Durban - Parents should speak to their children about the dangers of cellphones and how they were expected to behave online.
This is according to media law consultant Emma Sadleir, who said she was worried by the number of children and adults who were “sexting” and exposing themselves naked to other people.
Sadleir, who has co-written a book with Tamsyn de Beer, titled Don’t Film Yourself Having Sex– it provides legal advice on social media use and the digital world – said it was important that parents spoke to their children about consequences of misusing their cellphones.
She said children were driven by popularity and were producing “tons of pictures daily” including selfies. They were letting their guard down by not prioritising their privacy.
In Bloemfontein recently, a 17-year-old girl had been successfully prosecuted and handed a suspended sentence for sending explicit selfies privately to her boyfriend.
The teenager was found guilty of manufacturing and distributing child pornography.
“Do not let the content exist, because even if you delete it, it may not really be deleted because there are back-ups online that store photos these days, and phones can be stolen so quickly,” Sadleir said.
“If you even think it’s a good idea to take a picture of yourself in the nude, hit yourself on the head. Or make sure your head and genitals aren’t in the same picture.”
But it wasn’t just teenagers who were in danger, she said adults who were sexting or keeping compromising pictures and videos could find those pictures exposed in the internet as was the case recently, with Hollywood stars’ pictures being leaked after an iCloud server was hacked.
Sadleir said she was also worried about the popularity of social networking sites such as Instagram and Snapchat, which were popular with young people.
Instagram, which has 1 million active users in South Africa, was dangerous for young people as there was very little privacy and girls tended to take countless selfies, which opened them up to possible sexual predators as most did not know who was following them and why, she said.
Sadleir said the location services facility on social networking sites was also dangerous, as people did not need to know where one was at what time.
In a visit to three Durban all-girl schools recently, Sadleir found that most of the pupils were using a photo-sharing application called Snapchat – which allows anyone to send a picture to a friend and within seconds it is deleted automatically from the phone.
But Sadleir said such apps were dangerous as the content being shared was perceived to be compromising.
She said there was nothing stopping people from screen-grabbing a picture sent on the app before it deleted automatically.
She stressed that once content had been sent to someone, a person had no control of how far it would be further distributed.