Category: Technology Author : Steven Hodson Posted: April 20, 2009
Tags : police, privacy, Twitter
It’s one thing to see the mugshots of famous people show up on the web but getting busted for anything in Denton Texas could see you show up on Twitter. To make it clear this isn’t an official Twitter profile for the Denton police but rather an experiment by an art student as a way to show just how much personal stuff ends up available on the web.
Through some simple scraping of the public information available on the Denton police web site the student creates a Twitter post of the date and time of the arrest, the age of the charged person along with their mugshot posted to TwitPic. I am sure there are some who think this is a pretty cool idea but it also shows just how scary Twitter can be as a publishing platform. Considering just how much personal stuff is available on the web the idea that it could show up on something like Twitter without you even knowing about it should make people just a tad nervous.
[hat tip to SlipperyBrick / bottom pic courtesy of SlipperyBrick]
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Apr 20, 2009
The one good thing about online text is that it's easy to incorporate it into other materials. This allows the spread of ideas, and (when proper attribution is used and readers are motivated) allows people who read something in a particular location to go back to the original source to see the original details.
The one bad thing about online text is that it's easy to incorporate it into other materials. I don't know if the Denton Police has any opinion on this particular experiment, but the example just goes to show you that if something pops up in one location – public or private – there's no barrier to it showing up everywhere.