Someone has access to our Google photos

red dragon

Justiceforall
Skilled
Something strange is happening. A friend of mine sent me a Google photo search page result which has a photograph of my wife wearing a saree.
The photo was taken in 2015, few days after we got married. And I distinctly remember it, as we were watching YouTube for instructional videos.
We never shared it with anyone and it was possibly in my iPhoto album and later in Google photos.
I'm not concerned about this particular photograph, but wondering how and why was it accessed and posted online?
It's even there in some stock photography website!! It's rather disturbing...these types of photographs are no big deal, may be she shared on FB and forgot about it.
But everyone has personal photographs which are completely private.
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Not surprising at all, you share a ton of personal info on public forums.
On this forum itself you've already shared info related to where you've worked, how much money you make, where you live, which other city you've lived in, what you were addicted to, where you'll be working soon, what you plan on doing post retirement, how many dogs you have, how many children you have, etc heck you've even mentioned your wife's name (Lenka if i'm correct) and you posted your own pic too in one thread and now you've gone and posted your wife's pic here as well :p

My advice is to keep personal info off of public forums, don't be surprised if you get doxxed.
 
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Use TinEye to reverse search images.
Looks like that site was deleted or expired. Probably some FB or Google drive crawler bot that downloads images and posts them on sites to get ad revenue.There's lot of bots that do this. Reddit, Youtube videos etc.
 
Don't put anything online. For all these companies, Apple, Google or anyone, WE are the commodity.

From my first days with using computers i through all the settings thoroughly while and after installing any app or program. And i was always careful to unset any online backup options like Google drive etc in whatsapp. I do allow local backup and have used that folder to migrate whatsapp and ALL contents including every last bit of media to a new phone. But nothing online.

So i wasn't surprised when the celebs were caught by the narcs. Even if you wipe your phone they can still get your backups from Google.

Store nothing online in plain form. Only password protected rar archives for backup purposes.
 
Yes, I've shared a lot in this forum, as there's nothing much to hide, my life is pretty much an open book.
I'm not important enough to be targeted...We've even written a book on our struggles with substance abuse and the wonderful journey of recovery ( which be available @ Amazon by mid 2021)
There are plenty of videos of us in YouTube ( Vice made few documentary type thingy on Eastern Europe's forgotten generation where we practically lived with a group of homeless addicts for weeks)
But there's a line which is not supposed to be crossed without consent.
 
Thanks for sharing @red dragon , this is extremely disturbing, I have everything backed up on the cloud and am paying Google for additional space. Create local copies is tedious and manual, may have to reconsider given OPs use case.
 
as there's nothing much to hide, my life is pretty much an open book.
I'm not important enough to be targeted.

Then don't complain if private pics start showing up, you should've learnt the last time when you were apparently hounded on twitter.
IMO the weakest link is always the user.

You are just again facilitating the process.

Exactly, revealing more info about book release and youtube vids.
 
Hey, the book thing was my lame attempt at promotion.
The Vice videos are 4/5 years old.
It may sound ridiculous, but I had to appear to face the Spanish media almost everyday during the first wave ( most people at Madrid thought I'm from Greece and my weird surname is difficult to pronounce, combined with the colour of my skin and almost black hair!)
We're average middle aged people, our casual photos leaking online is not really anything.
BUT certain things are private. Like our kid's photographs or when we were young and wild.
We all had our wild days, don't we? Those things make me little worried.
What's the problem if you guys have seen me or my wife in photographs? We may meet someday, somewhere...it's a small world.
 
Don't want to stress you but just prey that such pics don't land on random pron sites... They even use such pics as an Ad.

And yes, saying this 100th time, any cloud no matter even ran by your own grandpa, its not at all safe. Sneak peak sniffing exposing breach etc..all can happen knowingly/unknowingly/deliberately and you are the one who will realize it pretty late..
ONLY you and you are responsible for your data and its security.
 

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  • Can we stop a peer/friend/collogues from posting some info/pic online?? It's always after something gets posted that we find out. But by then the info becomes persistent
  • Kids .. Knowingly/Unknowingly they share a lot of info ( check out r/oldschoolcool ) and the rage these days to share intimates .. who can stop the other person from posting online
  • Document photocopies , phone repair shops, IT support are all means to have your data leaked ... if relevant person want to ..
  • You can't imagine what level of info people share willingly. I've seen in School whatsapp group for my kids.. parents openly sharing adhar, medical info , passport, address info etc ... in the group .. visible to all
  • Things can leak from your school. college, office, investment firms, medical, hotels, and so on.

Bitter truth is , in today's world it is next to impossible to not have your personal data in public domain. The endpoints are so many that we can't even imagine. And with IOT and connected devices/homes .... it only going to be more difficult to keep things private
 
Bitter truth is , in today's world it is next to impossible to not have your personal data in public domain.
It's very possible. But you have to be proactive about it.

For example, i have a Facebook account i created but never use. I have this long list of friend requests from relatives and friends which i never accepted. Once some of my cousins and i went sightseeing and a cousin's wife posted our group photo on their Facebook and tagged my account to my pic. We're not even Facebook friends. I promptly removed the tag.

You have to realise the irony that putting photos, personal or otherwise, on any kind of social media and then complaining about privacy is retarded.
 
I guess this photograph somehow landed up in some stock photography site ( no idea how) and used by random sites for the saree thing.
Yes, it was taken in December 2015..we were probably staying in some hotel in Ankara/ Istanbul.
How can such a normal photo end up in some porn site!!??
 
What's the problem if you guys have seen me or my wife in photographs? We may meet someday, somewhere...it's a small world.

It's considered good practice to keep your offline and online identity as distant as possible, regardless of whether you consider yourself to be important or not.

How can such a normal photo end up in some porn site!!??

There's a lot of deepfake stuff going on nowadays, one photo isn't sufficient to produce results but those pervs might use it for all those "find horny bhabhis around you" kinda banners.
 
Use TinEye to reverse search images.
There's a better resource which searches multiple sites at once, including tineye. Tineye itself works well enough for popular images but not for more obscure ones. Yandex is crazy how effective it is.
Anyway the site is:

 
There's a lot of deepfake stuff going on nowadays, one photo isn't sufficient to produce results but those pervs might use it for all those "find horny bhabhis around you" kinda banners.
Horny bhabhis around you !!!!!!!!
You know, we have a popular adult movie industry star living next door!!
We're never going back to India anyway, so bhabhi is not going to be around anytime soon.
Thanks for all your sincere advice mate. We do have local backups of most of our photographs ( mostly travel photos)
But Google photo is so convenient.
 
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But Google photo is so convenient.
Somehow I feel it may not be Google photo. May be some other app on your phone or desktop crawling though cache/gallery .. or maybe you or someone shared this pic with someone else.
Could be K20 / or some other chinese phone you had .. before you were able to install custom roms
 
Or may be my wife posted it in her FB account. She gets super excited after doing something Indian.
Now none of us use FB anymore. Maybe I blamed Google by mistake. It can very well be our own mistake.
We were just two completely carefree souls back then.
The kid made us grow up.
Anyway I am not really worried anymore. We googled ourselves to find out a bunch of photographs at random sites. Thankfully most are Czech websites.
@ everyone, I'm sorry for this misleading thread.
I actually carry this photograph in my wallet. And seeing it online was kind of unnerving.
But it's not Google, but either of us who posted this photo long time ago ( we both were in FB at that time)
There are plenty of photos of us from various medical conferences etc.( and I have few hundreds if not thousands of photos scattered online while playing with small bands both in India and Europe, and it feels kind of good to see the younger and wilder version of myself)
I couldn't find a single objectionable photo online.
What the IT cell did, was completely different, they somehow manage to find a very old photo..We couldn't find it anywhere now...even if it exists, I don't really care...we are neither proud nor ashamed of our pasts. We've accepted everything and moved on long time ago.
 
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