"Sexting" is the practice of taking a sexually revealing picture of yourself, typically from a cell phone, and sending it to someone. Legal consequences aside, it's a dumb thing to do, especially for younger age groups in which it has become something of a fad.
(Credit:
CBS Early Show)
For minors, there's another risk: serious legal consequences. Creating, transmitting, and even possessing a nude, seminude, or sexually explicit image of a minor can be considered child pornography. It can be prosecuted as a state or federal felony and can even lead to having to register as a sex offender.
Crazy as it seems, some prosecutors have gone after kids for taking and sending pictures of themselves. There was a case in Florida a couple of years ago in which a teenage boy and girl photographed themselves nude and engaged in "unspecified sexual behavior."
One kid sent the picture to the other, and somehow, the police got involved. They were tried and convicted for production and distribution of child porn, and the teen who received the image had the additional charge of possession. An appeals court upheld the convictions.
In January this year, three teenage girls from Pennsylvania were charged for creating child porn, and the three boys who received the images were charged for possessing it. And, according to CBS News, a Texas eighth-grader in October spent a night in jail after a coach found a nude picture on his cell phone, sent by another student.
It's sadly ironic that the very child porn laws that were written to protect children from being exploited by adults could wind up having a devastating impact on the lives of children who, while acting stupid, have no criminal intent. For some perspective on whether this issue is overblown, see Anne Collier's post in NetFamily News.
It's hard to know how prevalent the practice is. But if you believe the results of an online survey commissioned by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, about 22 percent of teenage girls and 18 percent of boys admit to having "electronically sent, or posted online, nude or seminude pictures or video of themselves."
I'm not completely confident about the results of this study, which was carried out by a market research firm and not subject to academic peer review. But I think that it's fair to assume that a significant number of kids are doing this.
Perhaps more interesting than the survey's overall number is the breakdown of why teens take and send these pictures. Of those who reportedly sent such pictures, 71 percent of girls and 67 percent of boys said they sent or posted content to a boyfriend or girlfriend, while 21 percent of the girls and 39 percent of the boys say they sent it to someone they wanted to date.
As you might expect, peer pressure plays a role. Of those who sent such content, 51 percent of teen girls cited "pressure from a guy," while 18 percent of teen boys blamed pressure from girls.
While sexting is troubling, I think it's important for us all to take a deep breath and refrain from passing new laws or using child pornography laws that were designed to protect children from exploitation by adults.
I suspect that sexting will diminish over time. Kids aren't stupid and, faced with the facts, most will wise up. We also know that kids who get in trouble online are the same kids who get in trouble offline, so when teens repeatedly do sexting, or other stupid or risky things online, it's important to intervene early and often.
The best thing for a parent to do is to have a nonconfrontational conversation--perhaps over dinner--to ask your kids if they've heard about sexting and what they think about it.
You might not get a straight answer, but you'll open up a dialogue that can go a long way toward helping your kids understand how to minimize legal, social, and reputation risks. There are more tips on ConnectSafely.org, a nonprofit Internet safety site I help operate.
Boy, am I glad the Internet and camera phones weren't around when I was a kid.
You might recognize Sprint CEO Dan Hesse from those black-and-white commercials. When I met with him last week at a hotel bar in Oakland, Calif., two women at the next table certainly did. They treated him like a celebrity.
I wouldn't go that far, but he does appear to have a good handle on the mobile industry and what Sprint--the No. 3 cell phone service provider behind AT&T and Verizon--needs to do. And he knows more than a little something about phone companies, having spent 23 years at AT&T, including a stint as CEO of AT&T Wireless Services.
It's too early to know for sure, but it seems as if Hesse could be Sprint's comeback kid.
Sprint CEO Dan Hesse, as seen in the company's much-played black-and-white commercial.
(Credit: Sprint)I started the conversation on a high note by asking him about the recently announced Palm Pre smartphone, which will be available exclusively from Sprint when it's released later this year. Not surprisingly, Hesse was "extremely enthused" about the phone, which won CNET's "Best of CES 2009" award and high initial praise from me and many other journalists.
While devices might attract customers, the real value of a cell phone company is the speed, reliability, and footprint of its network. As a Sprint customer, I can testify that it's pretty good. No cellular network is perfect, and reception always varies by location. But with my own Sprint phone and others I've tested, I've had relatively few dropped calls on Sprint, compared with Verizon and AT&T in the San Francisco Bay Area and on my frequent business trips, mostly to major U.S. cities.
Like Verizon's, most of Sprint's phones don't work overseas. But Sprint does offer a few "world" phones--including the BlackBerry 8830, which I tested--that have a GSM chip for global coverage. AT&T and T-Mobile use GSM technology in the States, which means that most of their handsets will work overseas, albeit at incredibly high roaming rates, unless you unlock them and buy a GSM SIM card in the country you're visiting.
4G Network uses WiMax
Hesse spent a big part of our interview talking about Sprint's 4G network, which is currently deployed in Baltimore and will soon launch in Portland, Ore. A national roll-out is scheduled over the next couple of years. The service uses WiMax technology, which is a high-speed broadband that can handle data with average speeds from 2 to 4 megabits per second.
I haven't been able to test the 4G service, but the Sprint 3G card I tried in my notebook worked well in most locations, though at speeds averaging about 800 kilobits per second.
AT&T and Verizon will roll out their 4G networks using a different technology, called LTE (long-term evolution). But so far, Sprint is ahead in the race to 4G.
What I find most interesting is not broadband in PCs, but broadband embedded in other devices. Hesse envisions embedded 4G broadband in lots of devices, including video and still cameras.
Amazon's Kindle already has an embedded Sprint 3G broadband chip so you can order books from anywhere in the United States without having to connect the Kindle to a PC or a Mac. The Kindle is a one-way street--you use it to download books--but eventually there will be plenty of devices with high-speed two-way communications.
Hesse envisions using a high-end camera to take a picture or a video in Paris and narrating it in real time, broadcasting live via the network. Of course, you can already do that with cameras that are built in to phones, but he's talking about phones embedded into cameras.
While he wouldn't give me any specifics about unannounced products, he said there are some great new devices in the pipeline. In 2009 and 2010, we can expect much higher-resolution screens, 3D graphics, higher-resolution cameras in traditional phones and, of course, 4G WiMax.
Based on our interview and what I'm seeing in the marketplace, we can also expect plenty of new relatively low-cost handsets with either virtual or physical QWERTY keyboard so that Sprint and its competitors can sell their data services.
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