Saturday, September 22nd, 2012
Stephan: A woman reader wrote to ask my advice about what to do, because her 16 year old daughter was photographed nude in a locker room by she thinks, but cannot prove, a jealous former friend, who posted the picture on the net. It made me think about this whole issue, of visual privacy in the age of the internet, not just for famous people, but ordinary citizens. So I went looking for something written about this and, synchronistically, today I found this. My counsel to her was that both she and her daughter might find it useful to talk this over in front of, and with, a professional therapist in order to meaningfully process what had happened. But that this was the shadow side of the net, and was but a part of the growing pervasiveness of survelliance in general. It is the world we have created and must now live in.
The row over topless pictures of the Duchess of Cambridge continues. But Kate is not alone. Young women everywhere – famous and non-famous – are increasingly becoming victims of voyeurism in our internet age
On the popular website Reddit, where users submit and share content, a member of a forum called ‘creepshots