'Unseen' application causes controversy with anonymous posting of sexual comments or pictures.
Scrolling through Unseen, you might find a picture of yourself, and you aren’t sure who took it.
It happened to Brittany Bowers, a junior studying French education.
Unseen, an anonymous picture-posting application, recently gained popularity throughout Ohio University’s campus. One of the most enticing features of anonymity can be the downfall if a person finds him or herself pictured without knowledge or power of posting.
Bowers said she wasn’t using the application until friends told her that pictures of her were continuously showing up on their feeds. She then started finding multiple pictures a day, taken from her various personal social media accounts, with sexualized comments on the pictures.
“My major is education, I taught at Athens High School near here, a lot of my students are also OU students (through post-secondary enrollment options) and they (can) open this app and see all of this stuff and that’s a huge part of my reputation that I have nothing to do with,” Bowers said.
Bowers said she did report it to the Ohio University Police Department, but they couldn’t do much about it because she was not be physically threatened and compared the power she had over the situation it to a celebrity being stalked by paparazzi.
The police asked Bowers to continue to monitor the application.
In terms of being sexually targeted on the application, as of December 11, the Office for Inclusion and Equity has not had issues with Unseen come across its desk, said director Dianne Bouvier. Neither has the Office for Community Standards.
The application has also gained notoriety in terms of sexualization as it was used as evidence for F--kRapeCulture’s petition against the ACACIA fraternity, with accusations of drugging women and rape. The petition has more than 900 signatures on its online forum.
The group is also compiling a Google Drive of screenshots from various sites like these anonymous posting applications. Claire Chadwick, co-founder and a junior studying sociology and women and gender studies, said there are plans to create an exhibit of these screenshots.
Madison Koenig, commissioner of women’s affairs for Student Senate and a senior studying English, said however, the group probably will not include those from Unseen in the exhibit.
“We don’t want to keep on perpetuating this use of images without people’s consent,” Koenig said.
Martha Compton, director of the Office for Community Standards, said she has downloaded the application, but deleted it off her phone. Because Unseen is a private entity, the university is unable to subpoena the app or tell it to take down certain photos. Law enforcement can.
“I had downloaded the app and looked at it a couple of times and became really uncomfortable with what I was seeing, particularly because a lot the work I do is related to Title IX and sexual misconduct,” Compton said. “I did not feel comfortable to see that so I deleted the app from my phone but for the brief time I was on there I would say that the things I was seeing that was most prevalent was drug-related.”
Compton said it is clear that there are many OU students on the application and there also Athens residents that can have access as well. It is also easy, Compton said, to figure out certain locations, like dorms, Baker University Center, or other buildings on campus.
“(It is clear) where people have taken pictures of other people without their knowledge, and I think that’s one of the things that could be potentially problematic depending on what they were taking pictures of, anything that involved nudity or was on the upskirt variety of photos, would be a violation of our sexual misconduct policy,” she said.
Bowers said she had contacted Unseen and was sending representatives links to photos to be taken down as she found them. She said after she continuously purged her followers on social media and consistently direct messaged the posters on Unseen, the photos had stopped. She suggests people continuously go through a “spring cleaning” process on social media.
She said the pictures had started back up, but she no longer is on these anonymous applications and does not see a point behind them.
“(Anonymous applications are) open sources of bullying for people,” Bowers said.
What the university can do is help a student go through the process on an individual level, but it can be difficult.
“I think it would really depend (on what we could do),” Compton said. “I think if you knew the person that took your picture, there’s certainly more that we can do in that situation than if it was someone that showed up and I don’t know who did I was unaware my picture was being taken. ...We would encourage you and help you to ask Unseen to do it.”
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