Concerned About Theft

[Tullio]

I know exactly what you are talking about, Jim. However, going from an IP address to a real address is not that simple. You'd have to work for law enforcement and have serious suspicions of some crime going on in order to obtain the address of any individual from the ISP. As I stated, I access this site from home, work, my son's school, train station, airports, etc., and since each of these locations offer free wi-fi, to my knowledge no hacker would be able to track my access from these locations and find my home address. I do agree that people must be careful with regards to what they post on the internet, particularly in social media sites such as Facebook.

[JimC]

Again, detective work.

Look for posts with more personal info in them like member's albums and personal web sites, and search for information about a person's real name and location, as they've probably used the same member name on other sites, too; and it's not unusual to find posts with phone numbers and e-mail addresses when they've done things like selling gear; finding real names when discussing their employer, finding more about them if they've linked to their facebook pages on other sites, etc.

Then, piece "two and two" together to get a more complete profile.

I do that to help keep out spammers when new users join the forums and appear to be promoting a company or products; so I can find out if they're associated with a company or products they're promoting.

But, Thieves do that kind of thing all the time, especially when they find out that a given person has a lot of expensive gear, using Google to find out more about a given user, looking at other sites they're using, social media web sites to find out more about them, posts they've made on other web sites, etc.

[carylwithay]

Interesting conversation here. I never post on social media because i am afraid of it. I do use the same ID on several sites but had not thought it was a problem. People do steal my images. That i know. Any suggestions on how to stop that would be useful.
Caryl

[calr]

Caryl, I don't know how to stop people from stealing your images but you can prevent those individuals from using your images by imbedding a watermark in the posted image. There are two types of watermarks. One is visible, usually very subtle in the background of an image. The second is more useful for proving ownership and that is a digital watermark embedded in image file but not visible. Check the manual or help section of your image software for details.

Cal

[carylwithay]

Thanks Cal. I must really look into that.
Caryl

[Bynx]

How does one get their image stolen? Ive never had one of mine stolen. I guess Im just not worthy.

I had a small instamatic stolen once. The pics on the film were worth more than the camera. But after I bought my Pentax no one tried to steal that. I guess no one was strong enough.

[mtngal]

Lol! Love your ME, I had one of those for many years. But mine was a tad smaller than that one.

[calr]

This thread is starting to drift off topic so I am locking it.

Cal