I think the expectation of privacy is about the same, but we’re arguing a difference in degree, not in kind.
I would argue that the expectation of privacy on teacher’s cell phone, regardless if it is locked or not, is the equivalent of something being in the teacher’s purse. Most women do not have locks on their purses. I was taught from a very young age, you do not go snooping in a woman’s purse.
As to the question posed in the OP, it probably has more to do with the power dynamic.
Kids have parents, parents vote for the school board that hires the superintendent. There are more parents than teachers, so more votes by being accommodating.
In the particular case mentioned, female nudity is a big deal in conservative southern towns (and this case is in South Carolina). A lot of parents are going to be publicly outraged at the notion that the teacher even possessed nude photos of herself; having them at school is secondary.
That’s true. For one thing, she’s thirty years older, and nobody wants to see that shit.
Regards,
Shodan
The teacher’s failure to secure her phone might be regarded as an attractive nuisance, i.e. she should have expected that kids might try to have a look, and securing it is relatively easy, therefore had an obligation to secure it against intrusion.
If these were plain old “standing naked in front of the camera,” I might agree with you. But for all we know the teacher could be Tubgirl.
Actually, the linked article doesn’t even explicitly say that they were nude photos, just that they were “provocative.” (Which is probably more or less the same thing.)
But yeah, this raises all sorts of indignant questions from me, like “Since when is it okay for a high school student to look through a teacher’s personal cell phone?” and “Since when are teachers, particularly engineering teachers, expendable enough that they can be gotten rid of over something like this?”
Right. And I’m saying I think calling this negligence is a stretch. But whether it’s a stretch or not, if the same standard were consistently applied we would see teachers getting blamed for lots of things they are not currently blamed for.
In my view, the difference is not that leaving a phone unlocked is more negligent than the typical contribution to delinquency. The difference is that we treat nudity and sex, and especially female nudity, differently from other kinds of “harm.”
Even higher, I would think. We rightly expect the contents of a phone to be more intimate and private than the contents of a purse. And we expect that sometimes the contents of a purse will be revealed, if something falls out or it sits open–by contrast, no one is going to be seeing the inside of your photo album unless they steal your phone.
What an entitled little shit that kid is going to grow up to be, or already has. It is perfectly OK to go through someone else’s phone and look at their naked pics and even distribute them because obviously you are going to get no punishment for it whatsoever.
And now you are going to unleash the little hellion on the world, on the rest of us. This is the kind of kid that engages in revenge porn. And yes, I do think there’s an element of sexism in the story, too.
I guess we should thank the first person who stole, in order to teach us to lock our doors. I would never want to be a teacher and I have a hard time understanding why anybody would. What a shit job.
Ha. Want to feel old? Assuming an average teacher, that line should be “For one things, she was 4, then, and that’s disgusting”. Or, for a distressing number of the teachers I work with "For one thing, she wasn’t even born . . . "
Worse. The message is “Obviously, she’s the one who did something wrong by taking the photos, and you’re just the messenger”.
No, I didn’t want to feel old, so thanks for that.
Cripes - teachers are younger than me, doctors are younger than me, nurses are younger than me, the effing President is younger than me. That’s just -
What were we talking about, again? Never mind - it was something about phones, so I will just ask my daughter to explain it.
Regards,
Shodan
I basically agree with this. No teacher in his/her right mind (nor any other professional, for that matter) would bring a photo album into work with naked pictures of themselves. Even if they kept it locked up or hidden. I don’t see how this is different because the pictures are on a phone, laptop, or other electronic device.
The student should be in trouble for going through his teacher’s phone (analog to rifling through her purse/bag), but the teacher is at the same time responsible for bringing a collection of naked pictures of herself to school, which is a wholly inappropriate thing to do.
I disagree with the premise. A teacher should not bring a collection of pornographic photos into the class, then leave them laying around unsecured. Her phone should have been password protected, or she should just have not had them on her phone at all. Yes, the student should be in trouble, but teachers should not bring nude photos of themselves and leave them where a student can get ahold of them.
The fact that the student did something wrong does not somehow cancel out the fact that the teacher did something wrong.
Pantastic and Eonwe:
I would be curious to know your views on sexting in general.
I guess I am just not seeing it as a wholly inappropriate thing to do. I mean, no naked pictures of me exist, but lots and lots of people take them, and if somehow I discovered that my doctor or lawyer or my accountant or the person checking out my groceries had naked pictures of themselves on their phone, it wouldn’t seem to me that they had done anything wrong. It’d be wrong to show them to me. It’d be wrong to put them in a place where I might innocently see them (like, in a drawer that everyone had access to as part of their work duties), or taped to the inside of a locker that was normally left open). But naked pictures on a phone? To me that harkens back to the not-so-old idea that a teacher shouldn’t drink in public, lest a student see her.
I don’t really see how that’s relevant - this isn’t about sexting, this is about an adult leaving pictures that might be used in sexting where they were readily available to a child, who she was responsible for as a teacher. It really has nothing to do with what the pictures were used for, but that she had them and left them accessible.
But to answer the question, I have no problem with it pretty much anything two or more consenting adults get up to between themselves (that includes sexting, swapping pics, or video chat). My phone pretty much always has quite a few pictures stored on it that are very not appropriate for children on it.
So, let’s say she had them password protected, but a student got a lucky glimpse over her shoulder, figured out her password, and then looked at the pictures–is she still at fault because they weren’t secured enough? What if they were in her car trunk and a student used her fob during lunch and saw them?
To me, having them on the phone, so that people have to go digging to find them, is securing them. No security is perfect, and it’s not a teachers job to stop determined, malicious attempts to pry into her privacy–it’s her job to fulfill the basic requirements of not exposing students to things they have no business seeing.
Pantastic: Thanks. My hypothesis was that people who support punishment for the teacher generally are morally averse to sexting. It sounds like you do not fit my hypothesis! 
The impression I got was the district was afraid the teacher deliberately had those pictures on her phone and “accidentally” left it unattended and unlocked hoping a student would look.
Hi, Omar Little, and welcome to the south! I want to be clear: are you suggesting that Carolina teachers get unions? Because BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA o god it hurts.
No. Teachers in the south don’t get unions. We get politicians that trash us and balance the budget on our backs and find ways to pit us against each other (my favorite was the proposal, years ago, to give raises only to 25% of teachers in each building, based on district recommendation, and only if those teachers agreed to give up tenure). But we don’t get unions.
My anecdote: many years ago, before I was a teacher, I sometimes did programs for schools. Once I was doing a presentation at a high school. The teacher was getting a projector ready for me to use in about 10-15 minutes, and meanwhile I guess she was checking email on it. The projector wasn’t set up correctly, and most students were facing away from it, as was the teacher, which is why I was the only one at first who saw the enormous naked breast filling the screen.
It was so poorly pixellated that it was hard to tell what it was at first, and I wasn’t even sure what I was seeing until the teacher looked around, jumped about a foot in the air, and freaked out trying to turn off the projector.
To this day I wonder what it was she was looking at.