Almost everybody is in a social network site. Number of friends is increasing everyday. Some from current work, from your childhood and some you can not remember. Requests for friends are also irresistible especially with good profile pics. Just add, add and add. But do you know the lies behind a good picture? Do you know if the owner of the profile is the real one behind the photo? Worst thing is, do you know if somebody is using your photo as somebody else's profile!
One way of looking into this is to know if the image of that profile is used on other sites or profiles with different owners. The question is how can one tell that the photo is already published in other sites and claimed by other individual different from the profile owner?
Help has been there since 1999 but I have just stumbled upon it a few days. This site is to unmask if the profile photo is really your friends photo or just an image downloaded from other websites. This help is the first web-based image search engine to use image identification technology. Very useful for copywrite owners in tracking the sites or individuals that are actually using their exclusive work. You might have heard about those fake social networking accounts that are raking in money using your friend's profile pics.
This web based search utility is so easy to use, you just need to get the url address of the image and paste it to the search interface for url at the site then press search. Or you have the option to download the image and upload this to the search interface then press search. The later is more time consuming.
Interpreting the result. If the image is uploaded by the real owner then there should be no duplicate image searched from different sites or servers or owners. If it has been hijacked from the internet you will see different sites, servers or users that are linked to the image.
Screen Shots on how to use the and how to get the url of any web image below.
1. Select a target and RIGHT CLICK the image then hit PROPERTIES
2. Highlight and hit COPY at the url attribute, then hit X to close the properties dialogue. If copy is not clickable, hit SELECT ALL first.
3. Now go to http://www.tineye.com/ and paste the URL at the URL search window then hit SEARCH
4. The moment of truth, is the user using her own profile photo?
5. Yes, this user's photo profile belongs to herself. How about the photo profile on top of the post?
6. Using the same technique, this is the result! FALSE!
Cybercriminals are getting smarter, they can create profiles of people you know and ask money from you. Now you know how to determine whether you will give them or not!
But then, the search engine may still give you false results.
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