When It’s Too Easy to Put Pictures on the Internet   - 10,777 Views, 3 Comments

A lesser known, but perhaps equally dire warning is “teenagers, digital cameras, and Internet access don’t mix well”.

Consider the recent case of a group of cheerleaders from Thomas S. Wootton High School, in Rockville, Maryland.

By all accounts this group of girls were happy, go-lucky, all-American cheerleading sweethearts. They were riding high, on their way to the cheerleading championships.

They took a series of completely innocent photos of themselves, clowning around, mugging for the camera, and some somewhat more sassy pictures of themselves, pretending to kiss and in various “provocative” (but fully clothed, completely acceptable) poses (they were cheerleaders, after all, that’s what they do), and posted them to the photo-sharing website, Webshots.com, for their friends and the rest of the cheerleading squad to see.

Still nothing wrong, right?

But let Aunty put this in another context.

This was a group of high school girls.

In cheerleader outfits.

Pretending to be kissing each other.

In provocative poses.

Had these girls done anything wrong?

No.

But did somebody else?

You betcha.

Because someone grabbed those pictures, and posted them to an Internet porn site.

Oops.

And suddenly the girls found themselves disqualified from the cheerleading championships.

Ouch.

Fortunately, many tears, meetings, and telephone calls later, they were allowed to compete, and are back on track.

Hopefully they, and their parents and the school and anyone who has heard this tale, are a bit wiser.

But Aunty knows of another young high school lady - drop-dead stunning gorgeous and smart as a whip - who had high professional hopes, which may have been all but dashed when in a single rash act she posted pictures of herself, naked, on the Internet.

And you may recall the story which Aunty reported in which a young man took video of himself and his girlfriend in the act, and the video made its way to the Internet in the form of a disk being auctioned off on the Indian auction site and eBay subsidiary, Baazee.

Aunty’s point, and she does have one, is that in our day, while there were lots of stupid things we could do as teenagers, few of them left permanent, irreversable marks. Having a past which included naked pictures or video of ourselves in circulation was a rarity, not the norm.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could keep it that way?

But once teenagers meet the Internet, all bets are off.