Jailtime because of Facebook photos?

It's an eye-opening story teen social networkers should know about. "Two weeks after Joshua Lipton was charged in a drunken driving crash that seriously injured a woman, the 20-year-old [Rhode Island] college junior attended a Halloween party dressed ... in an orange jumpsuit labeled 'Jail Bird'," according to a report in CNN.com. Another victim of the crash gave copies of the photos to the prosecutor in Lipton's case. The prosecutor presented the photos of the "unrepentant partier" in a PowerPoint presentation at Lipton's sentencing, and the judge - who later acknowledged he was influenced by the photos - gave Lipton two years, calling him "depraved."

Teen rape suspects plead guilty

Four suspects ages 17 and 18 "pleaded guilty to raping a Seattle-area girl who later identified two of her attackers on her MySpace page," United Press International reports. The 16-year-old victim of the assault, which occurred last fall, met offline with the four after communicating with them online and was assaulted "on a darkened road." UPI adds that "the girl later described what had happened on her MySpace page," after which police "obtained a search warrant to capture email messages about the incident exchanged among the suspects."

Requests for teens' sex photos: Study

Four percent of US online youths have been asked to send sexually explicit photos of themselves over the Net, and about 1.5% have done so, the Associated Press reports, citing a new study by the Crimes Against Children Research Center. That's not just extremely unwise; those photos could be considered illegal child pornography, distribution of which is a federal crime. One of the study's authors, Kimberly Mitchell, told the AP that kids need to know this. "Mitchell said kids also may not be aware of how quickly such photos can circulate, mistakenly thinking the image is only for the personal use of the requester," according to the AP. Here are the conditions that she and her co-authors identified as making kids more likely to receive these requests for explicit photos of themselves: "having a close relationship with someone known only online; talking with someone online about sex or having a sexually suggestive screen name; and experiencing physical or sexual abuse offline." The study, which is being published this week in the Journal of Adolescent Health, is an analysis of data from a 2005 phone survey of 1,500 Net users aged 10-17, the AP reports (its authors said the numbers could be higher now, with greater use of camera phones, Web cams, and other digital-photo devices). The study's margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points.