Beware the internet

There are three types of spanko in this world.

Some have very high visibility public profiles - I'm thinking Sarah Gregory, Clare Fonda, Ariel Anderssen, Pandora Blake, Jillian Keegan and so forth. They are so open about their active interest that pretty well most people who know them will also be fully aware of their proclivities. They are not the slightest bit concerned by the thought that someone who comes across them outside of the realms of spanking will probably learn about their spanking interests and activities sooner or later.

At the other extreme are those who guard their identity and interests very carefully and make sure that people they encounter in their day-to-day lives will never learn about their spanking interests. The truth is that many people fall into the third category, to a greater or lesser extent.

The very first time I met someone in real life who I knew was a very active person in the world of spanking and whose face would be recognised by many readers of this blog, I was immediately relaxed and found them incredibly easy to talk to. When I went home I began thinking about how open I'd been. Taking a few keywords from things I'd said I dived into Google. It took me less than a minute for those keywords to throw up some photographs of me with my non-scene name and details of where I worked. I wasn't (and I'm still not) worried - I trust this person completely.

Some people go further and have posted photos of themselves on sites only likely to be viewed by other people with similar interests such as FetLife or Spanknet. They would argue that there is no reason why people seeing them there would have any reason to 'out' them to the outside world. Some people will even have gone as far as having modelled for spanking-related websites and still feel confident that those without an interest in spanking and CP would never see them. They may also have their face pictured on vanilla sites, and the problem lies therein.

There is a very clever search engine out there called Facecheck ID. It uses facial recognition to scan the internet for people it thinks might match an image you provide. There are lots of reasons why this could be useful. For example, if you get friendly with someone and have some concerns about their past you could search and might find images of the same person linked to some criminal activity or other nefarious enterprise. Or, when someone ‘meets’ a person through a dating site and that person is on the other side of the world, it could help them to uncover that the person they are communicating with has been sending them another person’s images to create a fake identity.

I have played around with the search engine – right now you only get five free searches and you need to be patient as you’re usually in a long queue, but it’s very interesting. I put in a photo of myself that is not on the internet and searched. It did find two actual images of me from sites which it indicated were highly probable matches (it ranks all of those it suggests}. It also found several more that were not me but which it was less sure about – several were of a very high-profile actor, but I can assure you that it isn’t flattering to look like him! I then tried putting in the face of a spanko model, partly because I was curious if they had worked for any sites I hadn’t seen before. The first model I tried, I did find several matches from well-known sites and then a few others it was less sure about who I was confident were not the same person. The second model I tried, the search engine also identified with high probability a few matches from the sort of sites I was expecting but then there was one, a bit less confident match, that looked very much to me like the person in question. Curious, I followed the link and was able to confirm it was the same person and the site was completely unrelated to their spanking activity.

The problem is that someone interested in a person’s vanilla world might use Facecheck ID to see if they can find more sites featuring their vanilla activity, could suddenly see images of the person in their non-vanilla work.

You do need to be careful out there!