TODAY: Living in glass houses

Remem­ber, you shot it on your hand­phone – don’t cry if that inti­mate snap becomes pub­lic domain viewing

THIS is not new: A cou­ple record­ing them­selves hav­ing sex on video, promptly los­ing the record­ing and then reel­ing in hor­ror as it is flashed all over the Inter­net. Think Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst, think Paris Hilton.

Read more at TODAY­on­line: [pdf][text]

Tech­no­rati Tags: blog, NYP video, sin­ga­pore, Tammy, Tammy NYP, tech­no­rati, TODAY

If you still don’t know what we’re talk­ing about here, this is how blog­ger Ghost (www.bexafraid.com) describes the incident:

“She is (allegedly) a Nanyang Poly (NYP) IT stu­dent. The story goes that she (or he) filmed their sex­ual escapade on her hand­phone, some­one stole her hand­phone and found the clip.

“As they say — the rest is history.”

So, does the fact that this hap­pened in Sin­ga­pore, with the cou­ple being teenaged stu­dents in a local poly­tech­nic, make it any less of a scan­dal? Even if they were allegedly of con­sent­ing age?

Appar­ently not — forums and blogs have pounced on the dis­cov­ery of the video file, links to which have since been taken off some web­sites, but not before the clip had pre­sum­ably been down­loaded, seen by thou­sands, and re-distributed on per­sonal web­sites and through email attachments.

As late as Sun­day night, a link to a copy of the video could still be seen on forums such as sam­my­boy (http://forums.delphiforums.com/sammyboymod/), where read­ers took turns dis­sect­ing and analysing the clip, while some oth­ers posted links to fake files, just to irk curi­ous browsers want­ing a peek at the video.

Blog­gers had a field day dis­cussing the mat­ter too, with some say­ing some­thing like this was bound to happen.

“From the moment 3G phones went into devel­op­ment, and with the increase in pop­u­lar­ity and wide­spread own­er­ship of such phones, I have fore­seen such an inci­dent hap­pen­ing,” said blog­ger Jasper Chen (jasperthedummy.blogspot.com), who also added that he had once recorded him­self in a sim­i­lar set­ting, only to delete the clip after con­sid­er­ing the fall­out should the video end up in the wrong hands.

He’s also scorn­ful of the chances the NYP video fad­ing into obscu­rity in the near future. Says Jasper: “The Inter­net just works this way: Unstoppable.”

Unstop­pable because read­ers’ curiosi­ties will be piqued, espe­cially by “reviews” of the video such as Ghost’s: “Frankly, it’s very stim­u­lat­ing and I got a lit­tle aroused too.”

For those of you who have had your curios­ity (ahem) piqued by that quote, Ghost also writes that the clip has been deleted from his com­puter, so please do not email him for it — and you, gen­tle read­ers, are reminded that the dis­tri­b­u­tion of porno­graphic mate­r­ial is ille­gal in Singapore.

Blog aggre­ga­tor Tomorrow.sg pub­lished a link to a blog post that dis­cussed the mat­ter as well, attract­ing over 2,000 read­ers and 75 com­ments, with reac­tions rang­ing from dis­gust to sym­pa­thy for the cou­ple star­ring in the clip.

“I think the vic­tim is very ‘poor thing’”, said blog­ger Cobalt Pal­adin (cobaltpaladin.blogspot.com) in response to the arti­cle posted on Tomorrow.sg.

“Poor thing” prob­a­bly for not real­is­ing, to para­phrase blog­ger and activist Alex Au (yawningbread.org), that with the advent of such high-propagation tech­nol­ogy, we increas­ingly live in a soci­ety of glass houses, where it is increas­ingly dif­fi­cult to safe­guard one’s pri­vacy — whether or not we have a right to that privacy.

I think there will be a whole slew of such inci­dents as peo­ple slowly adjust them­selves to the fact that data-carrying infra­struc­tures are get­ting faster and eas­ier to use, and with that, the speed and ease with which infor­ma­tion can be spread.

It doesn’t mat­ter if there’s still the Unde­sir­able Pub­li­ca­tions Act (last updated in 2003 to include “elec­tronic trans­mis­sion” apart from broad­cast­ing). You could still, for instance, acci­den­tally send a pic­ture of your­self in a com­pro­mis­ing sit­u­a­tion to the wrong per­son and end up hav­ing a much broader audi­ence than you intended, in addi­tion to tech­ni­cally hav­ing com­mit­ted a crime.

“I think she is a vic­tim in hav­ing her phone stolen and her video pub­lished … but which self-respecting female would carry her own sex film around in a mobile phone?!” asked “sir lus” on Tomorrow.sg.

In this day and age, either a brazen one or a fool­ish one. Take that as a les­son learnt.

Mr Miyagi aka Ben­jamin Lee has been enter­tain­ing read­ers at http://miyagi.sg for over a year, and once sent an sms to the sub­ject mat­ter of his com­plain­ing mes­sage.