“When Becky Spraggs joined a social networking website, she hoped to keep friends up to date with family photos and news. But unfortunately her friends are not the only ones looking at her photographs. To her horror, the pictures and details she placed on Facebook have been copied on to a sex website. Images of the 22-year-old mother of three appear alongside shots of another woman of similar looks engaged in sex acts and a message which reads ‘I want to be used and abused’. A fake profile claims Miss Spraggs is prepared to ‘do anything’ to become a porn actress and invites admirers to contact her manager on a mobile phone number. The number actually belongs to Miss Spraggs’s former partner, Paul Farrow, 32, the father of her young children. He has fended off more than 50 calls. ‘It’s devastating that someone could do something like this to me,’ said Miss Spraggs at her home in Hertfordshire. She signed up to Facebook a year ago and posted photos of herself and her children, who are all under four. She has listed 167 ‘friends’ on the website but did not realise her profile could be viewed by nearly three million others who have joined the same ‘London’ network. Like many social networking website users, she did not know she could opt for more stringent privacy settings to stop others seeing her details. Four of her photos appeared on June 28 on FetLife, a Canada-based members-only sex website. ‘I feel totally exposed. I’ve got pictures of my kids in the bath and the perverts that did the porn site would have seen them,’ she said… When Miss Spraggs contacted police she was told it had nothing to do with them and was referred to the Internet Watch Foundation, the British body which deals with reports of illegal content online. It said it was unable to help as no laws had been broken.” — ThisIsLondon (UK)

Here is a non-pornographic picture of Ms. Spraggs. Here is another. Here is a blurry grab of the fetish site on which she appears.

Ms. Spraggs’ former partner suspects that this is all the work of a disgruntled admirer. He may well be right. However, there is a larger issue at play. Identity theft has proliferated in recent years, and clearly there is now another sort on the rise: appearance theft. It used to be that only celebrities had to worry about it, as when an advertiser would make unauthorized use of their image to sponsor a product. But nowadays the appearance of a “regular” person can be valuable too. Just think about all the amateur porn floating around out there. Appearances that seem authentic or genuine can have tremendous appeal. Why wouldn’t unethical webmasters start skimming real photos from social networking sites to entice users to join their amateur porn sites, their meet-a-fuck-buddy sites, and so on?

Some have criticized Ms. Spraggs for taking her fight to the media. After all, how many people are going to make the slightest connection between that random image on a web site and the real person to whom the appearance belongs? Not many. But evidently that is a risk Ms. Spraggs feels she can’t take. What if the person who posted the images also writes that the young mother is willing to engage in orgies with kids? She doesn’t want to risk having her children taken away by some government agency. In that sense, taking her fight to the media is the smartest thing she could have done. It publicly discredits the stolen images and reassociates her appearance with the “real” her.

Finally, let the incident serve as a cautionary tale to anyone who posts images — of any sort — online. If you aren’t comfortable with them being grabbed, copied, repurposed, recontextualized, then don’t put them online.

VideoBox

It's like the iTunes Music Store for Porn. Download unlimited high-quality video for only $9.95/month.