Airdropping
April 2022
When reading The Oldie I often think of the great Michael Flanders, who, with Donald Swan, entertained us so elegantly in the white heat of the 1960s satire boom.
He would sometimes open their shows with these encouraging words: “The purpose of satire is to strip off the veneer of comforting illusion and cosy half-truth; our job, as I see it, is to put it back again.” I can’t help thinking that The Oldie still carries that torch, to some extent.
Consequently, I hesitate to address an indelicate subject in pages that most of us regard as something of a sanctuary.
However, we must face facts. The invention of the internet, like all innovations, has had good and bad consequences. One of the vilest is that it enables what is crudely, but accurately, called cyber-flashing. This involves men and boys sending, unbidden, pictures of their genitalia to women. Why they do it is beyond me, but it is a growing problem, apparently.
It’s bad enough sending repellent pictures to someone in your contacts list (at least they will know who sent them) but there is something much worse called ‘air dropping’ which is wholly anonymous.
AirDrop is a clever feature of every iPhone (not Android phones) that allows the easy sending of pictures to nearby iPhones (up to about 30 feet away) without having to use emails, texts or similar. Teenagers have been using it for years to share jokes, news, pictures and so on; that’s fine. The trouble is, if you leave the AirDrop widget switched on, with the security settings at their most relaxed, absolutely anyone nearby can see you are accessible and can send you anything, entirely anonymously.
This has inevitably attracted the deviants, who in a pre-iPhone age would have had to hang around park bushes to expose themselves and get their perverted kicks. No longer. I’m afraid It’s become common for women on public transport who have left the AirDrop feature active to be cyber-flashed, receiving the unwelcome pictures on their iPhones, and with the upsetting, even frightening, certainty that the man who sent them is on the same bus, possibly sitting very close.
Even more disturbing, he is probably watching her reaction to the picture and, presumably, gloating inwardly at the ‘success’ of his warped behaviour.
This is a bigger problem than you might think. According to research done in 2020, three quarters of girls between 12 and 18 and half of women between 18 and 24 have been sent unsolicited nude pictures of boys or men, and not just using AirDrop, but through networks like Snapchat, Instagram and others.
The problem is that the laws that aim to deter such abhorrent behaviour were mostly drafted before mobile phones were invented, never mind AirDrop.
However, parliament is finally catching up, and the soon (I hope) to be enacted online safety bill will, amongst other things, make cyber-flashing and some other similar digital activities an offence, so at last a legal line will have been drawn.
Those who are convicted will face up to two years in prison and will go on the sex offenders’ register. That’s good, and they may well be caught if they use third party platforms, because the new law will also impose a duty of care on the social networks to protect adults and children alike from illegal or distressing content.
However, the complete anonymity of AirDrop must surely make catching the offenders very difficult, so I urge you to remind any iPhone owning women you know, if they need reminding (which I doubt), to set the AirDrop feature so that only known contacts can send them anything, or even turn it off altogether when not using it.
As ever, prevention is better than cure.
