After my last post on the topic of inadvertent data sharing with family members, Servitor left a comment reminding me that separate user accounts can help solve the problem. That’s actually very good advice. All my laptops are Windows devices and it does an excellent job of providing sand boxed environments for each user. Keeping separate email and social media accounts for kinky stuff is an obvious thing to do, but extending it all the way to your local device also makes a lot of sense.
Unfortunately iPads and apps are terrible in this respect. The Kindle app is particularly bad. Not only does it show all your books in its library, but I can’t even find a way to delete stuff from the shelf. I’ve got all sorts of random porn and kinky writing mixed in with history books, classic crime novels and modern fiction. When I visit someone’s house I always enjoy being nosy and browsing their bookcases. Unfortunately the kindle app designer thinks that not only should your bedroom and living room bookcases be equally on display, but also those well thumbed magazines stashed under your virtual mattress. Now I live in fear that anyone using my iPad will browse my electronic bookcase and get an eyeful of some bizarre BDSM fiction that I purchased on a horny whim in a lonely hotel room many moons ago.
Here’s what I think should have happened to the kindle app designer the day after he came up with his initial design specs. Maybe an hour or two with these two ladies would have encouraged him to try a bit harder.
Yup. And it really is getting worse.
Like Steve, my concern is my children so I have to be very careful indeed. I agree, tablets and phones are mostly disastrous. I had a Samsung Android tablet that helpfully kept a complete list of all my downloads, and if you wanted to delete them all you had to do was tick them one by one*… cos after all, no one is ever going to want to delete the record of hundreds or thousands of image downloads, are they?
And then these days many devices, when I first start using them, ask me cheerfully whether I want to share my photos and videos with everyone else in the house. No. Just… no, actually. I so very don’t.
Beating and nipple torture is way too good for these designers.
And we used to complain about Microsoft’s Paperclip…. (“You seem to be watching porn! Would you like me to tell everyone you know?”)
*after some months, I found a better way.
I actually had a windows phone which for a time, unknown to me, was uploading all the photographs to albums online. Since this was the same phone I used to snap session photographs, as well as my day to day life, there was all sorts of naked kinky shots online mixed in with my usual friends/family/travel shots.
Luckily, although they were all completely public, the folder name was pretty much impossible to guess, so nobody found it AFAIK. I’m guessing it was a feature I enabled or agreed to at some point in the start-up process, but I certainly don’t remember doing so. I’m just glad it didn’t decide to automatically share them all out to facebook.
-paltego