Quoth Bill Nye: “Please, consider the following…”
- The Abu Ghraib atrocities were only brought to light after personal photos taken by soldiers made their way to the press.
- Students, both high school and college, are more regularly being busted for hazing and alcohol violations due to party photos shared online.
These incidents show that the proliferation of digital cameras and photo sharing websites is having a notable effect on law enforcement. No longer doe the police need to hope for a tip from some disgruntled person before they know about an infraction. Now they can just long on to any number of popular sites and search by keyword for photos of the illegal acts.
In a similar vein, a woman who’d previously been convicted of having an inappropriate relationship with one of her middle school students, was recently arrested on a parole violation. I’d not been following this but it seems the teacher created a MySpace account that police believe was intended to put her back in contact with the student. There are too many bizarre facts in this case to address them all, but suffice it to say that creating a profile on the 10th most popular website was not the best idea in the world.
Stepping back from these which are the worst case scenarios, there are still times when basic privacy issues are raised by these photo sharing sites. We’ve all been to events and parties where people were taking photos. Now those photos can quickly find their way online freely available to employers, family and complete strangers.
I will admit that I am quite paranoid in regards to having my information online. For quite some time I was very active in making sure that no photos of me were placed online. However, over the years it has become next to impossible to keep this up. I am left will little recourse but to allow my photo to be posted in this very public forum without any say in the matter.
Yes, one should always act with proper decorum so that if any photos are taken they are not cause for embarrassment (or arrest). But how many times do you pose doing something funny/bizarre/non-PC, or get caught off guard and, out-of-context, the photo looks worse than it is? These are they types of things that give me pause.
All of this falls under the general premise of information security, a topic on which I am rather keen (and have discussed previously). Though quite foreign to the general public, issues of information security are something with which they should be increasingly concerned. MySpace’s recent hiring of a former prosecutor to act as an online security officer to educate users is evidence of the importance of this idea. Safety online is something that must be looked into much more seriously than it is now.
4/16 EDIT: Newsweek story on this very topic to be published in the upcoming issue.
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Comments (2)
WTF is "middle school"? Are you in the U.S.?
Because here we go from elementary, to junior high, and then to high school.
Posted by Information Central | April 17, 2006 6:33 AM
Maybe it varies by region. They called 6-8 middle school where I grew up, but it was in the same building as elementary school. After that it was straight to high school. No junior high.
Posted by Elyas Bakhtiari | April 17, 2006 9:34 PM