Teenager Kills Classmate: Poses With Body To take "Selfie"

Murder Selfies.

A Pennsylvania teenager has been accused of murdering a classmate and posing with the victim’s body for a "selfie," according to news reports.

Authorities say 16-year-old Maxwell Marion Morton of Jeannette, Pa., fatally shot 16-year-old Ryan Mangan in the face before taking a photo with Mangan's body and uploading it to Snapchat, a smartphone application that allows users to send images that are deleted a few seconds after they’re received, according to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

Morton sent the image to a friend, who saved it on his phone before it was deleted, according to Fox News. The friend showed the photo to his mother, who turned the image over to police, according to Fox News.

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Police also say the friend received more text messages from Morton, saying: "Told you I cleaned up the shells” and “Ryan was not the last one," according to CBS Pittsburgh.

As @seandav suggested: before you get up on your high horse CRUSADES.

In other sign o' the times news, everyone's linking this story about story about Samsung tv's eavesdropping on you and sending your spoken words off to third parties, but what I think it's getting at is that voice-recognition features may be provided by third-parties and so third-party systems may hear your voices.

Still, even though I think the internet is overplaying this (The internet? Overplaying?), it is worrisome, and I don't like that I have to guess at an innocent explanation.

Every day we are confronted more and more by our contradictory choices. On one hand, we want everything more convenient (or at least Big Tech thinks we want everything more convenient). Big Tech says that to make things more convenient, it has to have all of our information, to "tailor" our "user experience" for us, and it might have to send our information to third parties to help "tailor" that "user experience" and "adapt" to our "evolving" "needs."

On the other hand: We do not want large corporations, and all the small fly-by-night outfits they have contracted work out to, hearing every word we say and seeing our every move in the house.

We keep pretending that this contradiction doesn't exist, and so we keep avoiding putting serious restrictions on these supposedly "convenience-enhancing" sharings of personal data; at some point, and that point seems to be now, this becomes unworkable.

posted by Ace at 03:53 PM

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