Someone Shared Your Private Images. Florida and Federal Law Both Address It.

The offense is committed by a person who willfully and maliciously sexually cyberharasses another person. As amended effective October 1, 2025 (chapter 2025-84, Laws of Florida), Florida defines “sexually cyberharass” as intentionally publishing to an Internet website, or intentionally disseminating through electronic means to another person, a sexually explicit image of a person without that person’s consent and contrary to their reasonable expectation that the image would remain private, where either of two conditions is met.

• Condition one: the image contains or conveys the personal identification information of the depicted person
• Condition two: that information is not in the image itself, but is contemporaneously published or disseminated in a way that someone viewing it would reasonably know it directly relates to the person in the image
• “Sexually explicit image” covers nudity, sexual conduct, and the display of semen or vaginal secretion on a person
• “Personal identification information” includes a name, an email or postal address, a phone number, a social security number, a date of birth, or any unique physical representation
• The statute requires that the person act willfully and maliciously, and that the publishing or disseminating be intentional
• A first offense is a first-degree misdemeanor. A person with one prior conviction for sexual cyberharassment who commits another one commits a third-degree felony
• Doing it for pecuniary or other financial gain is a third-degree felony, and a second or subsequent such violation is a second-degree felony
• The 2025 amendment also added a dedicated criminal limitations provision for these prosecutions at Fla. Stat. §775.15(22)
• The civil action provides injunctive relief, $10,000 or actual damages whichever is greater, punitive damages, and reasonable attorney fees and costs

Read the current statutory text at the Florida Senate’s official site.

Congress created this civil action in March 2022, and it took effect on October 1, 2022. It applies where an intimate visual depiction is disclosed without consent, in or affecting interstate commerce, by a person who knows that, or recklessly disregards whether, the individual has not consented. The statute reaches a “depicted individual”: someone whose body appears in the depiction and who is identifiable by their face, likeness, or other distinguishing characteristic such as a unique birthmark or other recognizable feature, or from information displayed in connection with the depiction. Unlike the Florida statute, it does not require that your personal identification information be carried in or published alongside the image.

• Damages: your actual damages, or liquidated damages of $150,000, plus the cost of the action including reasonable attorney’s fees and other litigation costs
• Injunctions: the court may order a temporary restraining order, preliminary injunction, or permanent injunction directing the defendant to cease display or disclosure
• Anonymity: in the statute’s words, “the court may grant injunctive relief maintaining the confidentiality of a plaintiff using a pseudonym”
• Others may sue on your behalf: where the individual is under 18, incompetent, incapacitated, or deceased, a legal guardian, estate representative, another family member, or a court-appointed person may assert their rights, and the defendant can never be that representative
• Exceptions written into the statute: no action may be brought relating to commercial pornographic content, unless that content was produced by force, fraud, misrepresentation or coercion; to good-faith disclosures to law enforcement, as part of a legal proceeding, as part of medical education, diagnosis or treatment, or in reporting or investigating unlawful content or unwelcome conduct; to a matter of public concern or public interest; or to a disclosure reasonably intended to assist the individual depicted

Read the statute at the Office of the Law Revision Counsel’s official U.S. Code site.

Florida covers an “altered sexual depiction”: a visual depiction that, through digital, electronic, mechanical or other modification, depicts a realistic version of an identifiable person with another person’s nude body parts, or engaged in sexual conduct the person did not actually engage in. An “identifiable person” is one recognizable as an actual person by face, likeness, or other distinguishing characteristic.

• Generating one: willfully generating an altered sexual depiction of an identifiable person without their consent is a third-degree felony
• Promoting one: willfully and maliciously promoting one, or possessing it with intent to maliciously promote it, without consent, knowing or having reason to know it is an altered sexual depiction, is a third-degree felony
• Soliciting one: soliciting one without consent, knowing or having reason to know what it is, is a third-degree felony
• The civil action reaches violations of the generating and promoting provisions, and provides injunctive relief, $10,000 or actual damages whichever is greater, and reasonable attorney fees and costs
• Covered platforms had to establish a removal process by December 31, 2025 and must remove a reported nonconsensual altered sexual depiction as soon as possible, and not later than 48 hours, after a valid request

Read the current statutory text at the Florida Senate’s official site.

This is the statute almost nobody talks about. Its title is “Theft or unauthorized promotion of a sexually explicit image,” and it covers a different wrong than §784.049. Not the betrayal of a private image, but the taking and the selling of one.

• Committing a theft, in violation of Florida’s theft statute, of a sexually explicit image with the intent to promote it is a third-degree felony
• Willfully possessing one with intent to promote it for pecuniary or other financial gain, knowing or having reason to know it was obtained by that theft, is a third-degree felony
• Willfully promoting one through print media, an Internet website, or other electronic means, for pecuniary or any other financial gain, without the identifiable person’s consent, is a second-degree felony
• The civil action provides injunctive relief, $10,000 or actual damages whichever is greater, and reasonable attorney fees and costs

Read the current statutory text at the Florida Senate’s official site.

Florida has protected people from the commercial exploitation of their own image since long before the internet. Section 540.08 prohibits publishing, displaying, or otherwise publicly using the name, portrait, photograph, or other likeness of a person for trade, commercial, or advertising purposes without express written or oral consent.

• The statute provides injunctive relief against further unauthorized use
• Damages include the loss or injury sustained, including an amount that would have been a reasonable royalty for the use of your likeness
• The statute expressly allows punitive or exemplary damages
• Statutory exceptions exist, including bona fide news reports having a current and legitimate public interest

Where intimate images are used to draw followers, subscribers, or paying customers to an account, this statute speaks directly to that use. Read the text at the Florida Senate’s official site.

If nothing has been posted yet, you are in a different legal position, and we want to be straight with you about it. Florida’s extortion statute makes it a crime to maliciously threaten an injury to the person, property or reputation of another, to expose another to disgrace, to expose any secret affecting another, or to impute a lack of chastity to another, where the threat is made with intent to extort money or any pecuniary advantage, or to compel the person threatened to do or refrain from any act against their will.

• That offense is a second-degree felony
• The section itself does not contain a civil cause of action
• Florida’s intimate image statutes are written around publication, dissemination, promotion, or disclosure, meaning conduct that has already happened

Read the current statutory text at Online Sunshine, the official site of the Florida Legislature.

Everything above is what the law says. This card is what it does not say. We would rather tell you where the open questions are than pretend they do not exist, because these are the questions that decide real cases.

• Deadlines. None of these statutes states a civil filing deadline on its face, so the deadline comes from general limitations law. For the Florida statutory claims, the most likely candidate is Florida’s four-year period for actions founded on a statutory liability, Fla. Stat. §95.11(3)(e). The 2023 tort reform’s two-year change applied to negligence claims, not to statutory liability. For the federal claim, which contains no limitations period of its own, the generally applicable federal default is four years, 28 U.S.C. §1658(a). Which period a court would apply to your claim, and when it started, are questions about your facts, and the clock can start earlier than people expect. Do not assume time is on your side.
• When the clock starts. Florida law addresses claims founded on a single publication, and Florida courts have also described a multiple publication rule under which each separate communication can be its own claim. Which framework governs an intimate image that was posted once, or reposted later, is not answered in the text of any of these statutes.
• Reposts. Florida appellate courts have said the analysis turns on whether a separate and distinct decision was made to republish the material. That is a question about the facts of your situation, not a question the statute answers.
• Platforms. The federal 48-hour removal duty is enforced by the Federal Trade Commission. What a platform’s failure to comply means for you specifically is a separate question from what it means for the FTC.
• Which court. Florida and federal law give different remedies, carry different requirements, and are not equally good in every case. The federal statute’s $150,000 figure and pseudonym provision are real advantages, and they do not make it the right choice every time.