➟ Sold to pornography sites. One of the fastest ways to
generate ‘new’ pornography images is to add new
faces to old material.➟ Used in advertising without your knowledge or
approval.➟ Used to steal your identity or scam others. If a crook
has a picture of you and can describe you, your home,
or car, another member of your family may be more
open to believing that the person knows you and may
succumb to a scam.It isn’t just photos taken with standard cameras that
could cause problems. The quality of cameras embed-
ded in cell phones is rapidly improving. The Asian cell
phone market now has many phone choices with five
or more megapixels, and Samsung has even developed
a 10-megapixel camera phone. These phones take
photos and short videos that have a high enough reso-
lution that they become interesting to copy if posted
publicly. Add this to the new services that carriers are
providing to make it easy to post photos directly to
the Web, and the result is many people are posting
images without really reviewing them from a safety
perspective — usually the comment we get afterwards
is that “it seemed like a good idea at the time.”Particularly concerning are the highly sexual images
that teens in particular are taking of themselves or oth-
ers with their cameras and then sending to someone —
typically a boy- or girlfriend, all too often these get
shared much further than ever intended and a great
deal of embarrassment occurs. Worse than the embar-
rassment however is that these images are child
pornography — even when the teen is the picture
taker — and sending as well as receiving these is a
felony offense. These pictures (and short videos) have
monetary value to predators and can make victims
truly identifiable — and locatable.
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Part II: Using the Internet While Dodging the Risk