Touchy People - an ill-tempered willmatheson.com 'policy' notice
What is it about people these days that they don't want their names attached with anything online - or specifically, why do they all come to me demanding that they want off my website?
Granted, I am an impulsive person who tends to do things without permission. If someone I know has a good website, it might end up on my links page along with their full name, and in this day and age, I don't feel that people need to be asked to be linked to (although maybe I should run the idea of their full name past them). This is not 1996.
And if I'm not defaming the person, then why can I not talk about specific people? Case in point - I write an article about my Prom and Safe Grad experience, and the people I happened to be going with (ie: my date) threaten legal action when they find out about it a year later (which is a joke in itself, I know). The worst things I said were about the limo route, which I think I exaggerated so much that it would still be taken as humor. But some people have no sense of humor.
Photographs are another touchy subject, although more understandable. Most of my relatives don't seem to mind being on my website, and I don't have the ugly photos available for public view. But try putting a yearbook photo of a newly-elected Student's Council executive member on your site, and boy do the sparks ever fly. Actually, nothing that bad happened, but the woman (who has, to my knowledge, still never visited my site even though she figures quite prominently in some of my early fictitious works - fortunately she doesn't have a problem with that!) politely asked me to remove the photo the next time I saw her at school. I did - but since the only people visiting my site at that time were the students in the same school, then why care? I'll admit that I'm a poor judge of what people care about.
Oh, and going back to the Prom again - let's say you put three simple photos of you and your date on your website. In fact, let's also say that one of the photos was taken from the official website of your high school! Well, I can "let's say" all I want, but the fact is that the "Get me the hell off your website" e-mails continue to pour in. Geez, I wish I didn't go to the Prom with that woman. I also don't like the fact that her friend who alerted her to the initial article said that she got this woman to go to the prom with me because no one else would. I'd like to say that she was wrong, because there were several other women willing to go with me (they couldn't for various reasons, but notice that they didn't say they couldn't right away), and one who could, but it would have been inconvenient... for me. I kind of feel bad about that now, but she didn't seem to mind, plus she had a boyfriend anyway.
Some people don't even like being linked to, so you can imagine what their reaction would be if they made it into an article or silly story:
dear will.
i told you under no circumstances to put my <name of website>
on your links page. please remove both of the links you have of mine on
your webpage immediately!
I absolutely despise getting e-mail like this. Why can't people just say "I'd rather not be on your page?!" I suppose it doesn't matter, because I did as she requested. She's gone forever. Her loss, I say. (She also didn't tell me not to link to that page, by the way.)
One of the materials new to willmatheson.com that is bound to create some controversy is that little quoter java applet. Well, not the applet itself, which was made by a really cool scientist, but rather the quotes I added to it. Yes, they're real. Anything said to me about me can possibly become fodder for the quoter - I would never betray anything said in confidence, however. But you'll notice that most my 'contributions' to the quoter directly relate to me.
Anyway, I guess I'm just writing this to vent a little, and also to inform the masses that I will be continuing my policy of posting first and asking questions later (unless I'm doing a novella - but I'm only writing one more part to the high school one, and then that chapter of my writing career will be closed permanently.). So if you're pissed off, you'll have to e-mail me. The less threatening and demanding you are, the better. And if you're going to get annoyed that I put a yearbook photo of an entire club or society online that I either belong to or have dealings with, I really don't think you have a leg to stand on.
I hope I'll never have to draft a privacy policy! And if I do, I hope it doesn't apply retroactively, then I'd probably have to wipe out half my content right there. And I admit that my former brand of 'fiction' might have been unfair to a few people, but as far as how my links page works...
If you don't want your name (or nickname, or some other kind of alias) associated with what you're doing on the internet, then get out I say! Unless you're doing an online diary or something... I suppose I could understand that. =)