Social Media in a Kinky World

Please, please, please - take this with a grain of salt and a great deal of popcorn.

And if possible, take it to heart. Carve it in there with the grain of salt - that's sure to help it stay there.

Social Media is a blessing. It gives you the chance to gather information about family and friends you would never be able to keep up with otherwise.

It exposes you to games, cultures, music and movies that never would have enriched your life without it.

It, in the case of sites like FL, creates an online community where you can meet, learn, and find yourself.

....

It also creates a whirlpool into which your personal information is sucked, on a daily basis.

• Your photos have GPS tags that show where you live, where you work, and where you hang out.
• Your posts show up on most sites with a location, and a time.
• Your purchases through the net are fed to social marketing sites that tailor advertisements to you.
• ....And build profiles (unofficially, of course) about your preferences, favorite sites, browsing times and how long you stay on.
• ....And probable age based on surfing history, probable gender (based on sales patterns and site preferences), geographical location.
• ....and occasionally the exact location given by your ISP. Some even have your home address, because some browsers upload it from the cache when they 'dump' for error fixes.
• ....and your Google+ profile has your entire browsing history, as well as any apps (adult ones included) you've installed through the Google Play Store.
• ....Apple store does it too, btw.
• Fetlife is NOT secure, no matter how much you've been told it is. It takes thirty seconds to join, and about a minute for a techie to figure out a way around the "no click" protections on your photos and videos.

I'm not trying to make you paranoid. I'm sorry if I have. But you need to understand -
What you post? It stays out there. Forever. The joke photo of the strap on you put up on Instagram a few years ago will eventually haunt you during a job interview or worse. The jokes you make about your elected leaders? They're compiled in databases - and they /will/ show up later.

This is not paranoid left-or-right-wing fantasy - it's just the reality of the internet.

So please. Please. Be aware of what you do online, and be a little circumspect.

Or at least be aware of the risks you're taking as you post those photos.

Because a very good friend just lost his job, his self respect, and his professional reputation, because he thought he was "too old" to worry about "that facebook nazi crap".