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Comment by sek | Hacker News Reader

> For parents, there's a pretty serious downside to all this teen texting, however. A full 28 percent of polled teens said they had sent fully nude photos of themselves over SMS. About a quarter of American teenagers participate in "sexting," according to Wilson's sources, which include research firms like Nielsen and Pew, as well as media and government organizations.

What is the "serious downside" for parents now? I convinced two girls when I was 14 to show me their boobs. We didn't have smartphones back then. You think about nothing else when you hit puberty and is totally normal behavior.

Btw how do you send a full nude picture over SMS?

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The big difference is, sending a picture puts it out into the world where it can be forwarded, saved, uploaded to the web, shared with the entire school ...

It can get way out of hand.

It's much more of a Pandora's box than the private "show me yours" that you describe.

Well, this seem to be a good case for the use of DRM.

But it's users the ones who will hold the keys for the kingdom, not corporations.

DRM only needs to fail once. Then an image is in the wild and can be endlessly replicated (think Streisand effect / network effect).

For a movie, or for the pictures of someone famous?

Yes, lots of people will be trying to break that DRM.

For a random no-one in some small country? Out of millions of random no-ones?

It's a lot better than the current no-protection-at-all scheme.

"serious downside" may be that the pictures can remain around forever, and can get shared with 10,000 people in 2 seconds. The two girls you chatted up were exposed just to you for a short period of time, and had you not told us, no one except the 3 of you would ever have known.

He must have meant MMS, where you can send photos, which functions almost exactly like SMS.

Agreed on this being a terrible article, but it does highlight one thing; punishing teens for this is not the way to go. I think diluting the sex criminal database with a quarter of the upcoming generation is a little counter productive.

I removed it, i try to be less judgmental.

I am not in the US, but I would probably have done "sexting" instead while being at that age. Looking at these percentages, it seems like the laws don't display the reality. At least they should make exceptions when the other part is at a similar age.

Agreed. An interesting article on the subject that was posted a few months ago. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4495914

Cheers

He implies that the security of a teenage sexual experience is responsibility of their parents.

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