The Guardian has the story of a British girl who claims her privacy was violated after photos of her breasts became an Internet meme. The girl, who was a teen at the time she took the pictures and uploaded them to the social networking website Bebo, filed a complaint with the Press Complaints Commission against the men’s magazine Loaded for featuring the pictures in an article.
The PCC, while sympathetic, rejected her complaint citing the fact that the pictures were already widely circulated through an Internet meme with the name “Epic Boobs Girl” and that the magazine could not therefore be seen as “intrusive.”
This story provides a compelling example of what can happen when content an individual posts online escapes their grasp. In hindsight, we can say that she shouldn’t have posted the somewhat provocative pictures to begin with, but she was only 15 at the time and we know that teens do not always think about the long-term consequences of their actions.
Privacy laws have yet to catch up with Internet technology, which is why individuals need to take personal control over their online reputations. Social media technology has given us an amazing opportunity to mobilize as a society in a very short period of time. In some cases, this is a very good thing, i.e. the response to the earthquake in Haiti or the Iran elections. In other cases, it leads to situations like this, where an Internet meme springs up overnight, causing embarrassment for its subject.
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