Beware on social media: What you post may come back to haunt you

WHEN Kildare woman Joan (not her real name) investigated her daughter’s online activity, she was shocked.

In addition to the Facebook, Youtube, Bebo and email accounts known to Joan, her daughter had a second Facebook account. When confronted, the girl referred to it as her ‘sexy facebook’.

“It had over 500 friends and, by the time I downloaded all the messages to go through them, they totalled nearly 10,000. No joke, I seriously nearly took root in the PC room going through them,” Joan says.

Joan also found a Tagged account. Tagged is another social-networking site, and the messages on it were more worrying.

“She had quite a few messages from different boys in our area, and also from one or two boys from school, who, basically, were asking her for hook-ups; oral sex and/or sex, but with no strings attached. One boy told her that he’d ‘let her give him a blow job as long as she didn’t tell his girlfriend’.”

All of the boys ranged in age from 13 to 15.

Joan’s experiences, while disturbing, aren’t uncommon. The UK charity, Beatbullying, polled 2,000 children three years ago. A third of those polled said they had received a sexually explicit message online. The same charity has said that sexting — sending sexually explicit texts — had reached epidemic proportions in the UK.

The survey data from Ireland seems to offer some comfort. An EU Kids Online survey, released early last year, found that in the 11 to 16-year-old age group, only 11% of Irish children had sent or received such messages, while a still smaller percentage received them online. But the consequences of sexting can be devastating, especially when there are pictures involved.

Joan found no evidence of revealing pictures on her daughter’s phone or computer, but when she asked her, Joan’s worst fears were realised.

“She admitted to sending something to a chap in Tallaght, whom she met on Facebook. She said that she knew that she would never see him, so she didn’t think it would be a big deal. The pic was of her in her bra, not naked, but she fails to comprehend that, once a picture is on the internet, it’s there forever. And that Ireland is a small place, and we don’t live a hundred miles away from Tallaght,” Joan says.

Simon Grehan is Webwise project coordinator at the National Centre for Technology in Education, and co-author of the EU Kids Online report. He has seen the devastation caused by teens sending explicit content online. “You’d have intimate relationships where pics are exchanged, then when the relationship breaks down, somebody gets the hump and shares the pictures to a much wider audience … You hear stories of people moving schools and finding that the pictures have followed them to the new school … There are families that I’ve worked with ten years ago. They’re saying that these pics are still coming up. They just don’t go away,” he says.

The basic problem, he says, is that children don’t understand the medium. “They use words like ‘private’ on social networks as if it’s possible to share private information on the internet. The reality is that when you’re putting up pictures of yourself, it’s almost impossible to control the audience, or the context in which they’re seen.”

For parents, especially those who aren’t tech-savvy, these issues create huge stress. Grehan says that when the National Parents Council recently offered seminars on children’s use of the internet, they were inundated with requests from schools — so they’re not taking any more bookings until after Christmas. There are ample resources online for concerned parents. Check webwise.ie for more information.

Or, you could call Michael Fertik. He is MD of California-based tech company, Reputation Defender, which has several hundred clients in Ireland. Reputation Defender develops software that tracks undesirable online data about you, or your child, and neutralises it.

Fertik’s first advice is this: Get the computer out of the bedroom and into the living room. “This doesn’t mean you’re spying on them, but they see that you’re in the room, so they’ll usually get into less trouble,” he says. In categorising the online behaviour of children and teens, Fertik talks about dodgy language, dodgy jokes, and photos that may be funny in context, but perhaps less so out of context. “Photos, photos, photos,” he says. “Kids and their cameras. The biggest surprise to me is how often kids are talking about their parents on the internet.”

Fertik says that children are doing what they’ve always done: Getting together to talk about the issues that affect their lives. The problem with social networking is that talking is in a forum that is potentially highly public and permanent.

“So the kinds of things that kids often do — very innocently, by the way — they say: ‘Mom and dad had a fight last night. I think they’re going to get a divorce.’ Or ‘Dad did not get the promotion, Mom did not get the job offer’, and so it’s not malicious, it’s just the kind of sharing that kids always do with each other to find community support and solace, and even just gossip,” he says.

Even supposing your teen knows not to post inappropriate content online, what do you do if someone else does? The recent controversy surrounding the video of fighting schoolgirls, from Christ King secondary school in Cork, is just one more reminder that we live in a world where everyone has a camera and anyone can post anything about anyone from almost anywhere.

There’s hardly a day goes by now when someone is not caught doing something that would have remained utterly self-contained a decade ago. Ask Paris Hilton or Tulisa Contostavlos, both of whom saw what they had understood were intimate moments go viral on the internet.

Privacy experts call it the irretrievable digital footprint. Once it’s out there, it’s out there forever.

But if everyone is at it, if there’s embarrassing content about half the world out there, does it make any difference? In a few years, will the drunken photographs and off-colour posts from when you were 16 make any difference?

Audrey Hughes, of Principle Recruitment, says that investigating a candidate’s digital life is a standard of recruitment. You can’t ask someone about their social life in an interview, but these days you may not have to ask. “If a candidate is an active Facebook user, you’ll get a very clear picture of what their habits are. If, for example, you’re looking for a really diligent worker who’ll put their all into the role, then you’re not really looking for someone who’s out late drinking on a Sunday night, or who looks to be a party animal on Facebook,” she says.

Even if you lockdown your privacy settings to prevent this snooping, employers in the US — and schools — have made headlines by demanding that potential candidates and students turn in their Facebook passwords. The privacy lobby condemned this practice, and several states have since outlawed it, but as long as the information exists, so will the vulnerability.

None of this seems to be having any impact on the popularity of social media. Facebook recently announced that it had added its one billionth member. As of last year, 48 hours of video were uploaded to Youtube every minute, while Twitter has 400m tweets.

This stuff isn’t going away.