How to protect photos online

1. First, try to contact the owner of the website and amicably ask to have the photo removed. You will usually find that on the web site there are links to “contacts”, “who we are” or “legal terms”. Through these links you can call them of send an email to make your request.

2. You should know that legislation in most countries usually requires that the owners of web pages have a link to contact information. This is of benefit to them as well.

3. If you cannot find contact information on the site, there is a service called “Who is” where you can find the owner of the page (www.whois.net). Within this page just type the name of the page in their search engine and you can easily find the owner of the page.

The answer to the question “is the owner of a web site legally obliged to remove content after they have received an email or call requesting they do so? is no, they can remove it or leave it, it’s up to their good will. If they do not have this, you will have to take the last step which is to exercise your legal right through the courts.

If we have taken all of these steps, we should consider ourselves lucky if the content you want removed only appears on sites within your country. If they are not, and photos appear in diverse places, with owners of various countries, the withdrawal is enormously complicated.

Our recommendation is to prevent this from happening rather than trying to fix it. Use free programs that encrypt the information and that allow you to control who can access what you send (How to protect photos online) with Prot-On. This is the best way to avoid unexpected and unwanted surprises.