If the pathway to Hell is paved with good intentions, a large number of slabs must be engraved with the names of information age technologies. For so many innovative ideas, so obviously life and business enhancing, quickly become factors to fear in our everyday dealings as, one by one, they fall foul of human nature’s wonderful ability to subvert. Like Preston, the robodog, in Wallace and Gromit’s ‘Close Shave’, they are good things which have turned out evil. Alas, unlike him, they will not be returned to their former innocuous selves.

Thus it is that the winner of this week’s Mega-Worry of the Moment Award goes to the mobile phone. Already the darling of the race fixer, the drug dealer and the philanderer, we mourned the loss of the mobey’s innocence long since. But, like all great gadgets, there seems to be no end to its nefarious uses. In a not-so-subtle twist, it has re-entered the charts with a flourish thanks to the novelty value of its latest use – boasting book/blackmail weapon to the Teenocracy.

Here’s the plot. Boy meets girl. Boy dates girl. Either or both decide to hot up the pace. Enter the mobile phone. With or without their partner’s knowledge, lads keen to impress their peer group take video proof of their potency. This gets passed around via Bluetooth and pretty soon the whole school knows who’s doing what with whom.

Whilst the relationship is going well and depending on the complicity of the partner, this may be viewed as a bit of a laugh – no more embarrassing than a particularly voyeuristic episode of Big Brother. Come the day it goes sour, a Pandora’s box of horrors might be unleashed.

This is not to say that girls are always the victims. Locally, a college recently had to hush up a case where a girl was using compromising mobile pictures to put potential partners off her ex. It’s a short step from this kind of blackmail to something much worse. It wouldn’t take much knowledge to post such video nasties up to a peer-to-peer network for all to access and see. A person’s reputation would be shot for years, not months. A career could be in tatters before it’s even started.

So parents beware. And also those who go overboard with someone from the office. The consequences of today’s entanglements may come back to haunt you and yours in more ways than you’ve ever envisaged.