If you are uploading sexually explicit photos and videos or yourself and/or your partner to the internet, you’re already living dangerously, my friend. And if you think that you will be able to keep it relatively private (or at least control who gets to see it), you’re probably kidding yourself.

That’s the takeaway from a new study by the Internet Watch Foundation. According to the study, 88% of sexually explicit content uploaded by young people made its way to third party porn sites – or what the IWF calls “parasite websites.” These are defined as sites that take pornographic images and videos from the original source and make them public.

Basically, if you think only one person or a couple of people are going to see your business, you’re gonna have a bad time.

The IWF spent 47 hours on the research, and they looked at 12,224 images and videos. Of those sexually explicit items, 10,776 had been taken from the original source and been made available for all on the parasite porn sites. That means that 88% of the content had been lifted and republished. The study found that the images and videos were appearing on 68 different “discrete” websites.

“During the course of our work we encounter large quantities of self-generated sexual content which has been copied from its original location and then uploaded elsewhere to form collections, but this is the first time we’ve been able to demonstrate the extent to which this occurs,” said IWF researcher Sarah Smith.

The IWF does provide this disclaimer:

This research did not attempt to discover if the person/people in the images had willingly taken part, or were coerced, or knew the images were going to be uploaded to the internet. It aimed to provide a snapshot of statistics about the amount of content that is currently in circulation on the internet.

But it’s safe to say that many of the owners of the 10,000+ scraped images and videos were probably not OK with winding up on a porn site.

We’ve reported on these types of porn sites before, many of which use teens’ Facebook photos. One notable example came out of Boston, when seventeen girls (some aged as young as fourteen) found that their photos had been lifted and republished in a porn setting.

The bottom line is that you should never post anything online that you expect to keep private. It’s simply not the nature of the beast. Teens need to be extra careful, because they never know how a couple of pics on a porn site could wind up negatively affecting future aspects of their lives. But as a general rule, nobody should be surprised if their nudie pics wind up on porn sites.