More Cybershaming via Cameraphone on a Train

Another recent incident of cybershaming, involving a subway passenger in New York who used a cameraphone to create and share a photographic record of shameful behavior, was reported in the New York Daily News yesterday. 

On August 18, Thao Nguyen was on her way back from an interview when a man sitting across from her on a nearly empty subway car started staring at her and then started to masturbate.  She snapped a photo with her phone and the man got off at the next stop.  Nguyen filed a police report, and then later posted the photo on Flickr and craigslist, allowing a far broader set of people to participate in identifying the man.  Given that the photo has been on Flickr since August 19, I'm surprised that the man has still not been identified.

I welcome the empowerment of broad participation in community policing exhibited through this incident and the earlier example of cybershaming in Korea.  However, I suspect it will not be long before someone uses a manipulated photo to publicly humiliate an innocent person … perhaps it's already occured … and we've seen some pretty serious repurcussions from an earlier incident of broadly publicizing forged documents.

[via BoingBoing]

[Update, 2 September 2005: WNBC reports "A Manhattan man was arrested Wednesday and charged with public lewdness after a rider in a subway car used her camera phone to snap a photo of the man exposing himself and posted it on the Internet."]