When my husband and I were first dating, we were in a long distance relationship. We communicated with each other a lot over webcams, and we also took sexually-oriented photos of ourselves to send to each other, and some together. These were meant to be private, but emailing more than a few photos at a time is time consuming and wasteful, and since I had a server with a gallery already on it it made more sense to use that. Albums could be “hidden” or password protected so that the general populace didn’t see them. So I put pictures of myself there. They were intended for him alone (though admittedly there was a slightly off-color more public album, but it had subalbums which were likewise hidden and/or password protected and again, just intended for him. Additionally, being a medical guy (he was in school at the time still, he was interested in seeing the photos from my actual reconstructive surgery that I had after I lost 123lbs and had to deal with skin issues. The surgery I had was not considered cosmetic, it was considered reconstructive*, for what it’s worth. Anyway, out of my own personal curiosity and because the surgeon offered it I opted to have the photos taken during the surgical procedure burned to a disk for me to keep. As I said, my now-husband was curious from a medical perspective so I put those pictures in a totally different album outside the main album entirely, so that it would’t even show up on the main page, even had it not been a “protected” album.
So there were compromising pictures “on the internet” but they were intended for an audience of one, and use the gallery software’s tools to make them (I may have missed some, I’m not sure) private so that only he could see them.
Sadly, my gallery software was not up to date and many improvements had been made. A few years ago I took the plunge and upgraded to the new gallery software. In the process I removed all the compromising photos and didn’t move them to the new server. The old server I went back and forth on, but ultimately decided to leave as an unlinked relic because many of my livejournal posts and such had directly linked images from it, etc, which would now be rendered broken images.
What I didn’t realize was that there was a back way to see images, even if they were in protected directories. Now, it takes a certain kind of person to go to the effort of finding those kinds of images, and the same or worse kind of person (really, truly, on the inside karmic level) to take glee in sharing these and laughing over them, trying to find even worse ones, and pretending that they were intended for a public audience… however that is what happened. Had I realized these images could be found by anyone but my husband for whom 99% of them were intended during our LDR years with the proper backdoor secrets, I would have removed the extraneous old gallery quickly enough as it had only marginal use for me. I largely ignored its existence.
But now it seems the cat is out of the bag and the members of a certain other place are taking glee in sharing them, making judgment calls on me for them, making fun of the way I look, making fun of the way my husband looks…behaving like 15 year olds, IMO. Naturally, I took them down, but I’m sure some of these fine members of society have saved them locally and will use them to whatever ends they desire as a way to “get at me.”
I have several comments for those kinds of people. First, the vast, vast majority of those pictures were intended for an audience of one, and were (at least to my knowledge) protected from public view. Second, I never claimed to be America’s Next Model. Chances are, I would need brain bleach if I saw you in a similar photo–but I bet your husband/wife wouldn’t agree. That’s the case here. These were casual and singularly directed photos–some not bad, some worse than others, some I didn’t actually remember uploading and may have been uploaded by him. I considered them to be in private folders (like I said the older version of that software had “security” on it but I probably trusted it too much. Plus I haven’t touched the gallery in years and who knows what workarounds may have come in that time. Or what settings may have changed when I did the migration of the albums I wanted in the new gallery . For all I know that changed the properties of some of the albums.
Intentionally digging through as many as possible, posting them on a message board and making fun of them (in many ways assigning completely incorrect context to them, but I only read two pages of the thread so I can’t characterize everything that was said. Anyway, intentionally doing such a thing… especially when you get into areas that were very obviously privately segregated and not intended for public viewing (my “public viewing” gallery images are generally pretty tame)… well… it says quite a lot about you as a person. About the malicious way that you think, and about how quick you are to tear down another human being if you possibly can, spread lies or guesses when you can to make the situation seem worse than it is, and in general intentionally try to hurt someone as much as is in your power to do so… you people who fit that description… how do you look at yourself in the mirror? How do you sleep with yourself at night?
I admit that I fucked up by not realizing there was a different way to access the photos that didn’t go through the password protection. But it was pretty clear that these were personal photos meant for one other person. We were in a long distance relationship and didn’t see each other much and this is the best we could do.
If you find me unattractive… well, guess what. I’ve looked through the galleries here and that describes probably 90% of the people who post here. And yet many of them are married or with an SO and those people find them attractive. They might like a photo of you that to me would have me retching. This is just how attraction works. Nobody is universally attractive to everyone else, and even unattractive people have those who find them hot.
I realize this has gotten long, but I just wanted to say for the record that I think it’s pretty low and scuzzy to go to lengths to find ways to make fun of another person’s appearance, especially when they’re taking private photos for their SO only to see. My mistake was relying too much on the gallery’s built-in security.
But yet that gallery has been sort of drifting in space and somebody had to go through some trouble to bring these photos to light. And once they did, did they do what an honorable, good at heart person would do? No. They used them in a campaign to try to ridicule another human being–one with a mental disorder at that, so kind–as much as possible. They saved them to their computer so they could prolong their hate-filled agenda whenever they wanted to.
Well, let me say this about that. I’m really not all that bothered by who sees my body. It’s been different sizes and shapes that I’ve been uncomfortable with, but it is in decent enough shape with clothes on that I’m happy with it these days. Without clothes on, I trust my husband to love me anyway, and overlook the things that aren’t perfect. Gory surgical pictures are gory surgical pictures no matter who they’re of. I’m not embarrassed by those. I’m not really all THAT upset that most of the photos were seen at all, it’s the intent behind it and also the incorrect beliefs about my motivations for putting pictures online. As I said I considered it a private way for my husband (then-boyfriend) to exchange photos when we were dating over long distances, but what the hell. It’s a body. We all have one. Most of them aren’t attractive (or attractive people wouldn’t be held in such high esteem. Yours probably falls at least as low on the scale as mine. Yet your SO probably likes it anyway. Go figure.
I have very little desire to have a long conversation about this topic, I just had some things I wanted to say about it. I thank the person who brought it to my attention. If you really feel you need to comment here, don’t get too upset if I don’t feel it worth much to reply to you.
What this incident says about me is that I wasn’t as careful as I could have been when sharing personal moments with my boyfriend. What it says about you (the people behind it) is that you’re cruel, petty, shallow, and cowardly. You’re bullies. And I really don’t care if you don’t like me. I don’t need people like that in my life.
Anyway, that’s the most I’m going to say about that. I’m more embarrassed by the technical breach than I am by the images that were seen.
*Except for the deviated septum and the small bit of length they took from the end of my nose, but that was very minor.
