One of the risks included in social networks and the continuous exposure of our personal information, is to suffer a theft intended to create false profiles that in the long run can have serious consequences.
If you think this has happened to you or you are interested in learning more about it to be prepared if you find yourself in this situation, I recommend that you continue reading this article to find out if someone is using your photographs on the internet.
What do I need to be able to search if someone uses my image online?
Basically we need a computer, mobile or any device with internet access and photographs published on a network. Only with this and by entering our profiles, we can continue with our research and find images through the Google search engine.
How can I know if someone uses my photos on the internet?
To find out if they use our photos on the internet, we start by opening Google Chrome and going to the social network where we have the photos that we suspect are being used without our consent.
Once we locate the images, we click on them (one by one) with the right mouse button, in the list of options we will click on the option Search this image on Google.
A new tab will open that will show us all the websites where other people have uploaded the photos they stole from us.
We can also perform an image search within Google itself. In this case, we must copy image link address, pressing it again with the right button and selecting the option mentioned above.
Once this is done, we select the camera icon in the Chrome home search engine, which sends us to the Image Search tab. Must paste the image link in the search engine and it will also show us the addresses of the pages that use our photos.
What is the best external tool to track the use of my photos?
With facial recognition tools we can track the use of our images on thousands of websites. And although there are many that promise you this, few compare with PimEyes.
With the guidance of a photograph of our face, it will show all the places where our photographs appear, no matter how changed your appearance is.
Its precision levels are quite high and its trait reading accuracy is unmatched. To enjoy its services it is necessary to pay a monthly fee, fortunately, it offers a couple of free searches.
And another quite successful tool and as recommended as PimEyes, is TinEye, which is also quite accurate and works similar to google image search engine. And the best, we can install and use TinEye completely free.
In the event that it is a person we know who has dared to use our photographs, the first thing to do is try to convince them to delete them and stop using them. But if the person who has stolen the photos in a complete stranger, the most reasonable thing is take the following steps:
In the case of networks such as YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, the website will allow us to report the publication, pointing out the inconveniences that content generates for us.
Talk to the website
We can try to communicate with other pages where our photographs circulate, highlight that they are being used without our permission to remove it from the internet.
Make a complaint
If the above does not work for us, it is time to take legal action against the person responsible. We must report the case, either to the AEPD (Spanish Data Protection Agency) or to the body in charge of cyber crimes in our country.
We can also Report to the police department so that the team specialized in these crimes can intervene and put an end to the problem. The process, whether police or judicial, depends on the established laws of each country and can be a bit slow.