Privacy in the era of snap-and-send

A cautionary tale from a California tech conference

Snap-and-send cellphone cameras are turning our children into pornographers, apparently. So declare the police and parent groups now waging war on sexting — the high-school practice of sending racy pictures to friends and paramours. In a modern take on the old-fashioned locker search, U.K. teachers now are being instructed to search students’ mobile phones for evidence of sexting activities — a bizarre policy that essentially turns professors into unwitting child-porn scavengers.

This is part of a larger trend: Mobile-phone technology is destroying our ability to lead private lives. Unless we’re constantly vigilant about everything we do or say in public, every one of us is just one Tweeted photo away from career-ending embarrassment.

In this regard, a cautionary tale emerged this week in Santa Clara, Calif. — at something called PyCon. That would be the annual gathering of software developers who use Python, a popular programming language employed for everything from YouTube to Dropbox to the Civilization video game series.

In other words: a world-class geekfest.

True to stereotype, these tech geeks mostly are young and male and bursting with industry buzz phrases. So when one of the speakers at PyCon started going on about “dongles” and “forking” (the former being a tiny hardware device, the latter being a common programming term), it was natural that a few of the audience members — employees of a company called Play Haven, as it happened — began riffing comically on this odd jargon.

Unfortunately, they did so within earshot of one Adria Richards — a fellow tech geek evangelist who also has a reputation as a sort of politically correct language commissar within the software-developer community. Ms. Richards snapped a picture of the two men with her cellphone, and posted it on Twitter with the name-and-shame annotation: “Not cool. Jokes about forking repo’s in a sexual way and ‘ big’ dongles.”

Her photo showed the nametag of one of the men. Two days later, one of them was fired by Play Haven — “which sucks,” he later wrote on a message forum, “because I have three kids and I really liked that job.”

It’s an absurd result for a variety of reasons — the foremost being that it’s not even clear his remark was off-colour. “While I did make a ‘big don- gle’ joke about a fictional piece [of ] hardware that identified as male, no sexual jokes were made about forking,” he wrote. “My friends and I had decided ‘forking someone’s repo’ is a new form of flattery (the highest form being implementation) … The sexual context was applied by Adria, and not us.”

It’s true that much of the tech world is a boys club full of casual and not-so-casual sexism. And one can see why some women have chips on their shoulder in this sort of environment. But what Ms. Richards did went beyond the pale. Recognizing this, her own employer, the email company SendGrid, promptly fired her. “SendGrid supports the right to report inappropriate behavior,” wrote its CEO. “[But] publicly shaming the offenders — and bystanders — was not the appropriate way to handle the situation.”

It ’s also gratifying to see other female techies rallying to the defense of the two photographed donglers. Oregonbased web developer Amanda Blum, for instance, has blogged that “ultimately, [Ms. Richards behaviour] actually harms female developers because it forms the perception that we are to be feared, we are humorless, that we are hard to work with.” Just so.

But the fact is that it doesn’t matter how many smart, reasonable, open-minded women come out on the right side after the fact. Once someone is shamed on the web, it’s hard to reverse the damage. And so all of us, whether on stage or in the audience, always have to speak and act in a guarded manner, stripped of satire, humour, sarcasm or anything else that might be misconstrued by a selectively hypersensitive eavesdropper with a smartphone.

The Internet was supposed to facilitate free speech. And of course, it has: Ms. Richards’ former company, SendGrid, has delivered 97 billion emails. Yet, ironically, this same technology has created a regime of de facto censorship whereby teachers feel entitled to search your kid’s cellphone, and a stray joke or a few out-of-context words at an industry conference can ruin your life.

As Mr. Richards might put it: “Not cool.”