The former girlfriend of George Zimmerman has shared her take on the sharing of very private information, for the first time on television. Her former boyfriend shared intimate photos of her on social media without her permission.
Much of her time with Zimmerman was good until she started to get text messages and voicemails from total strangers. They had seen her number in posts by Zimmerman’s account. These posts included her name and cell number plus some very intimate photos.
Her reaction was to ask him to take down the posts, which he obviously declined to do. She was getting messages from strangers as far afield as Australia and Canada. Some were kind some were cruel. One even tried to FaceTime with her.
A report was filed with the local County sheriff’s Office and the officer observed some of the tweets. The call frequency did drop and she shared many of the messages with Ch5 news.
Heather now wants the images of her, to be totally erased from all websites. Infostream’s senior network engineer David Parizek was interviewed by Ch5 news and he said “the internet never forgets”. He went on to say that in fact, images are more difficult to track and erase than written information. Photos can be copied and altered and then saved with another title. The tracking process is both time consuming and very costly often needing help from computer experts and lawyers.
David said that a search engine is the first place to start – this will identify the possible sites where the images have landed and then you need to ask the search engine to remove those results from search. If the images can be blocked from there, most people would give up, as that is where everyone goes. David told Ch5 news that in one year, the search engines had received over a million requests to remove information. So far about half have been approved. The rest have either not yet been looked at or have been denied as inappropriate. It’s understandable that people who have been made bankrupt would want that information removed, though possibly a bank would want to see that information. But what about when child pornography or a child molester is involved – they both want that information hidden but should it be?
Many states are considering legislation on the topic of the right to forget or erase which would allow adults to have such information removed if for example it was posted while they were a minor. Last year, a law was passed in Florida banning what is called Revenge Port which is the posting of nude images with information identifying the person. Google has publicly agreed to remove such posts.
The case in question does not fit under that umbrella. David said that Twitter having suspended Zimmerman’s account has helped.
WARNING AFTER INTIMATE PHOTOS SHARED PUBLICLY
