Whatever you put online may very well stay online for the rest of human history. While that may seem a bit paranoid it is unfortunately becoming a very real truth. Every picture or comment you post on Facebook or any other social media site to include the free photo sites can and often do become very public. Every post in the forum is tagged by Google. While you might think everything you post belongs to you that is not the case. Your photos and comments are often quoted by others and a copy of it moves under their name. So when you erase your data it may not really be gone. And what is worse, you will not know where it is. A couple of years a go a father traveling overseas found his family picture plastered on a French billboard advertising a product he’d never heard of. They got it from his online photo album.
There is a project that is funded by the Mellon Foundation called the “Way Back Machine" http://archive.org/web/web.php. This project is archiving everything on the web. I don't know about you, but I'm not sure if I would want people thousands years from now knowing only that I existed because all I left behind me was a picture drunken of me with a can of Budweiser, wearing cow horn hat, and a torn T-shirt stating ”I’m with stupid” as the only evidence that I ever existed.
Job Search
If you who are in the workforce you should use significant caution with your postings- especially on a job search. Potential employers are researching social media sites for promising resumes. When a researcher from a company runs across pictures or comments involving a candidate (you) that are derogatory the opportunity to be hired by that company evaporates like a drop of water on Mars.
Build Backup
So, the Peacekeepers warn you to be careful what you put online. There are several builds in-world Peacekeepers have seen over the years where the kind of pictures & content could be considered in bad taste. Fortunately search engines like Google have yet to penetrate virtual world content (stuff on signs in picture objects). So as far as Active Worlds content is concerned you're probably safe – for now. Unfortunately, http://tangent.imatowns.com/ is no longer working with version 5.2. That means that it is no longer possible for you to locate lost property in AlphaWorld using that tool.
The tip for this month is to keep in your teleport list a record of all the places you post content in Active Worlds. If you do not do this it's entirely possible that you could lose and never be able to find again your builds. While it is possible to relocate builds using the AW Mapper program (in AlphaWorld only) http://www.imabot.com/alphamapper/ you will find that it has not been updated for a long time and if your build is recent it may do you no good.
A tip of the hat to Aleya who led me to write this particular tip: