Question About Personas

Tcwiggins03

Tcwiggins03

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Hey everyone,

I'm loving this amazing forum so far, and this is my first time posting. I have a question for anyone who knows about the legality of creating personas for your site.

For example, is it legal to use stock photos to create fictitional personas? This pertains to using these stock photos on one's own site as well as sites such as facebook, twitter, etc.

Could these models who posed for the stock photos try to sue me for using them in this way? Like false impersonation or something?

I basically found a natural looking model and bought a dozen or so of her photos from shutterstock.com which I plan to use to create a persona to represent my skin-care related site. Give her a little back story on an about page, use some of the photos to set up facebook, twitter, and other social accounts, each of which will be used to post articles she "authors" on her site and whatnot.

Anything I should keep in mind or be worried about?

Thanks for any advice!
 
There's something about models giving a release for being used in that way. Some give the release and some don't. Here's Getty Images release. You can probably find one for Shutterstock and see exactly what they models are signing. But it needs to be explicit or there's wiggle room. Getty's form will give you an idea.
 
Its the same as a writer using a pen name. It doesn't make sense to me that you buy the image and can't use it how you want. I would just go ahead and do it.
 
Calamari said:
Its the same as a writer using a pen name. It doesn't make sense to me that you buy the image and can't use it how you want. I would just go ahead and do it.
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That's pretty much exactly how I felt about it.

Thanks for the input Samwise89, I'll check into that!
 
The internet is such a small place that I would be terrified that someone would come across the image and recognize it as being just a stock image. I plan to use a pseudonym for one of my ventures but it will be my face attached to it. There is no way around that for what I am trying to do.
 
Coney said:
The internet is such a small place that I would be terrified that someone would come across the image and recognize it as being just a stock image. I plan to use a pseudonym for one of my ventures but it will be my face attached to it. There is no way around that for what I am trying to do.
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So the odds of them recognizing your face attached to a false name is lower than recognizing some random false face attached to a false name?

How hard is it to get an unfamiliar picture of a face really? There are 7 billion+ people on the planet, and most of them consider $10 a lot of money. Hell you could even pay a photoshopper to tweak the features a tad so it's technically not a face of a real person.
 
It's obviously the best to have be upfront and honest about who you are and level of expertise, but I'm sure we all know that there's a lot of author personas around, ranging from anonymous blog characters to outright fakes.

Example I found in a health niche for a rather successful site, where the author was supposed to be a nutrition student. Then when I googled the image, he was also on another site a medical student with a different name. The two sites were owned by the same guy. He had done it more clever than most in using what I think is paid model photos, so they won't turn up on Tineye as a stockphoto.

What are your thoughts on this?

Legally
Ethically
Marketing wise
 
I've received great photos of people from offshore workers using microworkers. Target whatever country has the look of the ethnic group you're going for in your profile. Part of completing the task was signing the release form, which can be very broad. Then, I had one of my outsourcers check all the photos through google images to make sure google had never seen them before.

Boom, I've got totally unique, real photos that will never be recognized as a purchased photo whenever I need to create profile photos for pseudonyms.
 
I ended up buying a bunch of stock photos of a particular model so that I can have a variety of images for my persona, and then in my various profile pictures I just crop the persons face out of a much larger picture and I would always horizontally flip the image to make it a little different lol.

I dunno if the flipping matters, but I figured maybe cropping and flipping it would prevent any reverse image search from associating the image with its original source...
 
Tcwiggins03 said:
I ended up buying a bunch of stock photos of a particular model so that I can have a variety of images for my persona, and then in my various profile pictures I just crop the persons face out of a much larger picture and I would always horizontally flip the image to make it a little different lol.

I dunno if the flipping matters, but I figured maybe cropping and flipping it would prevent any reverse image search from associating the image with its original source...
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Yes, that was my plan too, have you tried searching with Tineye or similar to see if it works?
 
Using Tineye it looks like flipping and cropping prevented the image from being associated with the original stock image (which i got from shutterstock), but it looks like a couple of other people did the same thing and used it as a profile pic, both on Russian sites.
 
Tcwiggins03 said:
Using Tineye it looks like flipping and cropping prevented the image from being associated with the original stock image (which i got from shutterstock), but it looks like a couple of other people did the same thing and used it as a profile pic, both on Russian sites.
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Consider doing things like increasing the contrast while raising the brightness, and slightly altering the color saturation and maybe slapping a cooling or warming filter over it. There's enough things you can do. Rotate it by 5 degrees, stretch it vertically or horizontally a bit, etc.
 
Also make sure to remove any EXIF data from the image. At the very least it'll hide the obvious relationship to search engines if the stock image is used on other sites.

Shifting the color palette slightly probably helps too, or you could go above and beyond by do color replacements in photoshop on the person's shirt from red to blue, change the color of their tie, skin color, etc...
 
My thought would be to go to Model Mayhem (or whatever is the cool site now for women who want to be models and the clowns who take photos of them as a hobby) and hit up some chick to let you take a few pictures of her outside of a McDonalds for like $20. They could brag about getting "paid modeling work," since the overwhelming majority of them haven't gotten paid for a damn thing, so it's a major win-win.

If you keep up with her contact information, then you can revisit that if you need more pictures later too. I just feel like it gives you more control over it than the stock pictures idea, it probably costs about the same and you don't have to worry about "what if people find out they're stock images" or whatever.
 
Also, another simple trick. You can always user layers in Photoshop, Inkscape, or whatever advanced photo editor you might use. Idea being, trace and copy the profile, then swap out the background.

Also, you can use curves or other types of distortion on the profile layer. Make 'em gain or lose a few pounds! :wink: For inspiration, just check out some of the Instagram fitness personalities getting their digital "enhancement" game on. Looks straight up ridiculous sometimes, but hey, gets 'dem LIKES! :cool:

The general idea is, you're trying to create unique "patterns". People's eyes pickup on familiar patterns, especially if it's their own picture they've seen before. Software or algorithms, like optical character recognition (OCR) also pickup on this stuff. Most of the time, just a couple simple changes, like flipping the profile or whole image, changing color/contrast, etc. are usually plenty to break those patterns.
 
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