Smile, You're on Candid Phone Camera
The Internet has made lapses in behavior more embarrassing
By Philipp Harper
Special to MSN
http://mobilemomentum.msn.com/article.aspx?aid=12

As if we needed help making fools of ourselves, the Internet has taken this all-too-human propensity and turbocharged it, magnifying our missteps and screw-ups in ways no one could have imagined just a few years ago. What once were quietly embarrassing events — you name it — now are given a public currency that mortifies.

Consider: Last year at one of the Midwest's tonier prep schools, a 14-year-old girl was persuaded by her older boyfriend (pressured, say her parents) to take sexually explicit photos of herself and then transmit them to him via the Internet. Boys being boys, the recipient of this misguided ardor e-mailed the snaps to a few of his close friends, who, boys being boys … well, you get the idea.

When officials at the school learned of this amour less-than-propre, they gave the boot to the young couple and to two additional male students whose viewing of the images could be confirmed. But if the carnage seems to have been limited, it really wasn't.

Word got out and there were front-page stories in the local newspaper. There followed, too, the inevitable lawsuits. As to the number of eyeballs (to use Net speak) captured by the images, the girl's mother asserts the photos made it into the great cyber river and were spread far and wide.

Yeah well, that's not the cell phone makers fault, or the internet's fault. Probably not the "older boyfriend's" or the 14 year old girls fault... Nope, i'm going to pin the blame directly on the parents. Why would anyone let their 14 year old daughter date an older guy who is obviously a bad influence on her? This story leads one to think that they are bad parents. If you don't raise your childeren in the way they should go, bad things will happen. It's never too late to start being a good parent, and hopefully they have.

How does that happen, you ask?

Enter the cell phone camera, a device that not so long ago could have existed only in the fecund imagination of Q, supreme gadgeteer and outfitter of James Bond and other denizens of Her Majesty's Secret Service. Easily concealed, innocuous looking — it's main purpose is not as a camera, after all — the cell phone camera is becoming known more for its misuse than use.

Yeah it's always the manufactuer's fault when something bad happens with their product. Come on! Give me a break! It's not the cell phone makers fault if someone takes a nudie pic with it, nor is it the cell phone's fault. The blame is to be placed on the person who takes the pic.

But make no mistake, the camera phone is also a handheld mischief maker, one that seems to have tickled the funny (or naughty) bones of countless users. Which would explain the proliferation of Web sites devoted to the embarrassing, risqué or often plain pornographic images captured by amateur auteurs.

Any Hollywood starlet who swings her legs out of a low-slung sports car, revealing a flash or more of lingerie in the process, can pretty much assume that a snapshot of her unmentionables will be posted somewhere on the Web before the sun again sinks into the Pacific. Ditto the college student who, in a rum-induced fit of joie de vivre, sheds her top (or worse) at some beachside bacchanal.

Hey, if that Hollywood starlet is dumb enought to flash her lingerie and unmentionables, its her own dumb fault if they show up on the internet!! Tip too all the Hollywood starlets out there... if you don't want me to see your boobies, don't dress so I can see them, even when you get out of a low-slung sports car. Same goes for anyone who's dumb enought to drink and strip. If you have a problem with drunk nude pics of you showing up online, stop drinking. If you don't drink, you don't get drunk. If you don't get drunk, you don't strip or are much harder to talk into stripping. If you don't strip, you can't be seen naked on line! Is it really that hard to understand?

Ultimately, the most effective policing will be done by the camera phone owners themselves, relying on common decency and teachings like the Golden Rule to guide their behavior.

Probably the only thing the author got correct in the story.