Why some of your photos could end up in the wrong hands and what you can do about it

(WXYZ) - Did you know 250-million photos are uploaded each day to Facebook? That's three thousand pictures each second! And that doesn't include sites like Pinterest or Instagram. Odds are you have a photo or two floating around out there, probably of your family. But we’ve learned some of those photos may be making the rounds in places you never even knew about., and you may not agree with!

Like most of us, Jay Breen posts "snapshots" of his life on Facebook.

"If I'm doing something interesting or fun, like traveling, traveling to other countries or you know, to an island," Breen says.

But when a friend mentioned seeing those photos on a scandalous dating web site, jay was stunned. He
logged on, and sure enough…

"Up comes pictures of myself, three pictures, that I posted on Facebook when I first signed up a while ago. This particular web site is something I didn't want to be associated with."

Jay's picture had been hijacked! With hundreds of millions of photos being uploaded
daily to popular social media sites, experts warn that even the savviest internet users are seeing their
pictures. And other personal media, copied and shared without their consent.

Attorney Doug Isenberg likens it to digital shoplfiting.

 "Anything that you or I can create as long as it is an original work of authorship is protected under US Copyright Law. It can include photographs, video, audio," Isenberg says.

What's even scarier, reports are popping up around the world of stolen photos appearing in political
attack ads, online scams, and even on foreign billboards, just to name a few.

Protect Your Photos

What can you do if you discover you're a victim? First, try contacting the site owner or content creator
directly. That's what jay did. He said “This is becoming more serious, please remove it, in capital
letters, before I get, you know, someone involved, an attorney involved."

Isenberg adds… "You could send a cease and desist letter, citing violations of US Copyright Act and certainly in an extreme case you can file a complaint in court for copyright infringement."

A simpler option would be to take preventative steps, like putting a visible watermark over things like photos and video.

"It's typically just a logo or a copyright image that's an overlay on top of your image," Digimarc’s Ben Bounketh says.

But it's easy to crop the watermark out, or remove it through special software.
You can turn to a growing number of companies that offer other options, from software to give it a unique fingerprint…to digital watermarks that can't be seen by the naked eye. Then, they can be tracked.

"We have a search service that's actually crawling the Internet… the customer can then log in and view a report of where all of their images have been located," Bounketh says.

Jay's threats to hire an attorney worked, but he has a warning for you the next time you post a picture.

 "Think before you do it because you never know where the pictures will end up."

Another precaution is to change your privacy settings to be sure that only friends and family can
see those photos. Of course, they can still copy and save them to be used in other places, but at least you cut back on the number of people who have access to them.

For information on watermarking that is nearly invisible…
http://www.psdbox.com/tutorials/create-an-invisible-watermark-in-photoshop/

FINGERPRINTING OPTION:
http://picscout.com/, http://www.tineye.com/

DIGITAL WATERMARK
http:// www.DIGIMARC.COM