In May 2014, a substitute teacher at Highland Park High School in Highland Park, IL (a suburb just north of Chicago) raised concerns that two of his students had been cheating. Following an internal investigation, the high school not only sided with the students but told Steven Habay, then 40, that he was being released…
A short time ago, I wrote a blog post about the need to reframe the discussion over the involunatary capture and distribution of intimate images (colloquially described as “revenge porn”) so as to better capture its true nature: “electronic sexual assault.” One of the concerns that I expressed in that post is that the terminology…
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…
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…
Earlier this year, I wrote about the case of Robert Emmett, who plead guilty to charges of filming up the skirts of students at his school, St. Andrews Cathedral School in Sydney, and to possession of child abuse materials. Last Thursday, Judge Ian McClintock of the Downing Centre District Court imposed a sentence of two…
In general, the issues that I cover in this blog are fairly apolitical — there’s not a lot of difference between Republicans and Democrats when it comes to cyberbullying, cyberharrassment, or digital misconduct by educators. But when it comes to privacy and issues of national security, political divisions inevitably creep into the discussion. The first…
It was with special interest that I watched last night’s segment of the John Oliver show, “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.” In the middle of last week, I received a call from one of the show’s researchers, and had an interesting discussion about various state and federal laws that might apply to revenge porn,…
High school buddy James Lowder sent me a link to an interesting episode from a late 1970’s radio broadcast by the Sears Radio Theater entitled “The Terrible Dream of Mr. Glitch.” It’s an amusing story built around the efforts of an average man to overcome computer errors that suggest not only that his bank account…
[Updated] A judge in the Auckland District Court will soon decide the fate of a New Zealand teacher accused of watching pornography on a school-issued computer and masturbating in an empty classroom. The report of the teacher’s alleged misbehavior came from a student who said that he had stopped by the classroom to discuss his…
If love means never having to admit you posted nude photos of your partner on an adult Web site, then romance has taken quite a hit in the Internet era. Unfortunately, the explosion of digital cameras, smartphones with cameras, and laptops with Web cams has resulted in an explosion of homemade pornography. (The “democratization of…
