By Erika Icon

YNOT EUROPE – A new study by the Internet Watch Foundation found that a whopping 88 percent of all homemade erotic videos and photos shared digitally end up on websites that have no permission to display the images.

The IWF, established in 1996 by the internet industry in the U.K., is a non-profit organization devoted to empowering and supporting children and young people to use the internet safely. The foundation undertook the study in order to gather data about how often images escape the control of those who create them.

As part of the study, researchers tracked 12,227 explicit images and videos that had appeared online without the knowledge or permission of the people depicted. Of those images, nearly 11,000 had been “harvested” by what the researchers called “parasite websites”: websites created for the sole purpose of displaying sexual content obtained from somewhere else. The IWF identified 68 parasite websites, many of which displayed content researchers suspected of being obtained by hacking into allegedly secure image-sharing repositories that required passwords for access. In other cases, researchers indicated the content may have been disclosed by disgruntled boyfriends or girlfriends as a means of “getting back at” former sweethearts.

“This research gives an unsettling indication of the number of images and videos on the internet featuring young people performing sexually explicit acts or posing,” said Susie Hargreaves, chief executive officer of the IWF. “It also highlights the problem of control of these images. Once an image has been copied onto a parasite website, it will no longer suffice to simply remove the image from the online account.”

The two biggest uses of the internet are social networking and pornography, and parasite websites are capitalizing on both. A recent Reuters article noted that “social networking traffic only recently surpassed that of pornography.” Extreme Tech claims to have viewed quite a few pornography sites and found the larger sites have more visits than all other sites except Google and Facebook. The largest porn site generates 4.4 billion page views monthly, which is more than double the traffic social network Reddit receives.

The results of the study will be used to inform programs and recommendations presented by the UK Safer Internet Center.