Find every photo of yourself online: the ChatGPT audit kit

Step 1: the kickoff prompt

Drop a clear selfie into ChatGPT and paste this:

This is a photo of me, and I am running a privacy audit on myself.

1. Describe the visible features of this photo in neutral terms (hair, glasses, typical style, background clues) so I have a reference description for my own records.

2. Interview me for a findability profile. Ask me for: my full name and how it is usually spelled, every username or handle I have ever used, my city, schools and workplaces, clubs, sports teams and events I have attended, and anywhere I know my photo has been published.

3. Then build me a findability audit plan:
   - A checklist of reverse image engines to run my selfie through, with links.
   - A search matrix of text searches to run alongside them: name + city, name + school, name + employer, each old username on its own, and "[my name] photos" variants.
   - The places people forget: event photo galleries, old team and club pages, alumni pages, conference speaker pages, data broker profiles.

Format the plan as a checklist I can work through in 15 minutes.

Step 2: run the engines yourself

These are drag and drop, and the whole pass takes a couple of minutes:

• 🔍 Google Lens: go to images.google.com, click the camera icon, upload your selfie or drag it into the search box. It returns websites that contain the image or a similar one. Free. (How-to from Google: support page.)
• 🖼️ Bing Visual Search: go to bing.com/visualsearch and drag your photo onto the drop zone. Free. (Microsoft's page: visual search.)
• 🙂 FaceCheck ID: facecheck.id searches faces specifically across social profiles, blogs, video and news sites, and ranks every result with a match confidence score. The first pass is free, extra results cost credits. Their own warning applies: many unrelated people look alike, so treat low-confidence matches as maybes, not facts. Heads up: it also trawls mugshot and scam databases, and like any face engine you are handing it a selfie, so use a photo you are already comfortable having out there.
• 📷 TinEye: tineye.com is a dedicated reverse image search engine. Drop the same selfie in there too, it often catches exact copies the others miss.
• 💸 What you are avoiding: PimEyes (pimeyes.com) is the famous face search engine, but seeing the source links sits behind a paid plan, and its own homepage quotes the $29.99 a month figure. The free stack above covers a personal audit.
• ⚡ Optional accelerator: if you have a paid ChatGPT plan, ChatGPT Work (the Chat/Work switcher at the top of the composer, formerly agent mode) can drive the free public engines like Google Lens and Bing for you and gather the links, but it will decline actual face recognition and paid engines often block it, so you still run FaceCheck yourself. Not required.

Step 3: build the exposure tracker

Paste every hit URL back into your ChatGPT chat with this:

Here are all the URLs where my photo or my old usernames appear.

Build me an exposure tracker table with these columns:
site, link, what the photo or page is, sensitivity (low / medium / high), removal route (site contact, platform report form, search engine removal, data broker opt-out), and status.

Rank it by sensitivity so I know what to handle first, and tell me which entries are probably false positives I should verify before acting.

Step 4: takedown requests that actually get replies

For anything you want gone, ask ChatGPT:

For each high-sensitivity entry in my tracker, write me a removal request tailored to that specific site: reference the exact page URL, state that I am the person pictured and did not consent to publication, request removal, and cite the strongest applicable basis (the site's own content policy, GDPR Article 17 right to erasure if the site serves the EU, or the site's privacy contact process). Keep each one polite, firm, and under 150 words. Give me a subject line for each.

Two removal routes worth knowing on top of site-by-site requests:

• 🧹 Google's "Results about you" tool lets you request removal of personal info like your phone number, home address and email from search results, free, at myactivity.google.com (details: support page). It is rolling out to users 18+ in certain markets, so availability depends on your region.
• ⚖️ GDPR Article 17 is the "right to erasure": you can ask a data controller to erase your personal data without undue delay (the full article: Article 17). Citing it in a request to any site that serves EU users adds real weight.