In the case of the man reported in the Brisbane Times, his profile was also used on a dating app. Twitter isn’t the only platform with this issue, Facebook and Instagram also have a big problem with fake accounts, which probably really took off with the original “My Space” Fake accounts are also used spread spam, viruses and used to hack. These “Bot” accounts often used photos that were simply “stolen” from other accounts, google image search, flickr, or Facebook. Users who wanted to look very popular on Twitter could buy thousands of Fake “Bot” (Robot) followers for as little as five dollars.
Twitter had a huge problem with this in the early days, (they are getting better at deleting them but there are still millions of fake Twitter accounts) with scammers creating hundreds of fake accounts to “follow” and popularise accounts. The most common use is that the image “thief” wants to use a believable or attractive photo to give credence to a profile to scam other users in some way. What would someone want with someone else profile picture? If you do find out that a photo that belongs to you, or is of a member of your family, is being used by someone else, getting the photo taken down from the various places it has been posted online, might be impossible, depending on how much it has been shared or used. If you do find out that an image of you, or a family member has been stolen, it is incredibly lucky that you have discovered it, due to the amount of images that exist on the internet, it really would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack. No one knows how many online photos are stolen, but there are probably millions stolen every year. This type of image theft has been going on for a while online, but with the popularity of social media it has escalated. This Sunday the Brisbane Times reported on a story about a man who found out his profile photo was in the top search results on Google Images for the search term “Profile Photo” and not only that, he found out that the picture of his face was being used for fake profiles, on resume’s, dating sites and more. If you Google “Profile Photo Stolen” or “Stolen Facebook Photos” you might be very surprised to see some really shocking stories of ordinary people who have had their online images “stolen” and used for purposes they didn’t intend. Profile Pictures Being Stolen (shutterstock – bought and paid for!)
0 kommentar(er)
