A college undergraduate at a Boston-area university creates a website pitting photographs of college girls against each other in a contest of who is more attractive. The website spreads like wildfire across campus, triggering both enthusiasm and outrage from the student body. Sound familiar? Although the story may draw parallels to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s FaceMash, this time, the man behind the site is one of Boston University’s own.
In a scene straight out of “The Social Network,” BU sophomore Justin Doody launched RateBU.com, a website that poses visitors with the ever-important question of which girl is hotter. But more than simply being an issue of female objectification, the website’s appearance has triggered debates on copyrights and Internet privacy.
It is easy to see why the website is offensive to many women, allowing anyone to post a picture of a girl for judgment by her peers and compiling a list of the top 25 “hottest” girls on campus. But something that many people are taking even bigger issue with than being judged based on their attractiveness is the fact that in many cases, the pictures are taken from their Facebook profiles and posted on RateBU without their consent.
There is no law prohibiting this. According to Facebook’s privacy policy, any material posted on someone’s profile and set to the “everyone” setting can be taken and used without that person’s permission, a policy that Facebook should immediately consider revising. Websites such as Flickr allow users to protect their photographs from being used by others. Facebook should offer the same option. Simply posting a picture on one’s Facebook page shouldn’t make it public property.
Although it undoubtedly brings up important issues, RateBU has gotten far more attention than it deserves. Do the girls whose pictures were put on the website without their consent have reason to be angry? Absolutely. Should crackdowns be made on the protection of private content on the Internet? Yes. But at the end of the day, RateBU is just another website that will probably fade in popularity after a few weeks.
Doody may think that he’s the next Mark Zuckerberg, but his copy of FaceMash is neither innovative nor worthy of the attention it has gotten. While there is certainly reason to be angry about a site that seeks to demean women, the best way of combating the website is to ignore it until it fades away.