Let’s have some fun today (assuming you’re not at work — the imagery you’re going to be exploring today is definitely not safe for work, though this entry will not be directly linking to any, so this blurb of text is safe for work [1]). We’re going to see some amusing pictures, some stupid pictures, and some fairly hot/steamy pictures, all at the expense of people who just don’t get some very basic, simple aspects of publishing photographic “work” online.

[1] Yeesh. How fucking “meta” can I possibly get?

Here’s all you need to do to see all three kinds of these pictures:

1. Browse to http://photobucket.com/.
2. In the search box that appears right on that page, enter the word “private” and click the [Search] button.
3. Have a bit of patience; the first page won’t have much entertaining stuff on it, but just keep browsing result pages.

You will come across four basic picture types:

1. Pictures somehow related to the military (i.e. a “private” in the military).
2. Silly/funny pictures making jokes about (or in the context of) the military.
3. Pictures definitely intended for MySpace (or other social networking sites) admonishing the viewer for trying to read a “private” profile.
4. Nude, topless, or otherwise naughty pictures that some dipshit thinks is actually set to “private” just because the tag “private” is attached to their pictures.

Types 1 and 2 are not of interest; the jokes in #2 are completely stupid

Type 3 is mildly entertaining, if only because of the wide variety of ways people have come up with to insult a viewer. Is there seriously such a huge problem on MySpace of people stalking other people that it’s not only become necessary to set profiles to “private,” but to also create custom insult graphics to show people who “try to sneak in anyway?” I’m obviously out of the loop, but I’m admittedly a touch curious how one can even set up such a feature on their MySpace profile — whenever I look at someone’s profile that’s private, the site just slaps me with a “you must be Foo’s friend to see Foo’s pictures!” message. I also love the irony of a person thinking (whether correctly or not) they are so important/popular online that they must be being stalked. They have to create online personas that get so popular they can only be viewed by a “select few.” It’s just funny to create a profile on a social networking site to meet people, only to cut off access to all the social features after awhile to stop meeting people

My favorite is “Private!! Because it’s not any of your business who I talk to, what I say, or what I do on a daily basis. So worry about yourself & get a freakin life” … um, so if it’s not my business, why are you publishing it on a public forum that is so fundamentally broken you have to create a “get a life” graphic to warn the non-blessed away?

Type 4 is the real pay-dirt. Keep flicking through the results, and you’ll find supposedly “private” moments caught on cameras and published for the world to see by less-than-clueful people. There’s plenty of nipples poking through shirts, women kissing women, women in their bras (leaving “private” messages for their husbands), women in bikinis, smiling mugshots, hentai, women wearing butt-floss, naked men (blech! My eyes! They burn!), ultrasounds, and more.

I should explain the difference between a “tag” and a “permission setting,” too. Tags are just simple words or phrases that can be applied to pictures, blog posts, or basically any other “chunk” of information. In almost all systems, individual tags are completely meaningless to the computers that help you link tags to items. Google Mail is an exception, using special tags like “inbox” or “trash” to represent your inbox and trash folders, but again, even those are just tags, but the Gmail software treats them special.

Almost everywhere else, though, sites don’t give any special consideration to any tag. You can group your items by tag, of course, and tagging is a very useful organization tool, but it generally doesn’t assign special meaning to specific tags unless the site is built to do so (I tend to agree, actually, that tags should sometimes have special meaning — “private” should be private, for example, but it usually isn’t).

Just tagging a picture “private” but not actually setting the picture’s permissions to “only viewable by me/by a select group of people” has absolutely zero effect on whether I can see it or not. Thanks for showing me your boobs, though. The world needs mind-bogglingly stupid people (of both genders) to provide titillation for the rest of us  Hehehe.

And to the guy who concocted a “private” warning graphic that reads: “i wonder what you’ll do all day, now that you can’t read my profile?!? i figured this will help you girls GET OVER ME! your welcome :)”, I have a few notes for you:

• “I wonder…” statements are just that — statements, not questions. You’re not asking a question, you’re saying you wonder about something.
• You’ve proven you can find the caps lock key, so why not capitalize those i’s?
• Those girls? They’re totally over you. Trust me. They’re fucking men much hotter than you now.
• It’s “you’re,” not “your”

Thanks for the entertainment, though.