The price of not forgetting

Mind what you show

A while ago, I saw something both unusual and attractive in a face online, and did wonder who it was. I was gripped by curiosity but unaware of the tools at my fingertips to satisfy it.

In one of those events of one thing leading to another online, I happened upon PimEyes, a website that thralls the Internet for image similarities, it uses a form of Artificial Intelligence and for the free product, it is good.

I did find the face and just the other pictures and URLs you could not visit on the free version was revelatory. Let's just say you do not want to put pictures online on sites and profiles that could leave you compromised.

That it out of face

The same happened with a chap with totally enviable model looks, I found out where he took his modelling pictures from one of the URL results, but some other pictures were in flagrante dilecto, giving full expression to his sexual proclivities.

The prude in me did wonder how such a beautiful man could be up to such naughtiness. Even in my wildest years, my nudity never included a face, which must be a law, a rule never to be broken regardless of your state of sobriety, except where that is your clear intention.

It’s somewhere online

However, more pertinent was the impression of the Internet never forgetting, when a website I used for a core part of work research went offline months ago.

As I needed information only it could provide, in simplicity, I found the Wayback Machine, a website that does a sweep of the Internet, it periodically captures literally anything published online, it is an internet archiving resource. I was back in my element for the recall of an essential service.

My blog started in December 2003, hosted by a local company in Scotland that I thought I was supporting until they decided they found no more pleasure in hosting blogs in mid-2010. The harsher lesson was they used proprietary tools which made it impossible to migrate my blog to another hosting provider.

We were given 18 months to do whatever we could to get our content off before the hosting facility closed down in 2012. It took a good few weeks to copy each of the over 1,500 blogs to another location, but I lost the images, internal links, and interactions in comments.

Publish and be damned

Imagine, 13 years later, I plugged my old URL in the Wayback Machine and up came captures from 2003 to 2012, including comments.

All was not lost, just somewhere, if you knew where to find it. That is both a solution and a problem, how you can find what you thought you had lost, but worse still is what others can find that you had totally forgotten, you had done.

When Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington was being blackmailed to be left out of the saucy memoirs of his mistress Harriette Wilson, he retorted, “Publish and be damned.” The publisher Joseph Stockdale did publish, but retribution came through others who ruined him with libel suits.

To many of us, there is probably no fear of libel or defamation, just the unfortunate situation of someone being able to dig up something from the past and make it relevant to the present, at a point of ascendancy, that you might have to relinquish an honour, an accolade, or a position in ignominy.

Think about what you post or court controversy at your peril.