In an all-too-rare victory for common sense over prurience, a Utah middle school teacher was recently informed that she will not be fired for her slightly risqué Instagram photo gallery. Mindi Jensen, who teaches at the North Sanpete Middle School in Moroni, Utah, used the pseudonym “minscakes” to post photos of herself working out, posing…
A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to do another interview with Chicago Tribune business reporter Becky Yerak (@beckyyerak) about the privacy implications of the growing relationship between home insurers and companies that produce “smart” products for homeowners. Her article, “Insurers’ discounts for smart home devices raise privacy concerns,” ran last week in…
2015-10-19 Teens, Technology, and Suicide: Understanding Causes, Effects, and “Bullycide” from Frederick Lane A Featured Presentation delivered with Joanne Harpel, JD, MPhil, at the 2015 Annual Conference of the New York State School Boards Association on October 19 and October 20, 2015 in New York, NY. If you are interested in discussing a presentation or…
In the summer of 2014, an undercover police detective in New Zealand began trading images of child pornography with a man in Anchorage, Alaska. The detective forwarded information about the exchange to Alaska law enforcement officials, who used the data to obtain a search warrant for the home of Daniel Alan Brown, a teaching assistant…
A 45-year-old science teacher at Santa Ana High School was arrested in early September “on suspicion of having sex with a 16-year-old female student” two years earlier. According to the Santa Ana Police Department, Alvar Albert Gonzalez, met the victim in one of his classes and allegedly had sex with her during her school lunch…
A confluence of some of the most disturbing trends in American society led to the lockdown Wednesday of Highland High School in Pocatello, Idaho. In the wee hours of the morning on October 7, an unnamed 15-year-old male had a Facebook Messenger exchange with another person, age and gender unknown. A screenshot of a portion…
In August 2010, a woman named Jennifer Woolsey reportedly found a video on the desktop of her family’s shared computer that showed her husband Brian on the receiving end of a sexual act by a young woman. At the time, both she and her husband were teachers at Sunrise Mountain High School in Peoria, Arizona,…
When I researched and wrote Cybertraps for the Young, one thing that surprised me was the ease with which teens could order addictive and dangerous products from Web sites around the world. Any teen with a credit card (or access to one) could buy products intended for adults and have them shipped home or to…
At the end of September, Canadian tech entrepreneurs Julia Cordray and Nicole McCullough announced the pending release of “Peeple,” an app designed to enable users to give one- to five-star ratings to the various people in their lives — basically, “Yelp” for humanity. The reaction to the announcement was, to put it mildly, ferociously negative.…
In the fall of 2010, a young man named Tyler Clementi began his freshman year at Rutgers University in New Jersey. A couple of weeks into the school year, Clementi’s roommate set up a webcam to surreptitiously broadcast an intimate encounter between Clementi and another man. Clementi, a gifted musician, learned about what had happened…
