Three Wild Tech Privacy Stories Kick off 2021
A Bucks County woman anonymously sent coaches on her teen daughter’s cheerleading squad fake photos and videos that depicted the girl’s rivals naked, drinking, or smoking, all in a bid to embarrass them and force them from the team, prosecutors say.
The woman, Raffaela Spone, also sent the manipulated images to the girls, and, in anonymous messages, urged them to kill themselves, Bucks County District Attorney Matt Weintraub’s office said.
From a Grand Rapids, Michigan NBC affiliate Playing ‘Price is Right’-style game, GR doctors post operating room photos online:
One picture showed a doctor posing with a length of fibrous tissue in his hand. It appeared the patient from whom the tissue came was still lying on the operating table.
A second post showed a physician holding an organ that was removed in a cancer operation.
“The other game we play in the OR is guess that weight,” the poster of the organ picture wrote. “It applies to much more than just babies. As always, ‘Price is Right’ rules apply so if you go over then you’re out!”
Target 8 [TV news station] is not describing the organ further to protect the privacy of the patient from whom it came. We have also blurred the organ and tissue in the pictures, which were fully visible on Instagram.
And via the New York Times, another Pennsylvania cheerleader leads the news A Cheerleader’s Vulgar Message Prompts a First Amendment Showdown:
The student expressed her frustration on social media, sending a message on Snapchat to about 250 friends. The message included an image of the student and a friend with their middle fingers raised, along with text expressing a similar sentiment. Using a curse word four times, the student expressed her dissatisfaction with “school,” “softball,” “cheer” and “everything.”
Though Snapchat messages are ephemeral by design, another student took a screenshot of this one and showed it to her mother, a coach. The school suspended the student from cheerleading for a year, saying the punishment was needed to “avoid chaos” and maintain a “teamlike environment.”
This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
