My Photo Has Been Stolen and Reuploaded

[DibyayanC]

Just now I found out that one of my photo submission at Fabbrica  has been stolen and reuploaded. Here are proofs:

In the photo album of Fabbrica #1 is my photo and #5 is stolen oneMy photo published 4 months agoStolen photo published today (October 10)

Link to the LG account who stole my photo: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ve8pTDc9KAnzknUN7

@DeniGu can you please help?

[Kumaarsantosh]

This is very sad affair of state. It clearly shows the screenshot of the original photo of yours @DibyayanC  as the text in the stolen photo behind the glass are blurry.

Surprisingly this guy has posted 11 photos but only 1 photo is public that too seems to be stolen.

[MortenCopenhagen · Accepted solution]

Hi @DibyayanC 

I explained in details what you need to do here:

https://www.localguidesconnect.com/t5/General-Discussion/How-to-detect-and-report-stolen-photos/td-p...

Cheers

Morten 

[DibyayanC]

@MortenCopenhagen 

Thanks for the information providing in brief.

I have reported to Google as you said. Let's see what happens.

[DibyayanC]

Hi @MortenCopenhagen 

Update:

Just now I found out that the stolen photo has been removed from Google Map database along with the LG account.

Success 🙌

And thanks again for sharing the procedure in brief.

[Onkarjadhav]

This happens to me many times. Please report it as suggested by the moderator. I hope Google starts taking action against these accounts.

As a software engineer, I have an idea for tapping into this issue effortlessly. Google Maps can enhance the application to verify the metadata before accepting any photos, where it can check if the photo was taken by camera or a screenshot, and it can also track where the photo was taken and only approve photos near the actual location.

[MortenCopenhagen]

Hi @Onkarjadhav 

Using the metadata in image files has been suggested several times, and I believe that is used to some extent. The problem is though, that the metadata can very easily be changed to fool the system. 

As you probably are aware there is a quite remarkable system available on Google Photos to detect faces, identify them, and make all sorts of keywords for each image so we can search our photos using keywords. I believe this system requires some heavy computing, which is still not available on Google Maps. This could automatically remove, hide, or even warn users when they upload images that violate the photo guidelines on Google Maps. Selfies, group photos, screenshots, and stolen photos could be blocked or removed automatically. I hope this will become reality one day. 

Cheers

Morten