Respecting Reader Privacy

Privacy is a very important matter for us in the spanking community. I stand by my kink and I do not regard what I do as in any way wrong, sick or immoral. Still, I write under a pseudonym and I take other measures to protect my identity, because I do not want every work colleague, neighbour, former school classmate or other casual acquaintance who for whatever reason decides to google my real name to know about my intimate fantasies or see pictures of me spanking my girlfriend. Pretty much all of us spankos feel like that - we are okay with sharing our secrets with others in our community, even strangers, but not with everyone on the planet. So we use nicknames. It is a matter of privacy, not of shame or morals.

I am as fiercely protective of the privacy of my blog readers as I am of my own. For instance, I would never, under any circumstances, give the identity of someone who writes an email to me under his real name to a third party. That would be an inexcusable breach of trust, and for me, a reader's trust is sacred. If you send me emails under your real name, you do not have to worry. They are safe with me. Still, if you plan on corresponding with many different people, I would urge you to get an address under a pseudonym. While most of us spankos are as principled on matters of privacy as I am, not everyone is.

Actually, to my considerable displeasure, I find that there are a few bloggers in our community who are outright sloppy when it comes to protecting their readers' privacy. It is obviously the result of mere thoughtlessness, not malice, but that is not much of an excuse. As spanking bloggers, writing about such an intimate and private subject, we really should know better. We have to be unfailingly sensitive about issues of reader privacy. You can be reckless with your own life and take as many risks as you want, no problem - that is your business. But when it comes to the privacy of others, we have an obligation to be as circumspect as possible.

Which brings me to the subject of today's rant. I notice that a bad habit is spreading among spanking bloggers, and it is annoying me a great deal. The bad habit is called Live Traffic Feeds: little add-ons that display the geographic location of your blog visitors and the time they visited, publicly, for everyone to see. They are provided by companies like Feedjit.com, and more and more people are adding them to their blogs. "Hey, a feature where I can see where my visitors are from! How cool!" Bloggers who use the feeds are, apparently, unconcerned by the fact that everyone else can see the information, too, or that not all of their readers might be pleased to see their whereabouts made public like that.

When I visit a blog with such a Live Traffic Feed, I show up as "A Visitor from Munich, Bavaria" or something to that effect. Which is not a problem in my case - from the very beginning, I made it public knowledge that I am from Munich, it says so in my profile. But not all of us spankos are fine with their city of residence being known. My girlfriend Kaelah, for instance. When she became active on the blog, we jointly decided to not let the readers know what city in Germany she is from. She just feels more comfortable that way.

Now, if Kaelah were to leave a comment on a blog using a Live Traffic Feed, then anyone who looks at the blog around the same time and sees "A Visitor from So-and-so, Germany" on the list could make a pretty good guess that this is her. Kaelah was pretty disturbed by that realistation when it came to her recently - like quite a few others who surf the spanking blogosphere, she had not even noticed that such feeds are being used. Sometimes, the visitor lists go back several days, depending on how many visitors a blog has had recently. With the applet by Feedjit.com, one of the most popular specimens, you can access a longer list by clicking the "Real-Time View" option. Like this list recording visitors to the Feedjit.com website itself.

I just had a look at a similar Feedjit list from a spanking blog, which went back five full days, faithfully chronicling everyone who had come by during that period, the exact time of their visit, which website they came from, their browser, their operating system, and which website they went to when they left. I suppose you could make some pretty accurate connections between any recent comments on that blog and cities of residence, if you wanted to.

Sure, you can choose the option to "Remove your IP" from such a live traffic list (which I recommend you do if you have clicked the link above). And there are other methods to prevent being "seen", like disabling cookies in your browser. However, as soon as you are assigned a new IP address by your internet service provider, or clear your cache, you will be recorded again. It is annoying for you as an internet surfer to have to implement such protective measures time and again, all the more so because you should not have to implement them in the first place. Information about you should never be made publicly visible without your consent.

Indeed, companies like Feedjit.com have a funny definition of terms like "consent" or "voluntary" when it comes to recording information about people. What it means in their diction is that you can ask to have your information removed from their lists, after it has been recorded. But of course, you are never asked whether you want information about you to be recorded in the first place, and many surfers are not even aware that this is happening. Live Traffic Feeds can be difficult to spot on blogs, as they are usually pretty far "down".

You might ask, what is the big deal? It only says "a vistor" and what city that visitor is from, no names or IP addresses are given. Nonetheless, it is a violation of your readers' privacy. However small or harmless that violation may seem, it should simply never happen. It is a matter of principle. Or at least it should be for bloggers like us. Regardless of the subject we blog about, but all the more so when it is a sensitive, intimate subject like spanking. Besides, not all cities are as big as Munich, with some 1.5 million inhabitants. There are plenty of smaller ones around the globe, and there are cases where Live Traffic Feeds even display which exact part of a city a visitor is from. So even a seemingly harmless, vague piece of information like that could turn out to be a danger to a reader's privacy under the wrong circumstances.

Yes, it may be improbable, yes, it may be unlikely. But we as spanking bloggers have a responsibility to take these issues seriously. We have to operate with worst case scenarios in mind. We have to be sensitive about what we do. The point is, it might affect someone else's life. When spankos like Kaelah or I decide to blog about what we do on the internet, show our faces, even put out videos, then all of these are risks which we consciously and voluntarily decide to take. If anything negative happens as a result, we only have ourselves to blame. What pisses me off, though, is when the risks are increased, however slightly, without our consent, simply through the thoughtlessness of others. I believe that most of you in our community feel the same way as I do about their privacy. Wouldn't you like the decision about what to share about yourself to remain, at least as much as possible, in your own hands?

I thought so. That is why Live Traffic Feeds have no place on a spanking blog (or on any other blog, for that matter). If you as a blogger are curious about how many people read your stuff or where they are from, there are applications which run in the background and record the information in a manner where only you, the blog owner, can see it (well, actually, the software company which made the application can usually see it, too, but let's not go into that - I don't want to get too strict on you). However, under no circumstances should such information ever be made public.

Here at Rohrstock-Palast, I respect the privacy of my readers. I will never use Live Traffic Feeds or similar gadgets that compromise your privacy. Moreover, I will try to limit any links I have to other blogs which use them to a very small number. I am not going to "boycott" spanking blogs with Live Traffic Feeds outright, because I regard that as too much of an over-reaction (besides, it would require me to constantly check my links in case someone adds such a gadget). However, if you have a spanking blog, and if you use a Live Traffic Feed, your chances of going (or remaining) on my link list will decrease significantly, no matter how magnificent your blog is otherwise.

End of rant. Have a nice day.