Tim Walker’s Pictures

A recent attack on Australian schoolgirls’ privacy has seen personal photos stolen and uploaded to a pornographic website.

This is the most recent incident but realistically, this kind of Internet-based schoolgirl violation has been going on for years – it was Irish schoolgirls in 2013, British schoolgirls in 2015 and now, it’s Aussie schoolgirls who are being put under the red light.

Despite the international proximity though, there are a few common themes.

Firstly, obviously, the targets of this site are scantily attired if not nude; then lastly, in one (horrendous fusion) word: Facebook.

One such victim of this ‘hacked Facebook account’ debacle was a 21-year-old Adelaide woman; she was near tears when she maintained, “There were photos of me and my friends out at a bar one night, like, dancing, and having a good time and that … So like, that creep must’ve either been in the club that night taking photos of us or like, he got them from my Facebook page…”

Trolling online for photos of attractive girls to then post on a separate website is a deplorable act, of that there is no question; yet it’s as if these young women are of the belief that their Facebook accounts provide any kind of privacy or security…

Similar to teenagers on a school camp, who seem to believe that their tent walls will shield their hushed whispers inside from any ears outside, these youngsters need to wake up and smell reality.

…Surely every Facebook user is aware that by simply clicking on friends of friends, of friends of friends of friends of friends, it is not impossible to have travelled halfway across the world and be looking at the face of somebody who, in reality at least, that user is unlikely to ever meet.

The other basic rule of computing that these young women appear to be flouting, is that one should never post anything potentially hurtful, or indeed incriminating, online.

Courtesy of ‘file-sharing’, once a piece of information has become entangled in the folds of the World Wide Web, the chances of ever totally extricating it are close to nil.

I sympathise with these girls and their families but Internet users need to be aware, nothing online is truly private anymore.

 

 

Article by Tim Walker

Edited by Nia Eve Grills

Photography by Slee S Bagg

 

 

 

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