Vanessa and Naked-Photo Lessons
So “High School Musical” star Vanessa Hudgens (who is pictured here) has admitted that a racy photo of her currently making the Internet rounds is indeed a picture of her and was not doctored to make the teenage actress merely seem undressed.
Every time such a naked or semi-naked photo of a celebrity hits the Internet, I — and millions of other people, I’m sure — say to themselves: Didn’t they know? Didn’t they realize that any time there’s a camera anywhere near you at home, and you are in any kind of revealing position, that anything produced by that camera will probably make it online? It doesn’t matter how “private” that picture-taking session was: the image exists, and unless you destroy it completely, it will probably come back to haunt you.
Similar questions arise when even non-celebrities find revealing photos of themselves in all sorts of potentially embarassing places on the Internet. What did you think would happen when you sent that shot to someone in an email? That the image was going to remained locked on that respondent’s computer forever? Please! The best way to counteract the possibility of such embarassment is to never send anyone a compromising photo of yourself on your computer. Since that’s about as realistic for some people as abstinence from sex then we should agree as a society to do a 180-degree turn in our norms: Privacy no longer exists, and we should all get used to that fact, much as we may instinctively want to decry it.
