Try this: grab the photo you use everywhere, your Instagram profile pic, your LinkedIn headshot, whatever, and drop it into Google Lens right now. Give it ten seconds. You might not love what comes back.
That’s exactly what Redditor u/Professional-Rest138 did on r/PromptEngineering, mostly out of boredom. They found their own face sitting on three sites they’d never heard of, including a “profile aggregator” that had their real name stitched right onto it. Two minutes, no AI account needed for this first part, just a photo and a bit of curiosity.
🔍 The Two-Minute Test
Here’s the exact process the original poster laid out:
- Go to images.google.com and click the camera icon.
- Upload your photo. Google shows you every place online where that exact image, or a close match, shows up.
- Run the same photo through tineye.com. It catches things Google sometimes misses.
- Write down every site where your face shows up somewhere you didn’t put it.
Once you’ve got that list, the tedious part starts: writing individual takedown requests to five different random sites. Nobody has the patience for that by hand. This is where AI actually pulls its weight.
If you own the photo (you took it yourself), here’s the exact prompt the poster uses to generate a DMCA notice:
I found a photo of myself reposted on [site] without my permission, here’s the link: [url]. I own the copyright to this photo, I took it myself. Write me a proper DMCA takedown notice I can send to the site and its hosting provider, including the standard good-faith and accuracy statements a DMCA notice requires. Leave a blank where I need to add my contact info.
This prompt works because it hands the model everything a DMCA notice legally requires: the infringing link, an ownership claim, and a nudge to include the good-faith and accuracy statements that make a takedown notice valid instead of just an angry email. Leaving a blank for contact info means you’re not pasting your personal details into a chat window.
If it’s a photo of you but someone else took it, DMCA doesn’t apply since you don’t hold the copyright. The poster’s workaround is a separate, softer prompt:
Write a polite but firm request asking [site] to remove a photo of me posted without my consent. Frame it as a personal privacy request, not a copyright claim. Leave a blank for the page url and a short description of the photo.
That one word swap, copyright claim to privacy request, changes the entire tone and the legal footing. Sites are far more likely to act on a clear, calm privacy ask than an aggressive legal threat they can’t actually verify.
📋 What Your Results Actually Mean
A random blog reposting your photo without credit is annoying but usually harmless. A profile aggregator site with your name attached is a different animal. Those sites scrape your face and identity together, then resell or display that bundle to anyone who searches for you.
If your address or phone number turns up alongside your name, that’s data brokers at work, the Spokeos and Whitepages of the internet buying and reselling your personal info. That’s a separate problem from the photo issue, and it needs its own fix.
One top comment on the thread asked a fair question: what does Google actually do with the image you upload for reverse search? Worth knowing before you make this a habit, since you’re handing your face to the same company running the search.
💡 Extra Tips
- Google your own name too, in a private or incognito tab so your search history doesn’t skew the results.
- Search “results about you” tool. It’s free, it scans search results for your contact info, and it lets you request removal in a few taps.
- A few commenters pointed out that some platforms used to run AI facial matching (not just near-duplicate image matching) to find every photo of a person online, not just close copies. That’s a good reason to run this check more than once.
- You will not catch everything. Anyone promising a 100% clean sweep is selling you something. Most of it, for free, in an afternoon, is a realistic and pretty solid outcome.
🏴☠️ Give It a Shot
Two minutes of reverse image searching and a couple of prompts is a small price for knowing where your face has been wandering without you. The original poster keeps a running doc of 100 prompts like these for everyday AI use, worth a look if this one landed for you.
Go run your photo through Lens and TinEye today. Then come back and tell me what you found, I’m genuinely curious how unsettling this gets for people!
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Is it safe to upload my photo to Google Lens or TinEye?
Yes. Google used to have facial recognition that could find any photo of you anywhere, even in blurry backgrounds of other people’s photos, but the government shut that down for public use. Today, these tools just search for exact or near-exact matches of the photo you upload. Your image isn’t stored or used for training.
Q: Can these tools find ALL photos of me online?
No, just exact or very similar matches of the specific photo you upload. Want more comprehensive results? Upload different photos separately. It’s actually less powerful than the facial recognition that existed before government restrictions, but there’s a reason those limitations exist.
Q: When should I use a DMCA notice vs. a polite removal request?
DMCA is for when you own the copyright (you took the photo). A polite privacy request is for when someone else took it but posted it without your consent. Use whichever applies, the article has AI prompts for both.
Q: My personal info is in Google search results. How do I get it removed?
Google’s “Results About You” tool can find and request removal of your contact information. That data usually comes from data brokers (like Spokeo, WhitePages) that buy and sell personal info, getting it off there prevents further resale.
reverse image search your own face and see everywhere your photos got reposted without you knowing. takes two minutes and it’s actually unsettling
by u/Professional-Rest138 in PromptEngineering