password protected pictures
There’s a rally tonight for suspended Austin High art teacher Tamara Hoover at AISD headquarters: 1111 W. 6th St. at 7pm. Hoover got into a spat with another teacher over the use of a kiln, and it only got hotter from there. A student told the teacher of the existence of nude images of Hoover that had been taken from a private area of her girlfriend’s Flickr account. I’m not sure I would be particularly worked up about this, if it weren’t for the fact that the photos were not accessible to the public. Someone gained unauthorized access to the photos and redistributed them on the Web. It’s not as if she was appearing in Playboy magazine or a porn site. Not only was Hoover’s privacy violated, but the school district and the media are stretching the facts. Each news report should mention that the images were in a protected area — not “on the internet” — but the coverage seems to frame it as “daffy lesbians putting dirty pictures in the hands of kids.” It seems that homophobia and fears about the internet are trumping the facts of the case. I sort of wonder where Flickr is in all of this mess. Are Flickr’s privacy controls too weak, or is its security too lax? Or was it a simple case of an easily-guessed password?
Here’s an interview with the photographer Celesta Danger at Austinist.
[…] As a quick local note, an entry on the technology gossip blog Valleywag reveals that the third most popular search term driving traffic to Flickr is “Tamara Hoover,” the suspended Austin High teacher I’ve blogged about before. Her name ranked after “Flickr” and “Flickr.com,” but I imagine most of the users are more interested in seeing the nude pictures that got her in trouble than in supporting her cause. It’s particularly telling that the fourth most common search is for “boobs.” […]