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.
</span> 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.
