Recently, there has been a controversy that involves school students around Brisbane posting racy photographs of their schoolmates on the Web. These sites will often contain the name of the school, and even school colours and logos.
The photographs vary from party snaps to surreptitious swimwear shots. The sites often give names of the girls, whether they have a boyfriend or not, and other vital statistics.
Principals who don’t google for their school’s name at least occasionally are finding out about these websites from enraged parents instead.
By comparison, when I was at school, the Web was a relatively new thing, but it still seemed that the school had its nose in every little thing I did online.
First of all there was my project entitled World War 3, a pyromania-themed site that some friends and I were building. It was a pretty harmless idea, basically a few pictures of us burning some random shit, combined with some articles and recipes of how to make incendiary substances such as homemade napalm.
However, it seemed I’d neglected to remove my school email address from the draft version. Before we’d even had a chance to publish actual content on the site, a mining engineer from Gladstone found the email address, rang up my school and expressed his alarm over my page. It appeared to him that I’d intended to publish instructions for making explosives, which is illegal.
Of course, what one does outside of school is normally none of their concern, but since I had associated my site with the school, I had little choice but to delete WW3. It was considered so serious that I didn’t even get punished for it; instead, my parents were summoned for crisis talks with faculty and computing staff.
The other project was a much sillier idea. … Community was a website with my school’s name, colours and logo on it, with links to the homepages of individual students. Great idea, I thought.
The problem was that the Web is an ever changing place. Free web hosting services often have street-themed addresses, so that if someone ‘moves out’ of their Web site, it can be allocated to someone else. One student had moved out of his address, and someone with a penchant for colourful language had moved in.
Thus, I had linked the school to some dude’s page full of profanity and little else. Boy, did I cop it for that one. All of this happened back when the web was not well-known; imagine how fast they would act today.
The point of all this, is that schools who don’t keep an eye on this sort of thing are not doing themselves any good. Furthermore, they are letting everyone down. Have a look at what some of these guys are doing. If I had done the same, publishing revealing photographs of classmates on my site, I would have been taken to the fucking cleaners. And I would have deserved it.
To the boys who are making these sites, you are young and ignorant now, but I hope that in time you will realise what idiots you have been. Talking with your mates about how “hot” certain females are is one thing, and even tasteful (and consensual) pictures of them don’t hurt anyone. But putting their names, pictures, and the name of their school on the Web for all to see, is playing with fire. Please, stop this nonsense now.