http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...l?hpid=topnews
Several things strike me about this article.
1. The girl is not a celebrity and does not seem to want to be one... but she is becoming one nonetheless.
2. The girl is a %@#%@ pole-vaulter for chrissakes! Who the hell gives a %@% about pole-vaulting?!
3. She's attractive I guess, but she's not that attractive.
4. She'll probably not be happy to see her picture on the cover of the Washington Post

Some changes in our media are afoot in this story.
For one thing, we have the rise of women's sports... which has had two unintended consequences:
1. People don't watch it and make fun of the sports
2. Beauty is valued more than skill. This has hurt tennis the most. The star women's tennis players are not fit to kiss Billy Jean's tennis shoes... but they're good-looking (for female athletes).
3. What is up with this "good-looking (for female athletes)" $#@&? We have access to all manners of other disciplines and... mere regular life... in which women are generally more attractive at the high points than female athletes... Why are looks a draw for so many sponsors... and thus theoretically a large audience... when the athletes are not as attractive as models, actresses, or a lot of girls in real life? It's too big to be a fetish thing.
Are we seeing once again that specter of pseudo-feminism that says "Look, I can be competent and beautiful too", favoring mediocre athletes for looks?

Another thing, though, having more to do with technical changes in media than with sponsor-based cultural changes within media...
The internet can apparently make celebrities out of anyone... whether they like it or not.
Your picture shows up on one website... It's all over the world. It can be taken by bloggers for any purpose. We've already seen this with MySpace posters running into problems at work... and I'm sure a lot of the nude models all over the internet get embarrassing moments of recognition (if they're not all strippers and wannabe models anyway)... but these people can be said to be deserving. They do it to themselves.
But what of someone like the girl in this article. She wasn't parading naked in front of cameras or posting drunken party pictures on the internet. She had a picture up for a particular purpose, a professional one.

I remember in video production class that it was illegal to show a person's image without signed authorization. Has the internet changed this or simply made it unenforcable? After all, even without taking the picture, anyone can link to it.
This seems to me related to the surge in identity theft. If you have information anywhere electronic... there is a chance it will be stolen (and if you've been wise or lucky enough to mostly avoid this, fear not- the government has this information in electronic form and it can be stolen from them). It's not as serious as ID theft. It's simply image theft. But it seems obvious that it can affect a person's life quite a bit and very rapidly... and even the most innocent actions can trigger it.

Is privacy a thing of the past? As much as we worry about the government intruding on privacy... it seems people are losing privacy without government intervention, sometimes by choice, sometimes by unintended circumstance.

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"It's never over... BOY!"
The Tall Man, Phantasm III