In the age where celebrity nude photos are leaked from the cloud and congressmen find themselves in hot water after accidentally tweeting out pictures of their private parts for the viewing pleasure of the shocked masses, it would seem common sense for people to keep their personal nudes as far away from the Internet as possible. Unfortunately, though, that is not the case, and when underage teenagers get caught in these kind of disasters, it gets even worse.

On April 14, administrators at Joplin High School alerted the Joplin Police Department to an incident in which students were using the cloud-based storage website dropbox.com to share nude photos of their classmates.

While no arrests have been made at this point, any student 17 years of age or older caught sharing the photos will be treated as an adult and consequently subjected to child pornography charges. As Police Capt. Bob Higginbotham stated in a recent Joplin Globe article, “Whether it constitutes child pornography is all age dependent. Even though you are in high school, you are technically an adult at age 17.”

Should any student over the age of 17 be caught sharing these photos, it could mean serious charges, even if the victim of the photo sharing is merely a year younger.

But who is to blame here — the people sharing the photos, or the people in them?

Honestly, both parties are at fault.

In today’s digital climate, the risk of a personal nude photo being leaked should be more than apparent, especially for tech-savvy millenials. Obviously, the presence of these nudes started with the people in them, who either allowed someone else to take them or shared the photos themselves with people they thought they could trust.

The continued sharing of these photos and contributing to the dropbox account, however, are still inexcusable and clearly more despicable.

Honestly, any person caught sharing the pictures, regardless of age, should face severe legal consequences for their actions. If it were up to us, and if it didn’t threaten the very nature of net neutrality, these people’s Internet access should be legally taken away fron them.

This is the danger of nude selfies in a digital world, and more dangerous still, allowing of others to take nude photos of a person. There is no sacredness when it comes to such things and the Internet, regardless of who is involved. So, for pete’s sake, stop sharing nude photos with other people.