Browsing Tumblr the other day, the thought crossed my mind – not for the first time – of the trouble that a boarding school girl would be in if she was caught having viewed porn. Specifically, a propos Tumblr, I imagined having her own very vanilla site, full of kittens and libraries and pretty things, and merrily updating it from the school computers.
That her site was entirely innocent would be her defence; she wouldn’t have realised that Tumblr could also give others access to the list of other people’s posts that she had ‘liked’.* And, to her shame, her browsing past and sexual preferences would be clear for all to see on the printout on her housemaster’s desk -before he shamed her further by having her bend over, lifting her skirt and tugging down her knickers, and administering her first-ever caning.
* http://www.tumblr.com/liked/by/…
I think at “settings -> dashboard” there’s an option “let others view the posts I’ve liked” or something like that that you can turn off. So not everyone has a “liked by” page. If she was a clever girl…