Your Private Porn Pictures May Not Always Be Private

According to a recent study, 88% of all amateur homemade pornography find their way onto Internet porn sites, often without the owner’s knowledge. These types of homemade can include both videos and still pictures.

NBC News reports that this new study analyzed more than 12,000 sexually explicit images that were uploaded by young people. The study found that a large majority of the pictures were stolen and published to websites, that Britain’s Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) call “parasite” websites.

“Parasite” websites are websites that are exclusively devoted to showing sexually explicit images that feature young subjects. They allegedly obtain their content anyway they can get it, including lost or stolen cellphones, hacked private accounts on Photobucket, Flickr, or Facebook, or even chat sites and Tumblr, which is a blogging platform site that is notorious for the amount of sexually-explicit content posted by high school and college students.

“We need young people to realize that once an image or a video has gone online, they may never be able to remove it entirely,” Susie Hargreaves, CEO of the Internet Watch Foundation, told the Guardian newspaper in London. “Once an image has been copied on to a parasite website, it will no longer suffice to simply remove the image from the online account.”

In the IWF’s report, they featured quotes from people who have already had their pictures stolen and published. They featured these quotes as both a warning and also to let people know that they are not the only ones.

“One explicit image I took when I was young … is coming up on the first page of [unnamed search engine],” one quote read.

“Every time I begin to feel good and confident about myself … I just remember these pictures and what I did,” another quote read.

These people are not alone, there are many more people who have had their pictures stolen and published without their knowledge.