Let’s all say it together: the Internet is a pretty public place. But not everyone seems to understand that, and now some teens who posted questionable pictures on Facebook have seen those photos resurface in their high school yearbook.
Yet, even if those teens should have known better, the yearbook staff is also to blame – the pictures were reprinted without asking students’ permission, and the yearbook didn’t mention any of the original photographers. Plus, well . . . there’s a certain laziness factor.
“Downloading pictures from Facebook proved more efficient than roaming campus with a camera,” states Daniel de Vise, a reporter with the Washington Post. “Some students used pictures from their own Facebook pages, while others used images culled from the pages of friends and classmates.”
I’ll admit to having a Facebook profile, but in terms of photographs, the site only contains a few pics of my car (with the license plate dutifully blacked out). That’s one way to avoid this problem; another would have been for the yearbook committee to receive more oversight, but de Vise notes, “The yearbook adviser . . . told students to avoid Facebook and MySpace at the start of the academic year but subsequently went on maternity leave and was replaced by a substitute, according to an account published in the school newspaper, The Pitch.”
Ah, well. This incident likely embarrassed some students – and angered some parents – but it’s not the worst thing that could have happened. Hat tip to Techdirt’s Mike Masnick.
