Six women in St. Louis have filed a lawsuit against a plastic surgeon who allegedly posted nude photos online of their torsos before and after surgery with their names attached to the images.

Is you website putting you at risk?

From an  ABC Morning story

Six women in St. Louis have filed a lawsuit against a plastic surgeon who allegedly posted nude photos online of their torsos before and after surgery with their names attached to the images. The women say this was done without their consent or knowledge.

The before and after photos appeared in Google images if the women's names were searched or if the doctor's name was searched, according Neil Bruntrager, the attorney representing all of the women. He said that if a viewer hovered the curser over the image, the woman's name would appear below the photo.

"Some of these women have public positions—lawyers, teachers, CPAs—all kinds of people who would be searched," Bruntrager said. "They were horrified. Every one of them has said, 'I'm embarrassed. I'm humiliated.'"

Here's what probably happened.

Images on the web use something called an 'Alt Tag' (alt = alternative) that gives information to search engines since they can't tell what images are of. These are often used when building a web site to categorize and 'tag' images so that whoever is building the website can tell what they're looking.

Hover over some of the images in the righ column and you'll see examples of Alt Tags in action.

In this case, the before and after pictures were 'labeled' with the names of the patients.... probably not intentional but it does make the women identifyable and the search engines will pick this up.

Make sure that this is not you.