'Sexting' popular among teens [telecom]

This whole WINS news story is troubling because it goes on and on about young people's brains not being as developed, etc., and them not knowing the consequences of their actions, etc. What WINS fails to say is that times have changed and today's younger folks really don't think of naked photos as any big deal. And why should they be? Bodies are pretty. We're born naked, after all.

Which doesn't surprise me because so many parents these days want to do everything in the world except parent.

I have a 13 year-old son. It's scary that he could be forever labeled a "sex offender" doing something that hormone-addled boys (and girls) do. I don't think these parents are thinking this through. Instead of relying on the local district attorney to do their parenting, they need to get tough with the kids and need be provide them with a phone without a camera or MMS capabilities. Or no phone at all. I know that's paramount to child abuse, but it's for the children.

John

I would say that the main point is that technology has (yet again) allowed us humans to do things that are really not in our best interests.

For all the moral arguments/opinions, it boils down to people being able to do this sort of thing on a large scale because it is convenient, easy and low cost. Give the average person access to that combination, and all sorts of detrimental things happen (just look at the natural environment.....)

Pray that our advances in technology never allow nuclear/biological/chemical weapons to become that accessible.

-- Regards, David.

David Clayton Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Knowledge is a measure of how many answers you have, intelligence is a measure of how many questions you have.

I still don't see anything wrong or "wrong" with people sending out naked photos of themselves.

I also don't see how technology has made things any worse today than before. When I was a kid I read a story about how in the 1920s the telephone was encoraging people to say things that they would never say in person because the telephone was "anonymous".

I remember when the San Francisco Bay Area was so polluted that you couldn't see across the bay between Oakland and SF on a warm day. The smog was way too thick. Also, people thought you were crazy if you ate anything caught in SF bay. The water was way too polluted, too. Technology has changed all that. Between detectors and clean-up technologies and smog devices, it has been possible to double the population of the Bay Area and yet decrease air and water pollution.

I think that ultimately technology versus earlier methods comes out a wash.

This sort of thing was going on when I was a teenager, quite a few decades ago. It's just that cellphones didn't exist yet, and all anyone had were Polaroids and the US Mail. And back then you had to count to thirty after pulling the tab, separate the negative and positive, and spread the coater on the print surface....

-- scott

Or, some of us had access to a darkroom. We could use standard 35mm film. I did mostly B&W but did use color on a few occasions but it was expensive to do so becuase of the increase in number of chemicals required.

And where was this darkroom? The local Boys Club.

Ah, Polaroids! Those were all the rage when I was a kid. I saw lots of nude Polaroid photos, some of friends, but most of the girl (and sometimes boy) down the street from a party or whatever, when I was in high school.

In fact, the name Polaroid became synonymous with naked photo. "Do you have any Polaroids of her?" meant "Do you have any naked photos of her?"

As I developed my own photos I never owned a Polaroid camera. I produced my own collection of photos, though. It was amazing how many people would pose for photos, too.

So, sexting and cell phone photos are nothing new at all.

The local Catholic high school I attended had a better darkroom than I had at home, so most of the naked photos I took were developed there...

Nice! The whole post-Vatican church was awesomely liberal.

Actually, it's two very different things, with a critical distinction.

Back then, not everyone owned a Polaroid nor had access to a darkroom. Polaroid prints weren't cheap, so duplication was difficult. Further, back then, lots of kids didn't have cameras at all, if they did, they were quite cheap; only a rare few had good ones. While b&w duplicates were cheap, they weren't free, and there was still a cost to darkroom chemicals and photographic paper, as well as the time involved.

Today, in contrast, virtually every kid has a cellphone with a camera in it which is far easier to use. No film cartridges, no flashcubes, no developing. Press a button and it's done.

Most significantly, duplication and distribution is very easy and in most cases free with simply a click. That's a big problem with sexting--the pictures get shared and shared again. They could even get posted to the Internet, which didn't exist back then.

It's the incredible ease and low/no-cost of sharing the photos that makes this a problem. This also applies to embarassing secret pictures.

We must remember that information that once stayed hidden in the bottom of a file cabinet is now easily indexed and accessed remotely via computers and the Internet. To say an element of information was "always out then, nothing has changed" is not at all accurate; much _has_ changed thanks to computers.

Almost every kid I knew had an Instamatic. True, that if you wanted to develop a naked photo you couldn't just give it to Walgreen's. You had to know someone with a darkroom. But finding those people was as easy as finding someone who could sell you dope.

But should our reaction change? I really don't think so.

I respectfully have to disagree, having been involved in photography back then.

There were of course other kids who had both the skill to develop pictures and access to a darkroom to do it in. But they were a small number. Further, while some kids might be quite eager to develop nude shots, there were many others who would find it objectionable. Plenty of kids, then and now, were not into the "wild side" of things and wanted no part of it, being nude photography, drugs, cheating, skipping school, pranks, or other youth activities. Also, there was some degree of supervision to high school and club darkrooms and some kids wouldn't want to take the risk of getting caught and kicked out.

(Further, in my day, most people with Instamatics took color pictures. Of those kids who could develop in high school, the vast majority could only do b&w, color processing was harder and required more equipment.)

Which is my point--today no 'middleman' or willing associate is needed, no special equipment is needed--nothing is needed beside the cellphone every kid carries at all times. (Many kids might have access to a camera, but they didn't carry it around with them.)

As mentioned before, _distribution_ today is extremely easy, simply an email click away. Back then distributing photographic enlargements meant a trip to the post office for the heavy envelope. How many copies would a kid mail out? Further, back then distribution meant another kid would have a physical picture in his/her possession, easy enough to drop and have to explain. A cell phone image won't fall out onto the floor of a classroom.

Again I must respectfully disagree. Because of the ease in which information (any information, be it nude photos or personal history) is captured and disseminated, the rules have to change to protect individuals' privacy.

To put it another way, in my day some kids produced underground newspapers, it was reasonably easy to type up a stencil, get it mimeographed, and stand on the corner and pass it out. Some of those papers were quite shocking (by intent).

I can't help but suspect some of the producers had second thoughts about their work when they grew older and were happy they were forgotten. Which they would've been; it's extremely unlikely a prospective college or employer would ever find out. But today, many kids discover the hard way their their ancient explicit social website or wild times has come back to haunt them.

Society has always placed safety guards on dangerous machinery.

This has been the reason so many employers have zero-tolerance for anything that even remotely reeks of "sex". All it takes is one person, be it an employee or student, to do something stupid and suddenly the employer or school is a "hostile environment".

Due to court rul> snipped-for-privacy@bbs.cpcn.com wrote:

I was the most naïve kid on the planet and *I* knew how to get this done. Didn't know a thing about dope, but needed something developed. What I'm saying here is if *I* knew how it was probably very common knowledge in

John

Last year, Hong Kong actor/singer Edison Chen's photos were uploaded to the Internet because someone had stolen his laptop. He ended up apologizing to the various women who were clearly engaging in sex with him, some of whom were stars themselves. The photos are as explicit as explicit can be. It was clear that those were supposed to be private.

In the case of the cell phones, people are taking photos of themselves! And if they're taking photos of others, it's clear that they're posing for them. As you or someone else said, it's the recipients who are complaining, not the people in the photos.

With the Internet nothing is forgotten anymore. I was surprised to Google my name and the name of my grade school and come up with a newspaper photo that was taken of me when I was 8 years old.

By the way it was at that photo shoot that I learned that the press lies: I was asked to stand in front of some pictures kids had drawn as if to imply that those were my pictures. The photographer wouldn't let me stand in front of mine. I hated that because mine were better and I didn't want to be associated with bad art. At age 8. I remember it well. I am quite surprised, maybe astounded to know that someone scanned all those old newspapers and that an OCR system somewhere picked out my name and it got into Google's search engine.

I fully expect to see copies of my old underground mimeo newspapers to show up any day soon.

I think that this snooping thing is going to blow over. It'll blow over when employers realize that they won't be able to hire anybody anymore; too many people will have had explicit photos and politically incorrect content on the Web.

It looks like Google is doing OCR on pdf images. I got a Google Alert this week showing my name in a 1972 Broadcasting Yearbook. I checked the link, and there was no embedded text, just scanned images. Anyway, it is pretty neat that images are now being OCRd.

Harold

I'm glad that my old CIA ID had only a number. Air American, though, used names, to the extent that anyone flying for them had a "real" name. I'm glad I've kept my alternate identity and escape routes up-to-date all these year.

Bill Horne

Not always. Sometimes kids sneak pictures of others, such as in a locker room or in an embarassing situation. Sometimes they are private photos and the person who took them distributes them.

I'm not sure about that. Different people behave differently--while many might have troubling material about them on the web, a great many others will have nothing at all because they do not lead such wild lives. (Contrary to myth, a great many kids lead extremely tame lives.) It will also depend on the extent of what's out there-- someone with just one nasty reference will be in a more competitive position than someone who has multiple references.

In my personal opinion, the existence of computers and the Internet-- making storage, indexing, and remote access of personal information so easy--has changed the 'lay of the land'. Old privacy laws are not adequate to meet the new world

I should note that journalists and some others sharply disagree with my viewpoint. They take a very strong stance on the "public's right to know".

In your example, the ancient photo of you at age eight, in my opinion is not a matter of public interest, even if you were to become a major figure. But the $64,000 question is how would society differentiate between private stuff and matters that are of a legitimate public interest? For example: suppose someone at age 19 was active in a very extremist far-right or far-left group--should that be part of their record when they turn 30? If they run for political office when they're 50?

All I can say is thank goodness I have a common name. Many people think I'm a voiceover actor from Vancouver. While I've done v/o a little and I've been a DJ and all that, I'm not the Vancouver guy. Hopefully someone will see fit to deposit some of his money into my bank account one day...

Ah, but you have a different telephone number than he does, and that's all anyone needs to tell you apart.

Bill Horne

I dunno. I've got a landline number, a cell number, a fax number, two or three google voice numbers. I don't even recognize some of my own numbers, so it's a bit much to expect others to. But I'm pretty sure I'm not the Vancouver guy, either.

Dave

Yes, but ...

... your landline number is probably on your checks, or your business card, so it's "you" for practical purposes. It's certainly usable as a "disqualifier" field to _separate_ you from guy-in-Vancouver, and therefor it will keep people from mistaking you for him.

Bulk (snail) mail marketers spend a lot of time trying _not_ to send mail to those who won't respond: that's why they love telephone numbers, which are more valuable to show what you are _not_ (not in Vancouver, for example) than what you _are_.

Bill Horne Moderator

Area-based phone numbers are a thing of the past. I live in San Francisco. I have 3 housemates. We all have cell phones. One has an area code of 831 (Santa Cruz), another has 650 (San Mateo area), and the third has 206 (Seattle). None of them bothered to change their numbers even though they moved to SF long ago. Oh, and we have not had a landline in out household in over 5 years.

I routinely converse and text with people with area codes all over the nation who are actually in SF or Oakland or somewhere else locally.

Since you _do_ have a cellular number and you _don't_ have a landline number, you're a lot more likely to have a fair amount of disposable income than someone whose pattern is vice versa. It's all grist for the mill!

Bill Horne Moderator