Why I password protect pictures
May 8, 2008 Blogging
I know I’ve told this story before but I’m going to tell it again since a couple of people have asked about it.
Way back when I posted pictures of my kids now and again. Then one day I found a guy using pictures of my kids on a page he’d clearly written for school. In it he had a picture of me with Noah and said this was a picture of his mother with his big brother. Then he had a picture of Madison and he said this was a picture of himself as a baby. That was a little weird but the page looked dead and it looked like an assignment so I didn’t worry too much about it.
I found this page because he was hot-linking. Hot-linking is where someone uses your sourcecode to link to the picture from your site. It’s stealing bandwidth because whenever someone visits that page, it pulls the picture from your domain, which uses up some of your bandwith resources. (I don’t have enough traffic here to have bandwidth issues so I didn’t care about that.) Because he was hotlinking instead of right-clicking to steal the actual picture and host it himself, I was able to see this in my stats program.
Now you won’t see this kind of theft in your typical free stats program like statcounter or sitemeter. You can only see it in the more compete stats that come with most hosting accounts like Webalizer or Awstats. That will show every little person who has linked to you even once and every single IP that has ever visited you including all the millions of searchbots that the search engines send out to crawl the web. It will also show when people are hotlinking a picture.
Anyway, that didn’t bother me all that much — I just thought it was weird. But then another day when I was trolling through my stats (something I don’t do very often depending instead on the broad picture that statcounter gives me), I saw a whole bunch of people hotlinking a picture of Noah wearing party hats. He had two hats on his head like horns and one on his face like a snout. All you could see was his big blue eyes peeking over the rim of the hat. It was pretty adorable and it was all over myspace.
The picture was easy to find because I named it hats.jpg, which meant it came up in google image searches for “hats.” That was my first mistake. All of the kids were using Noah’s picture to wish each other happy birthday in their myspace comments. He was very popular for awhile and I was pretty annoyed. Again, not because of the bandwidth but because I don’t really want my kids becoming internet memes. (Frankly, I was grateful the kids were dumb enough to steal bandwidth theft instead of directly downloading it their own computers because then I knew people were stealing it. You can’t see it when people right-click to steal your pictures and I’m sure people were doing that, too but I wasn’t going to be able to catch it.)
Well, the first thing I did was replace the hats.jpg with a new file that said, “I’m an idiot and I’m stealing bandwidth!” so that everyone’s myspace comments would now display that. The second thing I did was dig more deeply into my internet stats to see if anyone else was swiping that pic. And they were.
I found the picture on a forum. Of course I went to the forum to check it out and I found it was a discussion board for ped*philes. That’s right, someone had posted the pic of Noah there and yes, it made my stomach drop into my shoes. I created an account to get into the board to find the thread with him in it (the picture was already replaced but I wanted to scare the hell out of the guy who stole it) because that thread was locked to outsiders. (I could see the name of the thread in my stats and it was titled, “Please sir, may I have another hat?” or something like that)
I couldn’t get into that post even as a “member” because the board was hidden — members without special privileges couldn’t even see it — but it was for posting pics of kids and my kid was up there.
I wrote the owner telling him to delete the thread because I could see people using my bandwidth and didn’t want my site attached to it. He was horrified I could see this super-secret board (I didn’t tell him how I knew it was there) and promised to delete the thread. I have no idea what other pics might have been up there but I can imagine.
Now frankly, I don’t think there’s as much risk of this if you’re letting pictures name themselves and not naming them something google image searchable. (Like dsc0019a.jpb vs. icecreamcone.jpg.) I also think the ped*philes are trolling flickr. (In fact, I know they are because people on flickr are writing about that.) Why bother with google image search when you can head to flickr and find a million little girls at a slumber party or a million little boys jumping into swimming pools?
Which leads me to the next bit — watch it with flickr, folks. Don’t tag your photos of your kids to make it easy for people to find them. Don’t upload any pictures of them in swimsuits, diapers, underwear, etc. But also know that even benign photos (including ones of your son with everything covered but his eyes) can catch someone’s attention.
I am not as alarmist as some parents, what with using my kids’ names and things, but nowadays I figure it’s better safe than sorry with pictures. It’s not a big deal to put them in lockdown so I do. Although I think what happened with the picture of Noah is pretty uncommon, I’m just not comfortable risking it. I can’t describe to you my feeling when I clicked through to the forum and saw where it was posted but it’s not one I want to experience again. (I’ll post the pic — password protected — after this so you can see how truly benign it was.)
And that is why you have to ask for a password to see pictures of my kids.
May 8th, 2008 at 8:33 am
I don’t use flickr or picassa or any of that. I have a kodak account that can only be accessed through invites to each album. I’ve never emailed any of my internet friends with invites (not even you, I don’t think) just family and IRL friends.
None of my jpegs are named, but are posted randomly on the blog. I post and delete pictures here and there. Frankly if a myspace kid is using them and I don’t know about it, I can live with that. I’m fairly careful of what kinds of pictures I post of the kids, but I know people could be excited by something I consider benign. Like I said in my post today, I am far less concerned about internet dangers than I am real life dangers. It’s not the guy looking at my blog who worries me, it’s the coach or friend’s father or brother who are far more likely to victimize my children. Those are the relationships I carefully monitor.
I’m sure if I stumbled on something it would skeeve me out. I’ve heard of other people’s children’s pictures being used as content on commercial sites, now that would completely piss me off and freak me out. But frankly I don’t think I have enough traffic to even worry about that.
May 8th, 2008 at 8:38 am
@Lisa V: I know what you mean because with camera phones people can take pictures of kids ANYWHERE and do with them what they will.
May 8th, 2008 at 9:10 am
Well, and it’s just not taking their picture. It’s truly victmizing them by physically violating them.
May 8th, 2008 at 9:50 am
@Lisa V:
Right but I’m talking about having lost control of Noah’s image on the internet and what I did in reaction to is. I’m only talking about images not real life threats.
May 8th, 2008 at 9:55 am
thanks for posting about this, dawn. i protected all my kids pictures after hearing about people trolling flickr.
May 8th, 2008 at 10:04 am
I use flickr but have never tagged personal photos and I’m not a part of any of the popular groups, have few friends/family, and haven’t had any problems, except the time I noticed that a picture of Jamie in a cloth diaper had over 600 views. I made it private immediately and anything of him in underwear or naked is private.
The diaper thing skeeved me out because a bunch of people on babycenter had their pictures stolen and posted on some cloth diaper fetish website. Cree-pee.
I’m pretty sure a picture of Jamie from my blog was on a variety of forums for awhile because I had c@lvin kl1ne model in the title of the post. So if you googled that term you’d get his picture. I ended up making my blog non-google-able anyway because of general privacy concerns, but now i know why people do the funky spelling thing.
May 8th, 2008 at 11:50 am
mOkay, this is quite irrelevant, but ay I have a password please? I’ve been meaning to ask for ages and I keep forgetting to…
May 8th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Hi Dawn, found you through BlogNetNews and was fascinated by the post title. Would you mind telling how you put passwords on the photos? Do you have special software to do it? Thanks so much!
May 8th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
That’s a creepy story Dawn. I can certainly understand your decision to protect your kids’ images. It’s got me a bit riled up, actually, since I have a photo site of the kids, mainly for my in-laws. The tech business is pretty mysterious to me, but I suppose I ought to take some initiative and learn more. Or else send hard copies to my in-laws.
It feels weird to ask right now, but may I please have the password? I’d just like to put faces to the names I read about. Thanks.
May 8th, 2008 at 8:51 pm
Hmmm, definitely scary. I don’t really use Flikr (I’m actually thankful right now that they charge for unlimited service, which is the main reason why I don’t use them), but I do post lots of pictures… I don’t rename them, and I guess I’m OK with the fact that they can be stolen… now, since I don’t know what’s happening to them, “ignorance is bliss.” I have to think more about this, though. My approach is similar to LisaV’s at this point… But maybe I should install a better statcounter, or… not post pictures of the kids, or… I don’t know.
May 9th, 2008 at 6:57 am
@AmyL: The wordpress software lets you individually password any of your entries, which is awfully nice. I don’t know if the other blogging software programs allows this or not. But it looks like you’re using wordpress, right? When you create an entry you can scroll down to the bottom and you’ll see “password protect this post.” You just stick a password in there and voila! Protected.
May 9th, 2008 at 8:17 pm
[...] to Dawn who taught me why she password protects her photos on her blog. She has been doing this (blogging [...]
May 11th, 2008 at 5:50 am
Thanks for sharing these stories Dawn. I try not to post kid pictures but sometimes let it slip. This post shows why I need to be so careful. Lisa V.’s thoughts are good too. What a world.
May 11th, 2008 at 10:57 pm
Hmm, I really like Typepad, but this is the one reason I have been tossing up moving to wordpress. Also, it’s free, which is nice, but it does seem sort of slow (I’m talking the free hosted version - I’m not quite up to figuring out how to host my own). At the moment I use it for a (private) writers group blog with some people from my uni course.
June 29th, 2008 at 12:25 am
But some parents are: to the point of publicly accusing people of being pedophiles and/or perverted because they happen to snap a photograph of their kid.
I’d like to point out (to Lisa V and Dawn) that it is NOT an invasion of privacy to have your picture taken from a public place (juveniles included) when there is not a “reasonable expectation of privacy.” While it’s icky to think that someone can “do with it what they will,” that’s the reality of modern society — the alternative is to never set foot into an area that can be viewed from a public place.
Obviously what Dawn is blogging about has some legal rights attached because it is unauthorized replication of a copyright work. But think for a second that if someone else snapped that photograph, from a public place, you would have zero legal standing to have it removed (from that forum for instance).
July 18th, 2008 at 9:14 am
I need to protect some pics. Would you mind to tell me how you put passwords on the photos? Thanks so much!