All across the internet, we are uploading our personal and professional images at an exponential rate. According to the consultancy Zephorai, Facebook users alone upload 300 million photos a day while Shutterstock, the licensed commercial photograph provider has users adding 50,000 images daily to its royalty-free collection of 50 million.
Yet, while sharing information over the internet has never been easier, it has never been riskier. Images intended to amuse or entertain family and friends can all to easily end up being used by unscrupulous enterprises to deceive and defraud.
Take Westland University, which claims to be a premier online research and teaching institution, with 4,000 employees, offering courses to UAE residents. Its testimonial section showcases three graduates: Kimberly Scott, Aamina Khalid and Alastar O’Reilly. Their images look slightly generic, set against white backgrounds, but of differing lighting and quality.
According to the website, Mr Scott, from the United States, was almost passed up for a promotion, despite holding a bachelor’s degree in sales management and five years work experience. He is alleged to have said: “Thanks to a master’s degree in sales management awarded by the university, I was able to clinch the position with ease. Thanks Westland!’.
"Mr Scott" though, has multiple identities, with his image, provided by a stock image agency, appearing on several other websites. Likewise, "Kuwaiti graduate Aamina Khalid" is also listed as "Arabian business woman posing in office" by the website bigstockphoto.com
One of the university’s professors is Robert Fontenot, who, Westland University says, holds a doctorate in educational psychology in the United States.
That comes as something of surprise to Bruce Hood, chair of development psychology in society at Bristol University in England and whose photo, which originally appeared on the website of the Guardian newspaper now turns up as "Prof Fontenot".
Although flattered, Mr Hood called the Robert Fontenot character “completely fictitious”. After he used the website’s live chat to ask about Robert Fontenot, he received a phone call asking him if he was interested in signing up for a degree.
The true identity of all these images was unearthed using a tool called reverse image searching, which can be used to identify multiple copies of the same image on the internet. If someone has plagiarised an image, you can very quickly find out by searching – not with terms, as you normally would – but with photographs.
Image Raider, one of the most effective reverse image search engines available, has more than 200,000 users per month. The vast majority of these are non-paying “consumer” customers, says the engine’s founder, Alec Bertram.
“These are regular people who come to search for image sources for a variety of reasons, but mostly to check whether what they’re looking at is a scam,” he notes.
The typical uses for consumers, he says, are checking to see if personal photographs have been used on the internet, verifying if a house they plan to rent is real, finding other sources for photos, and “looking to see if the person they’re talking to on social media or an online dating profile site is real”.
Using Image Raider, we looked into Online UAE Universities (OUU), a website that advertises directly to UAE residents on Facebook, and claims to connect UAE-based students to scholarships at top universities. It posts motivational photographs – equipped with life advice from Bill Cosby – and is endorsed by the Middle East Education Council – a social networking springboard for fraudulent schemes, with more than 14,000 likes from users who post: “I need degree. contact me.”
Like Westland, OUU’s website also boasts an enviable range of proud former students. Linda Garrett, Abu Al Hassan, Ayishah Samaha and Khaled bin Sufyan all enjoy high praise for the website, with Ms Samaha saying she “landed a job in a Fortune 100 company right after completing my MBA from an accredited online University”.
Mr bin Sufyan boasts that the website’s “international accreditation and global partners of OUU’s member universities” makes them the top educational portal in the UAE.
These photographs do not immediately resemble stock imagery. When we run them through Image Raider, most do not return results, but Mr bin Sufyan’s does. This image was originally published by a UAE educational establishment, and, in reality, depicts an Emirati man – with a different name – whose LinkedIn profile shows is now working for the police. He declined to comment when approached by The National.
Mr Bertram says Image Raider also maintains corporate accounts, which: “are used mainly for brand protection and finding where a company’s photography is used” – such as if another website is trying to sell counterfeit goods.
“We’re a digital marketing agency – Allotment Digital Marketing – and wanted to know which websites were using any of a client’s 20,000-plus photos, so that we could begin to build relationships and share more photography.
“If a fashion blogger has used a retailer’s photo, that’s a good indication that the blogger likes the brand; so the marketer can reach out to the blogger to further promote the brand.”
However, the company also identifies websites using photos without a licence, so it can send them removal requests or invoices. Similarly, it has trademark and intellectual property lawyers who look for organisations who use similar logos or brand imagery to its clients.
“Our biggest clients are household brands who are just trying to stop their logos being used. We recently found a case where a funeral home was using the logo of one of the world’s biggest oil companies.”
Although infringement of logos is less common, he says, it is what big brands tend to care about. “For some of our clients, we have found 100-150 infringing usages of their logo – used as the logo for another business – in the first year of monitoring.”
We discovered one such case of logo infringement during our research. The University of Liverpool, more than a century old, offers 36 full online certificates, masters and doctoral degree programmes. These are accredited by the UK’s Quality Assurance Agency. Performing a background check on its .ac.uk website reveals a contact email address, and that the site contains 6,133 links and is around 20 years old.
The University of Liverpool, however, is also a separate dot.com online university. Its registry information provides no contact details, and it has paid to keep the owner’s information anonymous. This website is just three years old and has just 95 links, indicating a lack of services and teaching material. Although it has copied the real university’s logo and likeness, this is not the University of Liverpool.
Photo and image infringement are becoming more common, says Mr Bertram, because: “grabbing a photo to use on a blog or product page is easy, and there’s a tendency for people to think they’ll never be caught”.
One way of disguising a stolen image from online verification services is by cropping them to a different size. But Mr Bertram says Image Raider can usually get past this.
“In general, our service picks up most uses. Even if photos are cropped or modified in some way, the system still finds many.
“For our clients, we mainly help them remove infringing uses rather than prevent usage”, he explains.
Unfortunately for UAE residents, it can be “extremely difficult” to pursue international enforcement of privacy and copyright laws because the UAE is not signatory to any bilateral treaties for enforcement, says Alessandro Tricolo, partner at Fichte and Co Legal Consultancy.
“Therefore, should the individual wish to bring a complaint they would need to do so in the jurisdiction of the infringing party,” he adds.
However, within the country, a local website that uses an individual’s photo or misrepresents their likeness for their benefit, without their permission, is liable under Article 285 of the Civil Transactions law, according to Chad Fox, an associate at the firm.
The Penal Code, meanwhile, provides a criminal avenue to pursue: “In relation to the unauthorised use of information, such as photos, if there is a specific damage to the individuals reputation private or family life without consent”.
The UAE courts do not have the authority to prevent the use of a photo, he says, which makes it hard to succeed with a civil claim for damages. However, the country takes privacy very seriously, and the courts are empowered to prosecute for “the simplest” unauthorised use.
“In a civil claim context it is extremely difficult to quantify the damage of unauthorised use of photos and other data,” says Mr Fox. “However, the true nature of the protection afforded is that the individual does not want their picture to be used without permission.”
halbustani@thenational.ae