Case Study: How PoppyD Got Stolen Photos Removed From a Porn Site

How fashion blogger Poppy used our tool to get her photos removed from a porn site.

Like any sensible blogger, Poppy of What I Wore Today fame uses Google Alerts to monitor her online presence.

One day, she had a nasty surprise: some innocent photos of her had been posted on an adult website.

Poppy admits to an initial feeling of “Wooooo, someone thinks I’m naturally beautiful, busty, skinny and thin!” (the site’s tagline) – but this was quickly replaced with concern when she discoverd that the site in question was ranking for Google serches for her name.

The photos weren’t pornographic or even, in Poppy’s words “the least bit sexy” – but some of the other images on the site left little to the imagination.

Poppy wrote to the site asking them to take down the images and promptly forgot all about it.

A few months later, Poppy received a message from someone who had Googled her name. Said porn site was now ranking #4 on Google for her name. Things had suddenly got rather more serious.

If you ask a site to remove images and they refuse or ignore you, you do have several options depending on the circumstances:

1. If you own the copyright to the images, you can file a DMCA notice. Although the DMCA is a US law, many other countries (including EU members) will honour a DMCA action.
2. You can request the site from which the images were stolen in the first place to do something. For example, Facebook and Flickr both have privacy policies regarding content hosted on their site.

If you decide to file a DMCA notice, the first thing you need to do is find out who is hosting the site. That’s where we come in. Just enter the domain in question and we’ll point you towards the host where you’ll be able to find the host you need to contact.

In Poppy’s case, a DMCA notice was all it took to have the stolen pictures she owned the copyright for removed.

We now offer a DMCA Takedown tool.
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