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Nude Photo Scandal at RHS Highlights Dangers of Social Media

Originally posted by James Kleimann on Ridgewood Patch

Daniel Fishbein held a news conference Thursday to address the transmission of nude photos of high school girls through social media.

The Ridgewood community should use the scandal involving the distribution of nude photos of high school girls through social media as a teaching opportunity, Superintendent Daniel Fishbein said at a news conference Thursday afternoon.

Multiple sources have told Patch that numerous RHS girls (mostly freshmen) sent nude photographs using the social media application SnapChat to male students, one of whom posted the images on Instagram for all the Internet to see. There was also a video of a dance depicting two high school girls simulating sex acts, sources said.

Most of the male students involved in the scandal are upperclassmen, according to individuals familiar with the situation.

The incidents occurred off school grounds and after school hours.

Students say the Snapchat nude photos first surfaced earlier in the school year, but high school administrators first were made aware last week following a verbal spat between two girls at the Campus Center. The altercation–over illicit videos and pictures–prompted what is now an ongoing police investigation, sources said.

“If this came to our attention a week-and-a-half ago, that’s when we would be having this news conference,” Fishbein said to a dozen news reporters at the Education Center Thursday afternoon. “As soon as it came to our attention…we deal with these things for the health and safety of the students and to educate our community.”

Fishbein sent a letter regarding the incident to students and parents on Wednesday afternoon, stressing that parents need to be partners to prevent the production and distribution of illicit images.

“We can use this situation as a learning experience, an educational experience,” the superintendent said Thursday, adding the event has become a distraction at the high school. “We certainly teach our students about the danger of social media.”

Ridgewood police have been investigating the scandal with the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office and have established an amnesty period for students to delete the images/video without fear of prosecution. The amnesty expires Monday morning at 7 a.m.

If found with images after Monday morning, students could be charged with “delinquency complaints” and adults with possession of child pornography, authorities said.

Ridgewood Police Chief John Ward said he did not know the exact number of girls who participated, but confirmed there were several of them. The police chief said he was not at liberty to comment specifically on whether an Instagram gallery containing the images went live, but said the amnesty clause only applies to those who are possessing or forwarding the images.

The students involved in the scandal will be spoken to individually, Fishbein said, adding that counselors are available to distressed students.

In response to a reporter’s question about a “non-chalant attitude” from some students, Fishbein called it a fairly normal adolescent reaction.

“Remember, they’re growing up in a different time than we were. This is a battle in a long war. You can say that with technology, you can say that with drug and alcohol education. Again, we try to partner with parents because in this case the incident happened outside of school after school hours…”

Fishbein didn’t know how widespread the practice is, but acknowledged many students use SnapChat and Instagram.

“To say this is rampant, I wouldn’t know if that’s accurate or not accurate. But these things do occur in this village and in other municipalities…We don’t know everything that occurs at every house in this community and that’s where it occurred.”

“Usually things are kept secretive for some period of time and then they do come out and we do address it,”  Fishbein said.

Although there’s a clear danger with misusing technology, many students use it responsibly, he remarked. Super Science Saturday offers a glimpse of the ingenuity of Ridgewood’s students, he said.

“There is some evil but the vast majority of it [technology] leads to creativity. I hope someday someone from this community cures cancer or something like that.”

For Kids, Snapchat and Instagram Alternative to
Facebook

Originally posted in CBSNews.com

Relieved your kids aren’t posting embarrassing messages and goofy self-portraits on Facebook? They’re probably doing it on Instagram and Snapchat instead.

The number of popular social media sites available on kids’ mobile devices has exploded in recent years. The smartest apps now enable kids to chat informally with select groups of friends without bumping up against texting limits and without being monitored by parents, coaches and college admissions officers, who are frequent Facebook posters themselves.

Many of the new mobile apps don’t require a cellphone or a credit card. They’re free and can be used on popular portable devices such as the iPod Touch and Kindle Fire, as long as there’s a wireless Internet connection.

According to the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, more than three-fourths of teenagers have a cellphone and use online social networking sites such as Facebook. But educators and kids say there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that Facebook for teenagers has become a bit like a school-sanctioned prom – a necessary rite of passage with plenty of adult onlookers – while apps such as Snapchat and Kik Messenger are the much cooler after-party.

Educators say they have seen everything from kids using their mobile devices to circulate online videos of school drug searches to male students sharing nude pictures of their girlfriends. Most parents, they say, have no idea.

“What sex education used to be – it’s now the ‘technology talk’ we have to have with our kids,” said Rebecca Levey, a mother of 10-year-old twin daughters who runs a tween video review site called KidzVuz.com and blogs about technology and educations issues.

Eileen Patterson, a stay-at-home mom of eight kids in Burke, Va., said she used to consider herself fairly tech savvy and is frequently on Facebook, but was shocked to learn her kids could message their friends with just an iPod Touch. She counts nine wireless devices in her home and has taken to shutting off her home’s Wi-Fi after 9 p.m., but Patterson calls her attempt to keep tabs on her kids’ online activity “a war I’m slowly losing every day.”

“I find myself throwing up my hands every now and again,” Patterson said. “Then I’ll see something on TV or read an article in the paper about some horrible thing that happened to some poor child and their family, and then I try to be more vigilant. But the reality is, I’m …stupid” when it comes to social media.

Mobile apps refer to the software applications that can be downloaded to a mobile device through an online store such as Apple’s iTunes. According to the Federal Trade Commission, there are some 800,000 apps available through Apple and 700,000 apps on Google Play.

Among the most popular mobile apps among kids is Instagram, free software that digitally enhances photos and posts them to your account online. The photos can be shared on other social media sites such as Facebook, which bought Instagram last year. Then there’s Snapchat, among the top 10 free iPhone apps available. Coined by the media as the “sexting” app, Snapchat lets you send a text, photo or video that self-destructs within 10 seconds of being opened.

Kik Messenger also allows unlimited texting for free and offers anonymity to its users. Able to run on an iPod Touch or Kindle Fire, Kik allows vague user names – for example, a nickname or a string of random digits – that won’t reveal a person’s real name or phone number.

But as with anything online, each of these apps comes with serious caveats.

Snapchat, for example, acknowledges on its Web page that its messages aren’t guaranteed to disappear: Anyone receiving a text or photo can use their 10 seconds to capture a “screenshot,” or photo of their device’s screen, and save that image to their phone. Video also can be downloaded, although Snapchat says it alerts senders when their data is saved.

Instagram is generally considered pretty tame as long as kids adjust their privacy settings to limit who can see their photos and don’t post nudity, which could subject them to child pornography laws. But Levey points out that many parents don’t know their kids are on Instagram until there’s trouble – usually when kids post photos at parties, and other kids who aren’t invited see them.

Dale Harkness, a technology director at Richmond-Burton Community High School in Richmond, Ill., said parents often will hand their kids a mobile device without understanding exactly what it can do. He estimates that even without the latest social media app, the average high school student probably transmits some 150 texts a day.

“It’s not anything that every parent and grandparent hasn’t already seen,” Harkness said. The problem, he adds, is the actions “get documented, replayed and sent around,” and kids “forget how fast it moves and how far it goes.”

That was the case at Ridgewood High School in Ridgewood, N.J., where a male student allegedly took a screenshot of nude pictures sent to him by female classmates via Snapchat, then posted the pictures on Instagram. According to a letter to parents by the school district’s superintendent that was later posted online, police were warning students to delete any downloaded pictures by Monday or face criminal charges under child pornography laws.

There are general security concerns too. A recent report by a cyberthreat research company, called F-Secure, found that some of the new social networking sites have become ripe targets for spreading malware and propagating scams.

In January, the FBI arrested a 27-year-old man in Los Angeles who allegedly hacked into hundreds of social media and email accounts, including Facebook and Skype, and found naked photos and personal passwords that women had stored online. He used the naked photos to try to coerce women into disrobing for him via Skype and threatened to post their private photos to their Facebook accounts if they refused to comply, according to the indictment.

Also worth noting is that almost every mobile app available collects some kind of personal data, such as a person’s birthdate or the location of their phone, and shares that information with third parties for marketing purposes. While a new regulation by the Federal Trade Commission this year is aimed at keeping advertisers from tracking kids younger than 13, most social media apps require that a person promise to be at least 13 when they sign up, thereby exempting themselves from the tougher privacy restrictions.

Rep. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who is co-chairman of a House caucus that examines privacy issues, said he’d like to see legislation that would give kids under 15 the right to delete photos or texts that wind up elsewhere online. The prospect, however, is unlikely in a Congress dominated by debates on federal spending and gun control, and raises practical questions about how such a law could be enforced.

“I believe that our children have a right to develop, to grow up and to make mistakes,” Markey said. “Nobody should be penalized for something they posted when they were 9 years old.”

Several consumer advocates actually recommend exposing their kids to social media sites earlier than age 12, when they’re more receptive to hearing lessons about online etiquette and safety.

For example, Levey links her kids’ devices to her iTunes account so she’s aware of any program they download. She also requires that her kids “friend” her on every program and follow certain ground rules: protect your passwords, set your privacy controls and never transmit inappropriate pictures or words.

Levey thinks a big hurdle for parents is getting over the idea that they are kids’ privacy by monitoring online activity. In fact, she said, it can be the kid’s first lesson that nothing online is truly private anyway.

“If they want privacy, they should write in a journal and hide it under their mattress,” Levey said.

Snapchat: Sexting Tool, or the Next Instagram?

Originally Posted by Douglas Gross, CNN

You may not have heard of Snapchat. But if there are teenagers or 20-somethings in your life, it’’s a safe bet that they have.

Snapchat is a mobile app which lets users share images or videos that disappear after a few seconds. That’s right–they vanish forever in the time it takes you to read a tweet.

In a little over a year since it was released by a Stanford student and his recently graduated business partner, Snapchat has has quietly amassed millions of users and now claims to process more than 30 million messages a day. Some bloggers have called it the “next Instagram.”

Not bad for a mobile tool which, rightly or wrongly, is often cited for one very specific ability — the “sexting” of naughty images to other users. In an age when young people are constantly being warned not to post inappropriate things online, Snapchat offers a degree of freedom by letting users share unfiltered thoughts or images without much fear of reprisal.

“Like most people born before the 1990s, I’m not a Snapchat user, and I’ve long assumed the worst about the app–that combining cameras; young people; and secret, self-destructing messages could only mean trouble,” wrote Slate’s Farhad Manjoo last week.

But increasingly, he writes, it appears possible that “teenagers are more likely using the app to safely explore the sort of silly, unguarded, and sometimes unwise ideas that have always occupied the teenage brain … in a manner that won’t haunt them forever. In other words, they’re chatting with Snapchat precisely because it’s not like chatting with Facebook.”

Not to be outdone, Facebook last month actually launched a virtually identical social app called Facebook Poke, a mobile re-imagining of one of the site’s earliest, and ultimately most ridiculed, features. But instead of siphoning users from Snapchat, Facebook’s move appears instead to have launched the upstart app to new heights.

Both apps let users send images or short videos and messages via their smartphones. The sender can choose how long the message will be visible–up to 10 seconds–before it self-destructs.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly was part of the team that coded the Poke app, currently available only on Apple’s iOS system, in only a couple of weeks. A family photo posted by sister Randi Zuckerberg purportedly showed their family playing with the app over the holidays.

But if Facebook was looking to flex its billion-user muscle to take over the instant-chat market, it doesn’t appear to be working.

On Thursday, Snapchat was the sixth-most popular free app for Apple’s mobile devices. Facebook Poke wasn’t in the top 100. As Forbes said in a recent headline, “the kids like SnapChat because it’s NOT Facebook.”

A newer version of Snapchat for Google’s Android devices sat at a respectable No. 33 in the Google Play store, ahead of stalwarts like Draw Something, Spotify, Fandango and Amazon Mobile. Facebook Poke isn’t available for Android.

A look by analytics firm Topsy showed that mentions of Snapchat on Twitter spiraled to more than 212,000 on New Year’s Day, up from about 16,000 on December 20, the day before Facebook introduced Poke. Facebook Poke got 1,822 mentions on January 1, according to Topsy.

So, does that mean young, socially savvy users are sending millions of racy pictures of themselves through cyberspace every day?

It’s difficult to say. Technological advances and nudie shots have shared a strong, if secretive, relationship for centuries. From the printing press to pay-per-view to VCRs, new tech (particularly the kind that creates new levels of privacy) has always been followed closely by folks figuring out how to personally or professionally use it to get dirty.

Read: In the tech world, porn quietly leads the way

There are clear, and sometimes ugly, signs that sexting is common on Snapchat.

“Snapchat Sluts,” a Tumblr blog full of nude and semi-nude images, was started up last month by a “party photographer” who says he put out an open call for salacious shots on Twitter and was overwhelmed by the response. Another Snapchat-themed blog on Tumblr is filled with complaints about male users sharing photos of their genitalia.

Snapchat users may think their naughty images will never come back to haunt them. But people can still grab screenshots from their phones, even though both Snapchat and Facebook Poke notify the sender if the recipient of an image takes a shot of it.

And last week, Buzzfeed exposed an apparent security flaw that it says lets recipients retrieve videos sent via Snapchat.

All of which should be bad news when young people and questionable decisions collide with the dark alleys of the Internet, where even the most ill-gotten of sleaze is posted.

Snapchat did not respond to an interview request from CNN. But in one of only a handful of interviews he’s given since launching, Snapchat co-founder Evan Spiegel told TechCrunch he thinks the sex talk about his app is overblown.

“I’m not convinced that the whole sexting thing is as big as the media makes it out to be,” he told TechCrunch. “I just don’t know people who do that. It doesn’t seem that fun when you can have real sex.”

But he also acknowledged to TechCrunch that the idea for the app, which he and Bobby Murphy hashed out after meeting at Stanford’s Kappa Sigma fraternity house, was partly inspired by U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner’s unfortunate decision to share racy photos via Twitter.

So, if not for naughty bits, what exactly is the purpose of sending images and videos that rapidly disappear?

In a September blog post celebrating its first anniversary, Team Snapchat shared a vision that comes off as downright wholesome.

“We believe in sharing authentic moments with friends,” it read. “It’s not all about fancy vacations, sushi dinners, or beautiful sunsets. Sometimes it’s an inside joke, a silly face, or greetings from a pet fish.

“There is value in the ephemeral,” the post continues. “Great conversations are magical. That’s because they are shared, enjoyed, but not saved.”

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