5 Ways Your Dirty Photos Might End up on The Internet

There are some photos you may want to keep private. You know the ones I’m talking about. As we’ve seen time and time again in the news, someone is either getting their phone hacked or getting tricked into doing something that results in their private photos being obtained by somebody who they didn’t want to have access to them, and then, BOOM. They are all over the Internet.

Here Are 5 Ways Your Intimate Photos Might End up On The Internet if You're Not Careful:

Beware The Spiteful Ex

Remember those naughty photos you let your significant other take during a passionate encounter? Guess what? They’ve got a copy of them because either they took them with their phone, or you sent  them to them when you all were all lovey-dovey and on good terms.
Now that you’re broken up, there is always that chance that your ex will do the spiteful thing and post them online. You can go through the process of requesting they be removed from a website, but that is not always necessarily going to be successful. Thankfully Google is now allowing requests for the removal of links to “revenge porn”. You can visit this article to learn more.

Beware The Synched Photo Stream

Apple and Android both have methods of allowing you to synch your photo library across multiple devices such as your phone, tablet, desktop, notebook PC, etc. Take a photo on one device and it is instantly replicated to the other devices via the cloud. What could possibly go wrong? Yep you guessed it, that naughty pic you just took ended up on the Apple TV photo stream screensaver in the living room while Granny had paused her Netflix binge-watching session of Orange is The New Black.

Yikes! Now you have some 'splaining to do.

Beware The Snapchat Screenshot

Snapchat is many people's go to app for taking quick naughty pictures and sending them to significant others. Snapchat novices might think it's safe to take revealing pics using Snapchat because the photo sort of “self-destructs” after a set time period. The problem is that people can use their phone’s screenshot capability and take a capture of the photo. This capture does not self-destruct.

Even if they don’t take a screen-shot they could take a picture of the screen with someone else’s phone or camera.

The message here is someone can always snap a pic of a pic, nothing is truly ever gone. Treat all pics as if they were going to get out onto the net.

Beware the Lost or Stolen Phone

If your phone is lost or stolen, you better hope you had a good passcode on it or had enabled a feature that allows you to remotely wipe or lock it (i.e. Find My iPhone). As big of a hassle as you think a PIN code is, it’s at least one roadblock preventing thieves from accessing those racy pictures you took.

Some smartphone operating systems like iOS allow for a phone to automatically self-destruct (wipe it’s data) after the wrong passcode is entered more than 10 times. They also allow you to remotely lock and wipe your data (if the phone can establish a connection to the cloud to receive your lock and wipe command).

Photo Privacy Tools

There are various photo privacy tools available on smartphone app stores to help you protect your private photos.. Some of these tools allow for you to keep a photo vault of private photos that you don’t want on your phone’s camera roll. After all, nothing is more embarrassing than showing photos to your friends and having a racy pic enter the slide show. Oops!