Should You Post a Privacy Notice on Your FetLife Profile?

If you’ve been on FetLife for any length of time, you’ve probably come across this little snippet of text at least once or twice before:

“WARNING: Any institution or person using this site or any of its associated sites for study, projects, or personal agenda do not have my permission to use any of my profile or pictures in any form or forum, both current or future. You do not have my permission to copy, save, or print my pictures for your own personal use, including, but not limited to, saving them on your computer, posting them on any other website, or this one and passing them off as your own. If you have or do, it will be considered a violation of my privacy and will be subject to all legal remedies.”

Or perhaps this one:

“To Sydney University and any other institutions or individuals using this site or any of its associated sites for studies or projects – YOU DO NOT have permission to use any of my profile or pictures in any form or forum both current and future. If you have or do, it will be considered a serious violation of my privacy and will be subject to legal ramifications.”

This is a notice that many, many, many users post on their profile, apparently motivated by a worry that people might otherwise copy their pictures, writings and other personal stuff and share them far and wide.

Is this a legitimate worry?

Well… sort of. Pictures and writings do get copied from FetLife… but these disclaimers really aren’t a very good way to address the issue. To understand why, let’s first take a look at some of the people who might conceivably lift content from your profile.

Who might copy content from FetLife?

Academic researchers

Kink is a subculture, and researchers often study subcultures. In doing so some use FetLife as a source, and have been known to:

Quote a comment or part of a user’s profile
Describe media that can be found on FetLife
Describe a specific user’s interests and fetishes

In doing so, let’s be clear, they’re not breaking the law AND they’re not doing anything unethical. Anyone can access FetLife. Material published there is, basically, as public as material published anywhere else on the internet… and material published on the internet can be quoted or described for the purposes of research or reportage.

If someone including a brief quote from your profile in an academic paper is undesirable… you might think posting a privacy notice is a good idea. And you might be right: given that researchers must be able to demonstrate that they are being ethical in their work, a notice asking them not to use material from your profile would certainly deter them.

On the other hand… is being mentioned in an academic paper really a problem? The audience for academic stuff is tiny, any quotes will be brief, and it’s extremely unlikely that they’ll use anything sensitive or identifying (especially since there shouldn’t be identifying information on your FetLife profile in the first place). Academics using FetLife, generally speaking, do no harm… instead their work actually broadens the understanding of kinky people and kinky communities.

Before slapping up a privacy notice, you should ask yourself if that’s something you really object to.

Well-intentioned idiots

The people most likely to copy pictures and text from FetLife profiles are, in fact, your friends and fellow kinksters. Most of the time they don’t mean to cause any harm when they copy something – they just see something cool, want it on their profile, and hit copy/paste without thinking.

Indeed, that’s EXACTLY how the viral privacy notices we’re talking about in this article are propagated.

Having people copy your stuff without giving proper credit is part and parcel of being on social media. And a privacy notice will rarely help (especially if it’s a privacy notice that specifically targets academic institutions, like the ones above)

The person blithely nabbing your content almost certainly hasn’t read your profile, and definitely didn’t read FetLife’s Terms of Service when they signed up for a profile. Chances are they won’t even notice your beautifully-crafted privacy disclaimer.

Nefarious wankers

If you’ve very unlucky (or have shitty friends) it’s conceivable that someone might copy material from your profile with the express intent of taking credit for your work, harassing or blackmailing you, or persuading others to harass you.

This kind of behaviour is vanishingly rare, by the way. But it does happen. And posting a privacy notice on your FetLife profile isn’t going to stop it.

Someone who copies material from your profile for underhanded reasons doesn’t care how you feel about it, and isn’t likely to respect your wishes. They’re also probably smart enough to know that the threat of “legal action” is an empty one.

Should YOU post a privacy notice?

As you can see from the above, privacy notices are mostly (but not entirely) useless. And, to add to the argument against them, they sound ridiculous. I mean, just look at this:

“To Sydney University and any other institutions or individuals using this site or any of its associated sites for studies or projects – YOU DO NOT have permission to use any of my profile or pictures in any form or forum both current and future. If you have or do, it will be considered a serious violation of my privacy and will be subject to legal ramifications.”

The scare caps. The empty threat of legal “ramifications”. The pseudo-formality. The redundancies. The general air of bullshit. Posting a message like this means that you instantly come across as ill-informed, gullible, and generally bad at understanding technology.

Instead, here’s a privacy notice that covers your bases without making you sound like an obnoxious fool:

“Please don’t use any material from my profile or writings without permission.”

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. If you really, really must post a privacy notice, the above is all you need… and, to be honest, you don’t even need that.

But… doesn’t FetLife itself steal your stuff?

Nope. Read the Terms and Conditions. They need permission to reproduce your stuff… but that’s so that they can serve it up as part of the normal functioning of the website. The idea that FetLife is stealing and profiting from your material is a fantasy.

What’s the deal with Sydney University?

Many of the viral privacy notices that circulate FetLife mention “Sydney University” in particular (they probably mean to say “the University of Sydney”). Why this particular institution? Well… I have no idea. Researchers from Sydney don’t seem to have taken an unusual interest in FetLife over the years, and there’s no specific study from the UoS that might have given birth to this trend.

The most likely reason why “Syndey University” gets mentioned so often is that someone just added the name of an institution to their privacy notice on a whim, in order to make it sound more cool and official. It got picked up and circulated… and now we’re stuck with it. Hurrah.