What Can Be Learned from a Photograph on the Internet
Imagine a situation: you have come across a photograph and you need to find its author, what will you do?
This chapter will be dedicated to answering this question; we will tell you what information malicious actors can obtain from a received photograph.
Suppose you uploaded a photograph to a file-sharing service or an image hosting site. Both file-sharing services and image hosting sites always retain quite a bit of information about the person who uploaded the photograph, including their IP address, date, and time of upload. Some file-sharing services even store this information about everyone who views or downloads the file.
But that’s not all. Some file-sharing services even employ staff and machine algorithms to analyze uploaded photographs. For ordinary users, this is unlikely to pose a serious threat, but many drug dealer couriers have been caught because of this.
The most popular method of selling drugs involves selling illegal goods through drops. In brief, the essence of it is as follows: the client calls or writes to the seller, places an order, and pays for it. Then the courier goes to the client’s area and makes a drop in some secluded place, for example, sticking it with tape to a garage. Next, the courier takes a photograph using a phone uploads it to an image hosting site, and sends the link to the manager along with the details of the drop location.
Sometimes drops are made in advance, and the client is immediately informed of the location. In this case, we are interested in the photograph of the drop made by the dropper.
On the largest Russian-speaking forum dedicated to the trade of narcotic and psychotropic substances, a special thread even appeared. Here is its verbatim text:
Dear users. Irrefutable information has come in that the Radikal service has activated a program to combat drug photos. To be precise, they have launched a real hunt for all photographs of explicit drugs, copies of the passports of droppers (who write confirmations for some sellers), and, importantly, drop locations.
You all know that at least every second seller or client uploads such photos specifically to Radikal or ipicture. Once there was no reason for concern; these are convenient, fast sites, and everyone used them without fear. But now these services are working directly with the FSKN, and all this data is sent directly to them.