Goodbye to Privacy

Teacher to students: Guess what kids? Thanks to the ubiquitous cell phone camera, the age of any kind of privacy is over. These days if you do anything even slightly outrageous, illegal or unconventional in public, or even what you thought was "private," chances are that someone, someone that you don't even know, has captured it on their cell phone and within a short amount of time it will be up online for the whole world to see. (BTW - whole world means friends, parents, school officials, prospective employers, college admissions officers and even voters in a possible future election.) Just ask some of the semifinalist American Idol contestants in the current round whose pictures - and look alike pictures - are cropping up to embarrass them. Does this mean the age of being "a little wild in my youth" is over? Probably not because some kids that may foolishly think this kind of exposure is their "15 seconds of fame." This isn't Big Brother watching - this is Little Brother and he doesn't care who sees. Until kids begin to realize they are all in this no-holds-barred world together, things are only going to get wilder.