By the standards of today’s reveal-all culture, the photographs were not particularly shocking. They were more Benny Hill than pornographic.
One showed a fully dressed young woman beaming up to the camera as her boyfriend playfully bit her breast. Another showed her smiling with her jeans-clad legs splayed, and in a third she was holding small pumpkins at her chest.
But the images were enough to land Amy Polumbo in a great deal of trouble, including an alleged blackmail attempt and the possible loss of her public role. For Polumbo is the current Miss New Jersey, an honour for which not only good looks but also perfect manners and a squeaky-clean reputation are requisite.
At the end of last week the national Miss America organisation decided to give Polumbo the benefit of the doubt and allow her to keep her crown, after the photographs were published prominently in tabloid newspapers across America.
But the case has left behind some big questions about how teenagers are storing up problems for themselves in later life by exposing themselves — emotionally and in many cases physically — on the internet.
The pictures of Polumbo were logged on the networking site Facebook. She insists they were attached to a private part of her profile that can be seen only by her friends. “This was meant to be private,” she said.
Sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and Friendster are still so new (Facebook was founded in 2004) that the implications for privacy are only just starting to be understood. What may seem like harmless fun in the flush of youth can come back to haunt you.
Employers are increasingly searching the sites before they interview college graduates for jobs. A survey of recent graduates by CollegeGrad.com last year found that almost half had changed, or planned to change, their profiles on networking sites in order to take down material that could compromise their application.
Web security firms warn that in the most extreme cases teenagers posting revealing pictures of themselves can render themselves vulnerable to blackmail approaches. Adult pornography sites have also been known to pilfer images from teen sites and use them without permission to advertise their paid-for pages.
As the first generation of social network users begins entering the workplace and public life, issues of privacy from childhood internet use are likely to grow.
Research shows that teenage girls in particular are vulnerable. Work by the Pew Internet & American Life Project has found that girls (83%) are more likely than boys (74%) to post pictures of themselves.
“This isn’t a problem of youth, it’s a problem of female youth,” said Clay Shirky, an expert in interactive media at New York University. He added that as such breaches of privacy became more common, users were likely to become more cautious in their behaviour.
There is evidence that such caution is setting in. Pew found that two-thirds of the teenagers it surveyed restricted access to their profiles. The easiest way to do that is to have a private profile site accessible only to vetted friends. However, as Polumbo discovered, that does not offer protection from so-called friends who can spot an advantage, particularly where the user becomes famous in later life. – Guardian Unlimited Â