It’s not surprising these days to browse the web and stumble upon a site displaying your own photo in an inappropriate manner so that readers can make fun of you. This happens after they stole your worst public picture from your account on a social networking site.
I didn’t investigate this issue, but I guess you can’t do much about that if it happens. The most you can do is send a polite email to the site’s administrators and ask them nicely to remove your picture, then wait and see if they accept or not to drop traffic on that specific post.
Image theft is not benefiting only to this type of sites, but some could use your photos for commercials or fraudulent schemes for ghost organizations.
BitDefender published a short article which provides five image theft prevention tips that would give you a general idea on how to protect your profile pictures on sites like Facebook, MySpace, Hi5 and so on.
If you did check the privacy statements on the social networking sites you have profiles on you’d probably read that you are the owner of all the content you posted and you can control how it’s shared, using the available privacy options.
This removes any responsibility from the site’s shoulders in case your information is stolen.
The first advice from BitDefender sounds kinda silly. It tells us that the best way to protect our photos is to not upload them. This can’t be done on a social site where you want to meet people and make friends. People want to see the faces of the persons they want to know more about.
The next suggestion is to check the privacy options on the website and restrict access to the content by allowing only people you know very well to see your photos. This, in my opinion, is the best method you could use to protect your photos.
Another idea would be to embed watermarks on pictures to discourage thieves from stealing them. I guess this won’t prevent them from stealing if they know how to use a simple photo editing software to remove the watermark.
You could also upload small-sized images such as at 72 dpi resolution and of up to 640 x 480 pixels just to keep your visual identity safe. This is not an efficient method as thieves don’t care about the size of the photo if it’s clear, and the maximum size recommended by BitDefender is big in my opinion. You can distinguish everything in a picture of that size.
The last tip is to avoid uploading individual, portrait images, but upload group photos in the nature instead, so thieves will have too many details to work on and remove.
After reading these tips I can conclude that the best solution is to restrict the access to your picture and allow only your closest friends to see them. This method won’t keep your pictures 100% safe, but will protect them longer.
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