I just read an interesting article covering a topic that is frequently brought to our attention when we speak at conferences - cell phones and sexually-explicit images of teenagers being circulated among peers. The bottom line is that we have got to figure out the best way to get kids to think hard and seriously about the implications of content they create or post or send getting into the wrong hands. It is largely inevitable, but youth naively assume that it will stay private and protected by a small, intended audience. The image started out "as a summertime joke between the ninth-grader and her friends." How many of us have taken a picture of ourselves naked - even as a joke? Wait, don't answer that. In keeping with my previous post - this picture could be tagged (with her name? with her contact information?) and shared on one of the numerous photo-sharing and photo-gallery web sites out there, and she would suffer the rest of her life from the humiliation. Let's hope law enforcement are able to confiscate every device on which this picture is found, and scrub those flash memory cards and hard drives minty clean. And let's try to remind everyone that possession and transmission of this sort of stuff is usually a Class I felony across the United States.
