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.
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Tags: Awstats, bandwidth, flickr, Madison, meme, myspace, Noah, Pictures, search, sitemeter, statcounter, Webalizer
