his webpage at American University in Washington that occupies the number one spot in a search for 'profile picture.' It's news to him. "My initial response is bafflement," he writes from the United States. "It's crazy! What does it mean? I want someone to explain it to me... will someone please explain what the heck is going on?!" As Palmer himself notes, his work isn't well known in Australia. It's unlikely his American University webpage is seeing a huge amount of traffic from downunder. Nilsson-Polias' image is from his writer's profile page on the website of boutique arts magazine RealTime, and Harvey's is from an interview with Lawyer's Weekly. These sites are not the New York Times or Buzzfeed or Wikipedia. The algorithms determining search engine result rankings are notoriously secret, but the most basic explanation is that sites that are referred to by other sites get higher billing. It's not that you're receiving the most traffic, but that others who link to you are. If this is the case, then every time someone else uses the image of Nilsson-Polias, Harvey or Palmer it boosts the popularity of the original. That boost in popularity means more people doing a search for a generic 'profile picture' will be likely to choose theirs, and the snowball effect takes over.

But that's just the nuts-and-bolts stuff. While Google may tell users that these images are what they're looking for when they're looking for 'profile pictures,' it's the users who decide whether they agree with the options proposed. 'Verla Smart' in New York agreed. 'Fabrizio Crano' agreed. 'Alex Lee' agreed. Or, rather, a vast number of internet users agreed that the faces of Nilsson-Polias, Harvey and Palmer do express the qualities they're aiming to project to the world. It would be a different case if the search term had been 'tough guy' or 'sex bomb' or 'weirdly shaped head'. 'Profile picture' seems an entirely value-neutral phrase, but the results in themselves say something for that reason. "I know! I'm vanilla!" Nilsson-Polias laughs. Or, rather, "vanilla within a certain spectrum..." Palmer doesn't see any particular qualities to the photo in question that might lead to its elevated status. "I can't imagine what. I believe the photo is fairly average. There are a million photos out there with people in them who are better looking. "I suppose it's something to be pleased about, but I honestly don't know. Perhaps it's there because I remind people of some degenerate character, like John Wilkes Booth."

"No, everyone's very normal," says Harvey. "That's the first thing I thought: how did I turn up as a top 'normal' picture? Is there some kind of mathematical algorithm at play? There's old people, young people, mostly men, some women... There's not many women there." There are more men than women. The top results are also overwhelmingly white. When somebody chooses one of these images to be their avatar on a LinkedIn resume, or a dating site, or a YouTube account, does it make some tiny statement about what they believe that face represents? And can the aggregate of those many tiny deceptions say something more truthful about what visual qualities a culture prizes? Take Palmer's shot. It's an image of benevolent paternalism, of a successful man who probably enjoys outdoor activities on the weekend, who gets the hard jobs done and still has smiling eyes. Nilsson-Polias' picture gives us a younger guy with black-rimmed glasses, a confident smattering of stubble and the wry hint of a smile. He could be an inner-city artist or the guy you hire to write computer code. Harvey's image is both warm and professional, both worthy of trust and likeable. All of these faces seem reliable and welcoming. If they do speak to something collective, it's not to values that are universal. While Nilsson-Polias ranks near the top in Australia, he slips to the 13th spot in New Zealand, and is somewhat lower in the United States and United Kingdom. In Britain, however, Harvey jumps up to fourth position. Palmer hovers near the top in most English-speaking countries, but you won't find any of the three in contention if you're doing the same search in Turkey, Japan or Haiti (in their respective national tongues). "The thing is that my face isn't a famous face," says Nilsson-Polias. "I don't think my image is valuable in and of itself. I think my image is simply a photo that looks like a real person that no one will recognise, and that's part of it. It doesn't look staged or anything."

It is staged, of course. By its nature a profile shot is a curated presentation of the self. That's why Nilsson-Polias doesn't see his image's proliferation across the internet as the kind of violation of privacy that celebrities experience when their personal photos are leaked. "Perhaps it says something about what the self-portrait is these days, but the image was taken by me as a projection of myself to the outside world. Compared to other images that get splurged around the internet, it wasn't taken by my girlfriend while we were having a moment to ourselves. It was very much me thinking I need a public image, the light is nice, I'll take a photo." Harvey agrees. "I don't really find it to be a bad thing. I don't even think I would worry if I found out someone was using my image in a brochure or something. If I was a celebrity or similar perhaps I'd be worried about my use of image, maybe I could earn some money off it, but I'm not in that position, obviously. So I don't really mind." If leaked celebrity pictures are a measure of a society's desire to violate privacy, passing someone's face off as your own is something else. It presumes that the mask you've stolen is so generic that it doesn't belong to an actual human being, or that your own presence in the world is so reduced that nobody will ever recognise the face you're wearing. Nilsson-Polias compares the use of his image to stock photos, those millions of posed scenes that companies can purchase to use in advertising. The same smiling face might appear on a billboard for teeth-whiteners in Los Angeles, in a French magazine spruiking pay-day loans, and an Australian commercial for hi-fi gear. The model will probably never know where their likeness ends up.

"Those randomly happy chemists are people," says Nilsson-Polias. "I have friends who are actors and models and you see them all over the place in ads and things and you understand there what the exchange is." After stumbling upon his own face twice, he says "I think it's a similar experience that they would have on a constant basis, reading a prospectus for a biotech company and going 'hey, that's me with the test tube.'" Carl Nilsson-Polias still owns the shirt he wears in the photograph. "I'm wearing those glasses now," he says. He and Stephanie wondered what would happen if that innocent designer arrived at her STC interview to find 'Fred Young' on the panel wearing the same outfit he does in her portfolio. "What would that do to her?" he laughs. "I guess there's a certain amount of me wanting to project back into that world and go 'you know, I am that person, that person does actually exist.' I guess that's still some element of me wanting to claim ownership of that photo. Of who that person is."