Years ago, at the start of the interwebs, and long before blogging became a thing which was so easy to do, there was a web site designed for the pathetic edification of spurned men. Its subject matter was compromising photos of ex girlfriends. From what I was told (ahem – ed) the photos were fairly innocuous by today’s somewhat more gynecologically educational samplings. Those pictures were mostly blurry scans of old Polaroids with younger topless girlfriends having a good time around the pool, at the beach and so on.
At some stage the bloke who had squirreled a photo away in a shoe box, behind old running shoes in his cupboard, had fallen out with the formerly young lady and decided to send the pictures to a lonely geek who would in turn put them up in his website called exGirlFriends dot something or other.
Today there is a breaking story of a young woman who on visiting one of the WWII concentration camps, took a selfie of herself. There is quite a stink about it on social media. In looking for the picture in writing this, I stumbled onto lots of disturbing stuff, far more troubling than a bunch of topless college kids. You can google “selfies in serious places” yourself.
So apart from waffling on about my depraved early internet surfing; what is this all about?
Seeing those topless pictures, I have always counselled my sons about the risk of allowing compromising photos of themselves to be taken at all. But more than that, today I had reason to write to one of my clients and ask him to open a separate private GMail address for us to communicate through during the negotiations for the sale of his business.
Earlier this year I sold a business in which the seller had for years used a generic domain name for his email address which was both his personal and his business address. For a long time all his personal, religious, political and anti establishment stuff came to the same inbox as his product orders, customer queries and medically sensitive correspondence. So too, were discussions between he and I about the various sellers who had been interested in buying the business.
The address became an issue once he had accepted a rather nice offer. The buyer quite understandably wanted to have that email address. It’s a bit like feeling entitled to the Post Office box of the company, its premises, telephone number and web site; and rightly so.
So think about that from now on if you use your work email address for personal stuff. It is after all a very inexpensive exercise to get yourself a GMail account. Actually it’s free, and you can access it off any web site or smart phone, wherever you are. And it’s yours for life. Did I mention that it costs nothing. Ever. Get two. Sam Cowan has a Twitter account for her dog. You can have two GMail accounts. And then when you sell your business, it won’t be with a fear of embarrassment after the fact.
Do it if you are even remotely likely to sell your business one day.