Entries from December 2008 ↓

Every new field develops a new lexicon. A new word I recently came across is “sexting.” How do you like them apples?
It may not take a genius to figure out what sexting is. It is texting sexually, right? Or SMSing sexually? Or with sexual content and innuendo? According to this CBS piece, teens are communicating sexually with one another via text message. So what is it that they are doing?

No less a personage than the very smart Andrew Sullivan has blogged about sexting and offered up a (quoted) definition. Check it out.

Well, it turns out that alphanumeric text messages aren’t the only form of sexting. Indeed, two Seattle cheerleaders got into trouble for sending nude photos of themselves around school. Or, at least, when those nude photos got sent around
school.

The example of the Seattle cheerleader girls is both most unfortunate and no doubt one of many. We can expect this trend to rise rapidly around the US and globally. Photos posed for or taken furtively–in school, out of school, etc..–will find their way into circulation.

They don’t even have to be nude pictures to be damaging. I spoke recently with a middle school administrator who told me an unhappy story about a seventh grade girl in his charge. Some boys in her class got hold of her phone, persuaded another girl to pose her forefinger and middle finger closed together, took a close-up picture of the same, and then sent the photo around from the first girl’s phone to others, together with a suggestive message.  The girl who owned the phone was humiliated.

It’s a new day.

I remember reading Popular Mechanics when I was a kid. (Maybe it was my brother who read it? I could be misremembering.) Anyway, this article from that venerable (launched in 1902!) magazine has some interesting comments on online privacy.

Here’s one tidbit, including a quotation from Daniel Solove, a leading light in the field of privacy law:

“Cloud-based social-networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace
push the privacy envelope even further, encouraging users to post and
share massive amounts of personal data that can be scooped up and
stored indefinitely. And in an increasing number of cases,
information that people willingly post about themselves online is
coming back to haunt them. “The problem is that teenagers, college
students and even some adults who ought to know better are not
thinking through the long-term consequences of putting up so much
personal information,” says Daniel Solove, author of The Future of
Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet. “Today’s
reality is that once something is out in the public, it usually stays
there.”

and, perhaps a little unusually, an interesting quote from a computer scientist at the US Military Academy on the Milton Friedman “no free lunch” quality of social networking sites and similar pages:

“Free Web services aren’t free,” says Gregory Conti, computer scientist at the U.S. Military Academy. “We pay for them with
micropayments of personal information.”

And then finally a short note from PopMech itself:

None of these technologies ever truly feels like a trap until it’s too late—when your embarrassing photos are posted online by your angry ex, when your cellphone data becomes damning evidence against you in court, or when the ads delivered to your e-mail in box become disturbingly personal.

Breakups are always difficult. Things are said that can’t be taken back. Feelings are hurt. Pornographic images and video of your ex are posted online and emailed to thousands of strangers. You know, the usual.

In all seriousness, however, Revenge Porn, which we’ve written about on the ReputationDefender Blog before, is a growing problem in the Internet age. Given the ease with which people can post and share information online, it only takes one jaded ex with an itchy trigger finger to mouse click your sexual escapades to the world.

Of course, once the  material is posted, it’s too late for the offender to simply apologize. Removing information from the web is no easy feat and judges are beginning to crack down on this kind of defamation. For instance, take the case of the Italian man who was jailed for over two years after uploading pornographic images of his ex-girlfriend. As angry as he may have been over the breakup, I doubt he’d repeat his actions if he knew he faced that kind of sentence.

This is a few months old as news, but I’ve been meaning to blog about it for a while.  Here’s the piece, originally published, it seems, in AdAge:

“MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — The internet is fast becoming a “cesspool” where false information thrives, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said yesterday. Speaking with an audience of magazine executives visiting the Google campus here as part of their annual industry conference, he said their brands were increasingly important signals that content can be trusted.

“Brands are the solution, not the problem,” Mr. Schmidt said. “Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.”

Also available here.

Amazing comment from Schmidt.  Here at the ReputationDefenderBlog, we think Schmidt has guts for talking about the major pitfalls of information supply on the web.

For perhaps the first time in Internet history, Facebook has served as the conduit for serving legal documents. After repeatedly failing to serve the papers in person, the law firm of Meyer Vandenberg convinced a judge in the Australian Capital Territory’s Supreme Court to allow them to use the popular social network to serve papers related to an unpaid debt.

Mark McCormack, the lawyer who came up with the idea, had this to say: “It’s somewhat novel, however we do see it as a valid method of bringing the matter to the attention of the defendant. It’s one of those occasions where you feel most at home with what you know and I myself have a Facebook account. We don’t know of any other lawyer who has used Facebook in this way, we got the idea ourselves in the course of looking at alternative methods of bringing the matter to the defendants’ attention.”

The couple at the heart of the matter failed to keep up repayments on a $150,000 (£44,000) loan they had borrowed from a mortgage provider. After numerous attempts to reach the couple, both through traditional means and through emails, the law firm was at their wits end when the couple missed a court appearance on Oct 3 of this year.

Frustration bred innovation, and Mr. McCormack had concluded that the couple had altogether vanished. “They weren’t available at their residence. They no longer worked at the place given in some documents as the last place of their employment,” he said. “The Facebook profiles showed the defendants’ dates of birth, email addresses and friend lists – and the co-defendants were friends with one another. This information was enough to satisfy the court that Facebook was a sufficient method of communicating with the defendants.”

McCormack went on to use his lawyer-y skills to try and convince the court that Facebook was an acceptable way to communicate with the couple, and the court agreed with the stipulation that the papers be sent via a private email, not be posted as a status update (You’ve Been Served!). While this is not the first instance of legal documents being officially served through electronic means, courts worldwide have been slow to embrace the idea of service of process through email service. With the Internet continually growing and people moving more of their lives online perhaps this trend will increase. If so, it only raises the question of which social network will become the Internet’s safe house.