Almost all of us at some time have jumped onto Google and conducted an image search of some sort. Whether it is searching out a cool screensaver or trying to find a photo for that assignment, there are an infinite number of photo's that can be found. How these images are located by Google is quite technical, but with the advancement of social networking over the past decade, there are even more photo's that can be found currently. On Facebook alone, in Australia over 23million photo's are posted on that network per day. Worldwide, almost 330million images posted. This is massive!
But if all of these photo's can be found by a quick Google search, many people think, "Hold on! Can my photo's be found in the same way?". In many cases, photo's posted publicly can be seen across the Google network via indexing technology. Many social networking sites allow the public photo's posted by their users to be found in a Google search via this method. One of the worlds leading networks allow this with almost 42% of their images. As such, many parents worry the photo's their kids are posting online, are being seen by so many more people than their kids peers or family.
A great method to identify whether your kids images are being shared outside of the networks they are posting on, is Google Reverse Image Search. This is also a great way to find out whether the images being used on a suspicious social networking account are really owned by the person who is using that account.
You can either watch my video on Youtube - You Tube Reverse Image Search or follow these simple steps.
- Have your child open a browser session and log into their Facebook account.
- Have them select one of their posted photo's on their Facebook account.
- Open another browser tab and go to a Google search page, then click on the image link to open a Google Image Search page.
- After the image search page has opened, go back to your Facebook account and left click on the photo you have selected.
- Then drag and drop the photo into the search area of the Google page (where you would normally type search terms).
What will happen now is the meta data of that image will be read by Google and a search will be conducted across the internet for other copies of that image. After only a few seconds, Google will display a list of different websites where a copy of that image can be located across the internet. It is a great little way of finding out whether the photo's your kids are posting are actually really "private" or not. More importantly, it is also a good way of identifying whether the images being used on a suspicious social networking account are actually of the person they are purporting to be.