Anybody outing anyone...

…about anything, anytime. That may sound a bit elliptic, but it describes what people can do with digital photography, and to parents and many other people it could be a little scary. It has got to be scary to paparazzi, anyway, because tabloids and other publications are now paying anyone with a camera phone for spontaneously snapped photos of celebrities, as the New York Times points out. The scary part for parents and educators is that celebrities certainly aren't the only subjects. Anyone can not only be a photographer and publisher, but also a subject - peers, parents, teachers, etc. That's fine when intentions are good, but if someone has it in for a peer or an adult, it's getting very easy to snap and upload photos that victimize the latter. Sometimes embarrassing or compromising photos and videos are taken in fun or friendship but the friendship goes bad, sometimes purely maliciously. Not only do we need to require that our kids and students ask permission to upload photos and footage of others, we need substantive home and school policies about using images of others maliciously, including in blogs and profiles that impersonate them (fake pages made to look like theirs). Someone recently posted in BlogSafety.com a link to California TV personality Josh Kornbluth's account of being victimized by someone who put an impersonating profile of him on MySpace. Almost immediately after he got it deleted, another one popped up.

This is the nearly uncontrollable nature of Web 2.0, where there are hundreds upon hundreds of free sites where people can play dirty tricks against schoolmates or anyone against whom they might have the slightest beef, and there is very, very little all these sites can do about it except be quick to detect and delete impersonating or otherwise malicious profiles, and some – like MySpace – are clearly working on that. But as I posted in our forum, the only real, lasting, solution in the kid part of the harassment spectrum is the tough one: to work with the kids involved and maybe fellow parents.