Someone posted a private video of me. What do I do?

1. Save the evidence before you do anything else

Everything after this step depends on having links. Report forms ask for exact addresses. Police ask for dates. And pages disappear, sometimes because your report worked, which is a good outcome that also destroys your proof if you did not keep a copy.

For every page you have found:

• Copy the full web address, not just the site name.
• Take a screenshot that shows the address bar and the date.
• Note the username of whoever posted it, and the upload date if it is shown.
• Keep every message from anyone who contacted you about it.

Put all of it in one folder. You will be pasting from this folder repeatedly over the next few days, and having it in one place is the difference between an afternoon and a fortnight.

2. Find every copy, not just the one you were sent

Almost nobody finds only one. The same clip gets re-uploaded to a second site within days, mirrored so it reads left to right, cropped to remove a watermark, or cut into pieces and dropped inside longer compilations. Reporting one page while five others stay up is the part that makes people feel like nothing is working.

Searching your own name finds the copies that bothered to use your name. Renaming a file takes ten seconds, so that misses most of them. What works is matching the video itself: the actual picture and the actual sound. That is what the free check here does, and it finds clips as short as about six or seven seconds.

3. Pick the fastest route for each copy

There are four, and the one most articles recommend is often not the right one. Take them in this order.

Report it to the site itself

Every large platform has a form for private content shared without consent, usually separate from its general abuse form and separate from its copyright form. It does not ask who owns the copyright. Use this one first. It is normally the fastest, and often the only step you need.

Register it with StopNCII

StopNCII.org creates a fingerprint of your image or video on your own device and shares only that fingerprint with participating platforms, which then block matching uploads before they go live. Your file is never uploaded to them. It does nothing about copies that are already up, so it complements the reports rather than replacing them.

Send a copyright notice, if the video is yours

If you filmed it, you own it, and a takedown notice is a formal request that sites have strong legal reasons to act on quickly. If the other person held the camera, this route is not available to you, and trying it anyway wastes days you do not have.

Report it to the police

If you are being threatened, blackmailed or harassed, or if you were under 18 when it was filmed, this is not the last resort. It is the first call. Sharing private sexual images without consent is a criminal offence in a growing number of countries, and threatening to share them almost always is.

4. Expect it to come back, and plan for that

Removal is not one event. A file that was up once tends to reappear, sometimes months later, on a site nobody had heard of. That is the part that grinds people down, and it is the reason the checking is worth repeating rather than doing once and hoping.

Two things reduce it: StopNCII, which blocks matching uploads on participating platforms before they appear, and having something watch for new copies so you hear about them in days rather than from a stranger with a link.

5. Look after yourself while you do this

You do not have to be the one who looks. Ask someone you trust to do the searching and the reporting with you or for you. It is legitimate to hand this to a friend and go outside.

There are also organisations that do this work full time and will help for free: the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative in the US, the Revenge Porn Helpline in the UK, and StopNCII worldwide. If you were under 18 when the video was made, use Take It Down and contact the police. We do not run any of these and we get nothing from linking them.