Thousands of Women Victimised Online

[SayNo]

Good evening all at Mumsnet, my names J and I'm a girl on a mission: to spread awareness of the sharing of PRIVATE photographs from photobucket across the net. Please have a look at my page on FB (link below) to read more about what is going on, as none of the mass media have yet reported on this since it has been uncovered. I'm looking to change that!

For those of you with teenagers, please point them in the direction of the page, as many will have uploaded such pictures of themselves, and a reminder of the risks involved may be helpful!

www.facebook.com/pages/Naked-Photobucket-stop-the-spread-of-your-private-photos-now/436192349751022

Thanks for your time!

Hi,

Can you explain how you plan to stop this?

Hi, the plan is to raise awareness so we can reach as many women as possible so that they are prompted to delete any such content on their photobucket accounts before it gets dispersed. This will hopefully prevent others from uploading such content in the first place also. The majority of women who have been targeted are unaware of the phenomena, so hopefully I will reach some of them, which will hopefully enable the to regain at least some control over their situation.

I plan to contact the internet watch foundation, as well as a number of main stream media sources. I also hope to get a copyright lawyer on board to help me to draft some FAQs for girls whose photos have been stolen. This is currently in its infancy however, so building a strong online presence is the first step!

I would be really grateful if some of you could "like" and "share" the page, as it is a really horrendous issue. There are few things more invasive, and a fairly high proportion of victims are underage.

I'm trying to understand what you're doing here. People are putting photos of themselves online, and other people are keeping copies of them? Is it something about photobucket which is causing this?

Sorry to seem to so ignorant but your FB page hasn't cleared it up for me.

Hi yes, sorry if this is unclear- there is an option on photobucket which allows you to create a "private" photo album, many use these to host naked pictures of themselves and other content they would not want others to see, however photobucket is incredibly insecure and a large online community has been exploiting this through software which allows them to essentially "hack" the albums in such a way that they can see the photographs.

These pictures are then being downloaded and put up on other sites for use as masturbation material (for lack of a more delicate way of putting it) which is a horrendous breach of the privacy of those who have uploaded such photographs.

There has been no mass media coverage of this issue, and as a result many potential and actual victims are unaware of what is going on. Of course uploading any content online carries with it inherent risk, but these pictures are getting over 100,000 views a piece in very short spaces of time. A lot of those who have fallen victim to this are young women under the age of 18, making the practice even worse, as it is dispersing high volumes of child pornography.

Is that more clear?

I would like to make the information on my FB page as easy to understand as possible so it is accessible to all, so if you could give me some feedback on what is that was unclear I would be very grateful!

It may be of use to you to repost this in the Feminism section of MN: you may get a larger audience for what you are trying to achieve.

Thanks for the tip Caramelwaffle, I've cross-posted this to the activist section, so hopefully I'll get more response on there :)

Have you obtained a statement from Photobucket? If there are security issues, as you describe, then a statement from them about the problem would be useful. Do they recognise it as a problem?