

The dark side of teen texting - sonabinu
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2413210,00.asp

======
sek
> For parents, there's a pretty serious downside to all this teen texting,
> however. A full 28 percent of polled teens said they had sent fully nude
> photos of themselves over SMS. About a quarter of American teenagers
> participate in "sexting," according to Wilson's sources, which include
> research firms like Nielsen and Pew, as well as media and government
> organizations.

What is the "serious downside" for parents now? I convinced two girls when I
was 14 to show me their boobs. We didn't have smartphones back then. You think
about nothing else when you hit puberty and is totally normal behavior.

Btw how do you send a full nude picture over SMS?

~~~
theorique
The big difference is, sending a picture puts it out into the world where it
can be forwarded, saved, uploaded to the web, shared with the entire school
...

It can get way out of hand.

It's much more of a Pandora's box than the private "show me yours" that you
describe.

~~~
Shorel
Well, this seem to be a good case for the use of DRM.

But it's users the ones who will hold the keys for the kingdom, not
corporations.

~~~
theorique
DRM only needs to fail once. Then an image is in the wild and can be endlessly
replicated (think Streisand effect / network effect).

~~~
Shorel
For a movie, or for the pictures of someone famous?

Yes, lots of people will be trying to break that DRM.

For a random no-one in some small country? Out of millions of random no-ones?

It's a lot better than the current no-protection-at-all scheme.

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guard-of-terra
Aren't all of those sexting teenagers "sex offenders" according to the
inexcusable USA laws?

Which really makes me want to stand up and go burn a church or two.

~~~
jerf
While I'm sure you can find many church members who would say it's wrong for
teens to send nude photos to each other, I doubt you're going to find a lot of
support for harsh, punitive government actions in response.

For that matter, I suspect you can find a lot of non-church members who would
agree on one level or another its wrong (or at the very least a bad idea), but
also would not agree to harsh punitive government actions.

This is out of control government and policians fearful to be seen being even
remotely soft on child porn lest they get smeared by their opponents in the
next election, not the ever-less-Puritan American public or any portion
thereof.

~~~
guard-of-terra
The peoblem is, we have an out of control situation and an utter lack of
people to blame for this. Everyone it kind of not supporting the shit but
nobody actively prevents the shit from happening.

The people to blame for this is the people not to blame for this.

~~~
jerf
No, I'm pretty comfortable blaming lawmakers for this. It's their job to keep
the laws up-to-date, and they've failed in this case. It isn't random people
on the street locking these kids up, except by a very extended and tenuous
(albeit real, but still, small) connection, it's the lawmakers who keep it
illegal without regard to human costs, who would rather send teens to prison
and blaze them with the closest thing our society has to a Scarlet A (and ours
is in many ways worse, certainly harder to escape), rather than risk their
reelection prospects, who are to blame.

It may feel more gratifying to blame it on $DUMB_YOKELS, but given that this
problem seems to exist everywhere regardless of their influence, it would seem
to be an emotionally-driven decision, not a logical one.

~~~
guard-of-terra
Lawmakers are just an example of people doing their job poorly. The only
people ever defending these broken measures happen to "believe".

------
j2kun
Also, the dark side of infographics. Bar charts with just one bar make me
giggle. :)

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sareon
They mention that texting is on the decline.

I wonder how much of that comes from iMessage on the iPhones, which as I
recall, doesn't use SMS but rather data to send messages.

------
ollysb
Another mobile site fail, forced to use portrait mode and then you can't
scroll down. I really wish I could block mobile sites on my iPhone.

------
SonicSoul
tl;dr

teens still use texting quite a bit (even though they were not around when it
was invented). girls use it more than boys.

reason? because it's easier than calling.

there is also an infographic. fascinating!

