I sometimes feel like I’m beating my head against the wall whenever I try to teach my kids lessons on Internet safety and privacy. They’re relatively young (Kevin is 14 and Caitlyn is 12), and they haven’t seen or heard much of the sordid side of online communications.

Another case study recently whipped across my desk—but I don’t think I can share it with my kids yet. Maybe in a few years. Here’s the background. Tell me what you think.

I was reading an issue of Automotive News, a trade magazine geared toward the automotive industry. I was beginning to get a little punch-drunk from the usual collection of bland articles, when an article on page 46 hit me right between the eyes.

“Racy scandal for race exec” was the headline on an article that reported that Max Mosley, president of Federation Internationale de l’Automobile, the sanctioning body for Formula One and other international racing circuits, was caught on video recently with his pants down. Actually, with his pants, and every other stitch of clothing, removed from his 67-year-old body.

The video, which was posted on the British News of the World website, started a sort of media flogging of Mosley. According to the Automotive News story, in the video, the naked Mosley administered lashes to one of five prostitutes, counting the strokes in “vigorous German” and adding, in German-accented English, “She needs more of ze punishment!” Later, he gets punished by a dominatrix for being a bad boy.

Mosley is fighting off calls that he resign, lashing out at his critics, saying that the video was of a private matter that was “harmless and completely legal.” (I checked…prostitution among consenting adults is legal in London, where the video was made. Side-note: prostitution is not legal in Monaco, where Mosley lives with his wife.)

You may be thinking at this point, “So what is the lesson that you want to share with your kids, Tom? Tell us before we have to pull it out of you!”

In what, to Max Mosley, must have been a painfully twisted idea, the S&M sex video was filmed with a camera hidden in the brassiere of one of the participants (not Max, I’m assuming). That’s it; that’s the point that I want my kids to understand.

The world in which we live is closer than anyone would have thought to the “Big Brother” world written about by George Orwell. Only it is even more insidious than Orwell imagined, because rather than an evil government conspiring to remove our privacy, we are doing it to ourselves. Through our brassieres, through our camera phones, through our lack of respect for privacy.

My kids need to know this, before they start adding videos of their own (hopefully much more family-friendly than Max’s) to their MySpace, or Facebook, or whatever place they will consider to be “private,” “safe” and “boss” in the future. Because it isn’t only Big Brother we need to fear today; it’s Big Dominatrix with the Little Video Camera…or our best friend who doesn’t have the sense to yell “Cut.”
“max+mosley” prostitution video privacy commakazispeek

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 4:41 pm and is filed under General, Uncategorized, blogging, communications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.