You may think that you are being oh-so-careful with your Google profile, Match.com profile, Facebook profile, or other social media or dating site (or other) profile. You never use your full real name publicly, you don’t share your address or where you work. But if you have an image in your profile that has ever been published anywhere else on the Internet, it can be very easy to use Google’s image matching search engine to quickly discover any information associated with that image anywhere online.
Here’s how it works. Someone grabs the image from your profile, and plugs it in to Google’s image search engine, at images.google.com.
Take this picture, for example, of our publisher, Anne Mitchell:
All we had to do was drag it onto the search bar at images.google.com:
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And..the results:
Ok, you say, so what, it’s common knowledge that Anne’s ISIPP Publishing is the publisher of those sites.
Ah, not so fast. And that’s not the point. Look at this picture of Anne:
Now, pretend this is your picture. And you think it’s a pretty decent picture, so you decide to put it up on Match.com, or OkCupid.com, or another site like that. Or pretend it’s your daughter or your mother, and they are putting it up on their Facebook page.
Now, somebody wants to know more about you, or your sister or mother (or imagine this is a picture of a man, and it’s you, or your brother, father or son). Someone wants to track them down – figure out where they live, where they work.
That stalker is just one hop away from knowing exactly where Anne works and lives, so he can walk into her office and blast her away (obviously he is a spammer who is ticked off at her for writing part of our Federal anti-spam law):
So, the lesson here is, if you put pictures of yourself (or, ahem, your children) on the Internet, don’t think you are safe from being tracked down or stalked just because you don’t include your name or other identifying information. The picture is the identifying information!
If you want to play with Google’s image search yourself, go to images.google.com.
The Internet Patrol is completely free, and reader-supported. Your tips via CashApp, Venmo, or Paypal are appreciated! Receipts will come from ISIPP.
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