Lately, I’ve seen all kinds of whining and crying about maymay’s fetlife proxy. For those who’ve been ignoring the whole thing, maymay’s proxy lets you see any public content on fetlife without logging in. Because, you know, the ‘one simple step‘ signup is such a high barrier to entry and all. And it’s not as if bugmenot already has login information for fetlife.
People, by attacking maymay, you’re just shooting the messenger. I’m not saying you have to like him, I’m not saying he’s never abrasive, I’m saying that all the proxy does is make a huge security flaw impossible to ignore. Ironically, the flaw isn’t even that Fetlife is insecure. The problem is that Fetlife tells you it’s secure when it’s not. To quote Fetlife’s own front page from the ‘Why Join Fetlife?’ section:
2. It’s Secure
We have a fetish for security. That’s why we’re the first social network to be 100% SSL. The same security banks use.
This is what we call a sham. Even if Fetlife’s account security were perfect, it wouldn’t matter. Nothing you put on the internet is every really ‘private’, especially not on a website that tells you your pictures are private when anyone with a Fetlife account can see them. There were only 1,528,331 members at the time I wrote this post, but hey, I’m sure all of them are trustworthy, upstanding kinksters. No need to worry about being the next Cpl Jim Brown.
I even like Fetlife. I like being able to have discussions with fellow pervs from all over the world. I like being able to keep up with what my kinky friends are up to. I just don’t kid myself that Fetlife is a safe place to put face pics or private information.
For fuck’s sake stop crying that the sky is falling when all maymay did is point out the whole left behind when it fell in ages ago.
The irony of people complaining about Maymay’s telling them they’re playing in front of an open window, like he shined a spotlight on them is rather delightful.
Thank you for transforming silence into language and action.
I should have linked kininexile’s post, but here’s an especially relevant snippet: “If you can not afford to be outed you can not afford to use Fetlife.”
Most people will probably be okay putting their naked pictures on fetlife. That really is great for them, but I think if Fetlife is going to advertise itself as a safe place to be kinky, they have a responsibility to make it clear that safe for most people is not the same as safe for absolutely everyone. If they just dropped the attempt to make people think their images are safe (it took me about a minute to figure out how to get past Fetlife’s attempt to disable right-click save with chrome’s developer tools, how long do you think that’s going to keep out a malicious reporter or your embittered ex-spouse?) and sprinkled a few reminders around the profile editing and picture up loading pages that people who can’t afford to be outed need to be very very careful, I’d be perfectly fine with Fetlife’s (lack of) security.
Facebook certainly has plenty of its own security issues, but at least they aren’t kidding anyone about it. When you can right-click save any picture on facebook, it’s pretty obvious that you can’t expect anything you post there to stay private.