Here’s how to know whether your nude videos or pictures are online:
The easiest way to find out if your nudes are online is to use a reverse image search.
In order to do this, you need an image of the nudes to give Google something for comparison.
With the reverse image search, the Google algorithm will scour the internet for you, and it will show you any likely matches.
So if you want to learn all about how to find your online nudes, then this article is for you.
Let’s dive deeper into it!
How Do Your Nudes Get Online? (2 Possibilities)
A process for finding your own nudes online might be easier to understand if we first get into how they get posted in the first place.
That’s a little more complicated than it might seem on the surface, mostly because it’s difficult to research.
A lot of people don’t want to talk about this when it happens, and even for those who do, it’s hard to discern exactly how the nudes got online in the first place.
For the most part, the pictures were either posted by someone you know, or they were outright stolen.
But, figuring out which is the case isn’t always easy.
The lack of data means that there isn’t convincing research to tell you which is really the most common.
To compensate for that, we’ll cover each topic as if they are equally likely, even if that doesn’t turn out to be a fair representation of reality.
#1 Someone You Know
No one wants to think about this, but if your nudes are online, there’s a fair chance that they were posted by someone you know.
The most obvious case is that they were posted by a partner who you shared them with or who even helped you create the content in the first place.
But, that’s not the only possibility.
Anyone with access to your devices could potentially share your nudes, and it’s not entirely unheard of for an uninvolved party to do this.
There might be money in it.
There could be countless other motivations too.
The real point here is that the pictures or videos were in the control of someone other than you, and that’s how they made it to the internet.
#2 Hacking
The other possibility is that the nudes were completely stolen.
They might have been hacked from your device, or they could have been heisted through some elaborate scheme where people stole your phone just to get to your pictures and videos.
Hacking seems more likely.
The issue here is that even though you kept the pictures and/or videos exclusively on your own device, they still got out.
It means that one thing you’ll need to consider moving forward is the digital security on your personal devices.
There’s a second problem with hacking that leads to problems we’ll discuss.
If a hacker got your pictures or videos, there’s a good chance they made copies.
That’s going to make it a lot harder to get the nudes off of the internet, but I’ll go over some potential solutions for this near the end of today’s discussion.
Where Are Nudes Posted? (2 Places)
We’ve covered how the nudes can get out of your control, but that’s only half of the story.
How do they end up online?
That’s a matter of posting them to a host site.
There are a lot of ways that can happen, but for the most part, you can find nudes in one of two places. (The internet is huge, so you can find nudes in a lot of places.
I’m trying to keep things simple.)
#1 Google Images
Google is a massive search engine, and it works hard to try to make the whole internet accessible and easy to reach.
Part of that is image searching.
Google AI scours the internet to find and catalog countless pictures and videos every day.
If you have nudes online, there’s a good chance that Google will find and catalog them.
That means that one of the easiest places to find your nudes is on a Google image search.
Google isn’t actually hosting the images, and Google definitely didn’t post them to share with the world.
But, it’s the easiest way to find them, and in a bit, I’ll walk you through the specific steps to do this.
#2 Countless Porn Sites
If you’re wondering where the pictures are really hosted, that’s likely going to be on any one of countless porn sites.
I’m going to walk a bit of a tightrope here because I’m not trying to promote the unauthorized posting of nude content.
But, if you want to understand what can happen with your own nudes, I have to cover some uncomfortable truths here.
One of the leading sites for hosting adult images is Imgur.
Now, Imgur isn’t specifically a porn site.
It’s just a site that allows people to post and share images.
But, as you might expect, it has been used for pornographic purposes.
There are also dedicated porn hosting sites like PimpandHost (please forgive me for not including a link).
The truth is that there are just too many possibilities to list here.
What this ultimately means is that if you are looking to see if your nudes are online, you won’t be able to go through these sites one at a time.
The task is just too daunting.
How Can You Find Out If Your Nudes Are Online? (2 Things)
Considering how all of that works, the process to find your online nudes is actually pretty easy.
Essentially, you’re going to use the Google search engine to find them for you.
But, before that, there’s an important question you should ask yourself.
Do You Have Nudes?
This is the starting question.
If you haven’t taken nude photos or made videos, then there really shouldn’t be anything of you online.
You can still go through the search, but in order to find something, someone would have to have taken photos or videos of you without your knowledge.
As creepy as that thought is, it’s a substantially different problem.
Still, when I go over steps to remove nudes from the internet, that applies whether you knew the nudes existed in the first place or not.
Reverse Image Search
If you have reason to worry, then a reverse image search is your best bet.
Remember how individually searching every website is too hard?
Well, Google has already done this work for you.
You can do a reverse image search, and the Google engine will take care of the rest.
Let’s stop and talk about what this really means before I go through the steps.
In order to do a reverse image search, you need a copy of the image.
Assuming your nudes are on your own device, this is very doable.
But, if you got rid of the images, and now you’re worried about them being online, things get a lot trickier.
You might have to try to find a copy, and I’m not going down that rabbit hole.
The other thing to know is that the Google image search can check pictures and videos.
A still frame from a video is enough for the engine to work.
Here’s another issue to consider.
In order to perform an image search, you have to let Google see your image.
If that makes you uncomfortable, it’s understandable, but it’s how the technology works.
There’s something that might be a little comforting.
Uploading a picture to a Google image search is not the same thing as uploading it to a website.
Google isn’t going to keep a copy of the image, and Google isn’t going to make a note of what you put in the search.
That’s not how it works, and using this feature will not cause your nudes to be online.
One more disclaimer.
You’re about to ask Google to find images of a naked person (in this case it’s you).
The search feature is going to pull up lots of pictures to try to match your image.
Whether or not you show up, you’re probably going to see a lot of pictures of naked people when you do this.
You have been warned.
Ok. Let’s go through the steps.
- Go to Google Images.
- Click or tap on the camera icon to “search by image.”
- Upload your image.
- Run the search.
Google will pull up every image match that it can find.
From there, you can decide if they are good matches or not, and if you definitely see yourself, then you know.
Your nudes are online, and the search will even show you where they are hosted.
What Do You Do If Your Nudes Are Posted? (2 Steps)
Ok. You went through the process, and you found bad news.
Your nudes are out there.
It’s not fun, but with the right steps to resolution, maybe this whole thing can soon be in the past.
Here’s what you can do if your nudes are in fact online.
#1 Ask to Have Them Removed
The first thing you can do is contact whoever runs the site that has your nudes.
Explain to them that you have not authorized these posts, and ask them to take the nudes down.
If the site is under the jurisdiction of the United States, the European Union, or many other countries with similar regulations, they will comply.
It’s illegal to post nudes without consent in these countries.
If they don’t comply, then you can escalate.
#2 Report It to the Authorities
There are authorities that deal with this kind of thing, and they are available to you.
If you find that your nudes are online, you can report them to the FTC (for Americans).
If you are not in the United States, you can look up the correct governing body and make the report.
They will walk you through the process and help you work towards resolving the situation.
I know that’s a little vague, but the truth is that this can shake out in a lot of different ways.
It’s really a case-by-case kind of thing. So, contact the authorities, and follow their lead.