Profile Pictures on Social Media: Operational Risks
The internet has become an incredibly visual medium. Faces are everywhere online, particularly in social media. But, if you are trying to go online under an alias, faces can create a major problem.
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When people visit your accounts, they expect to see profile photos associated with them. The question is, where do you get those photos from? Making the wrong choice can quickly compromise your operation.
Many people’s first choice, and a quick and easy option, is to find existing photos on the public internet and use them as your own. For example, you might use a picture from a stock photography site that matches the demographics of your alias, or grab a profile photo from a real person’s account.
Unfortunately, in addition to the copyright and ethical issues, using existing photos makes it easy to detect that you are a fake. A number of companies, including Google, offer the ability to do reverse image searches. These searches take some existing photo and find everywhere that image can be found on the web. It can even find the original versions of heavily cropped or somewhat modified pictures.
If you are using a Chrome browser, right click on any image and you will see the option to “search google for image”. This will return links to all the matching and similar images that Google has indexed.
I did a quick look through some of my recent connection requests on LinkedIn, and—within just a couple of minutes—found an obvious fake. This profile looks plausible and has racked up a fair number of connections. However, the image search shows that this picture is actually taken from a stock photo! The exact same thing could happen if you use an existing profile photo. The search will probably turn up the real person’s account in addition to your alias account.
Profile Pictures: Compounding Complications
Facial recognition creates another major complication to finding usable pictures. Many social media sites, and other organizations, are using facial recognition systems to biometrically profile and identify millions of faces. If you are using someone else’s real face on your profile, the algorithms could quickly determine that person’s true identity. When that does not match the identity of your alias, you have been caught.
This can even be a problem if you are creating original photos to avoid image search. If the people in the picture have had their facial biometrics captured at any point, they might still be identified. This makes it particularly dangerous to use people around the office, friends, or family as a source of faces.
Making things worse, a social media account with just one picture looks odd, particularly on highly visual sites like Facebook and Instagram. To blend in, you will need to have many different photos for each account, most of which will have the identity’s “face” in them.
That face in all the profile pictures must be recognized as the same face, both by people viewing it and by the algorithms. But obviously it can’t just be the same picture of a face pasted into different situations. It needs to have different expressions, lighting, and backgrounds.
Speaking of backgrounds, those need to be identity appropriate as well. Any background objects, signs, vehicles, and the like, need to be appropriate to the alias identity. Signs should be in the correct language, cars should have country appropriate license plates, steering wheels should be on the correct side of the car, landmarks should be from the right country, etc. These backgrounds need to be original as well; borrowed backgrounds can be recognized by reverse image search, even after a new person or face has been added.
Fortunately, it is often possible to get away with profile photos without recognizable faces. Many people use pets or other animals as their profile photos. Other common non-human choices are cartoon characters, sports logos, flags, etc. Even obviously borrowed faces can work. Many people use pictures of well-known celebrities for their personal accounts. Finally, there is the option of using pictures where the subjects face is obscured by some kind of mask, or helmet, or where bad lighting leaves the face in total shadow. However, in any plausible account, at least some of the pictures will be expected to show the account owner’s face clearly.
By paying close attention to how you source your photos, and keeping all the risks in mind, you can avoid these identification pitfalls and keep your alias identities intact.
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