history

So, back in May, I did a presentation for my gender and women's studies class about advertising, specifically the portrayal of women in ads and especially the gratuitous use of sex or sexiness in said ads. It was quite a good presentation, in my own humble opinion—at least, I got a lot of positive feedback from my classmates—and the most effective part, I think, was probably the Ad or Porn Quiz, where I showed a bunch of pictures and had the class guess which ones were ads and which were from porn movies or websites. This was the part that drew the most comments, and I was really happy with how it went over, and especially the grade I ended up with (^_^).

Now, you are probably asking what brought this up, so I'll explain: in the course of putting together the aforementioned quiz, I spent a lot of time on this very laptop looking up porn on the internet. (This led to some hilarious conversations between myself and my roommate.) I did all my searching on Google, and of course, I never bothered to clear out my history, because honestly, who uses my computer but me? And I promptly forgot all about that, until tonight when I happened to open the Google homepage by mistake and on a whim, I clicked to see what the first few things that came up on my history were, and thanks to the magic of alphabetization, they were all porn. In fact, scrolling down the list, more than half of the items on it were porn, some obviously so from the names, and others less obvious, but I remember searching for them, so I know that's what they are. My history, I notice, is different on the actual webpage than the one I get from the search box built into my browser, which is much longer and more up-to-date, so I guess when I search from there (which is much more often), it doesn't go into the same list as the one for the actual webpage? I'm not sure how that all works.

At any rate, this still wouldn't bother me, except I let my 14-year-old cousin use my laptop when she was staying with us last week, and I'm pretty sure she didn't go anyplace much except for Hotmail and Myspace, but not entirely sure, because the history doesn't differentiate between my usage and hers, and I'm on Google all the damn time. So it all boils down to the fact that she probably didn't see any of that, and if she did, she didn't say anything, but still, what if—?

Time to go "Clear Private Data" and all that jazz.